Who Wants to be a Millionaire? RTE1 Tuesday
The Royle Family, BBC1 Monday
One Foot in the Grave, BBC 1 Monday
An Fear a Phleasc, TG4, Sunday
Prime Time, RTE1 Tuesday
At the beginning of the latest series of The Royle Family, Ricky Tomlinson's couch potato character Jim waves his remote control sadly and complains about the poor TV schedules. "We're going to have to get Sky," he says. I think he's got a point. This was not a good week for public service broadcasting - and the less said about some of the ropey hairstyles on display the better.
But first to the most-hyped event on RTE television since Gay Byrne's retirement: his return in triumph as host of the Irish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? This was an act of public service, the well-groomed silver-haired charmer told the RTE Guide. Some time ago a friend in London told him about all the other countries which had their own version of WWTBAM, 35 or 31 or whatever figure you prefer. Except poor deprived Ireland, so Gay nobly rang the then controller of RTE1 Joe Mulholland, one thing led to another and now we can sup from our own cup of this vacuous gruel. Did Gay never hear of rabies? Most European countries have it, but that doesn't mean we must.
In truth Tuesday's programme only superficially resembled the Chris Tarrant ITV version. It was subverted, lock, stock and flashing lights, by the Howth Host, everybody's favourite telly uncle, nice-as-pie Uncle Gaybo. I have participated in decades of the rosary which contained more suspense than this. Look at the kindly way in which he shepherded his four charges in the first episode - curiously split in two to persuade us to watch Fair City - to win sums which fell a long way short of the eponymous million.
Where ITV's Tarrant - and Mastermind's Magnus Magnusson - were stern and inquisitorial, Gay is just cuddly and nice, the way we always like him to be. He used to throw in the odd quiz in his pre-retirement broadcasting career. The post-retirement one, although it has the trappings of the international WWTBAM, has the usual Gaybo reassuring endearments and you cannot really find the quizmaster scary when he has trouble in scrambling up into his chair.
The attraction of quiz shows is seeing the other guy on the hazard, taking risks, hung out to dry for a heart-stopping age between knowing of great fortune or ignominious failure. But here we knew from the start that contestants Des O'Connor, Robert Pashley, and Rachel Brennan would come to no harm, and though the fate of contestant Cathal Gallagher is yet to be determined, we won't be holding our breath. Give me the Russian version of the game, where the studio audience hate the contestants so much they prompt them to give wrong answers. Contestant Robert Pashley paid a high price for his 15 minutes of fame and £8,000 prize. The Star put his matrimonial problems - and wedding picture - on pages one, two and three on Thursday. When it comes to being tacky, the tabloid press can still show TV a few nasty tricks.
There were some entertaining moments. The three per cent of the audience who thought that Fine Gael's formidable deputy leader Nora Owen was married to James Joyce is going to colour many people's reading of Molly Bloom's soliloquy for years to come.
The hardest question of the night referring to the Government's "short policy statement" - the answer was a White Paper - brought a premature end to contestant Rachel Brennan's short-lived gallop along the road to riches. Few people could have answered that, apart from Nora Owen-Barnacle. That name is going to stick, Nora...
It's all harmless fun - of a kind - if not the riveting spectacle which the hype promised, but public service TV it most certainly is not. Nor does it make any claims to originality. Surely it would have sat more comfortably in the commercially-driven TV3 schedules, giving talents such as Lorraine Keane a run for their money?
Don't we have a right to expect from our licence fee and advertising funded State broadcaster something more specifically Irish? I'm going to be boring and mention programmes like good quality adaptations of the works of Ireland's celebrated writers, the aforementioned Joyce and O'Casey, or modern writers, William Trevor and Roddy Doyle, for example. Or could we not showcase our bright young comedians and sell their TV versions of their work abroad? There has to be a strong argument for sticking to our muttons, doing what we do well, and buying in the WWTBAMs, where the address of the contestant, be it Sandymount or Stevenage, does not make much difference to our enjoyment of the show.
Public service TV - and cool hairstyles - took another battering as BBC1 revamped its schedules to play silly News-at- Ten scheduling games with the rival ITN News, which moved out of the nightly 10 p.m. slot and is now threatening to move part of the way back. Monday's game plan was to build the audience for the new BBC1 10 p.m. bulletin with two well-tried comedy programmes in the hour before it. The truly frightening thing about it is that preliminary viewing figures suggest that it worked.
The better of the two, One Foot in the Grave, gives full rein to the bald Richard Wilson as the splendidly grumpy curmudgeon Victor Meldrew, and the talented and nearly bald Annette Crosbie as his long-suffering wife. This is the final series and the first episode had loads of visual jokes, a dog which lost its voice and barked silently; a wonderful misunderstanding over children's clothes in the washing machine, which Victor thought he had shrunk through using the wrong programme and then tried to stretch into adult sizes; the defrosting of a deep freeze, and a cheapo Chinese restaurant which turned out to be a brothel. Some jokes worked better than others, but you got the idea that someone had done a fair bit of work on them: that as TV is a visual medium all the jokes did not have to be verbal. And like the new improved 46A bus service, if you don't like this one, there's another one coming along in a minute. Being in its last series, it might have two feet in the grave, but it had more life than many of the corpses which pass for TV entertainment today.
A few new jokes would have helped The Royle Family, which like its upmarket cousin the Windsors, looks set to be with us for a long time. There are some excellent talents involved in this inventively conceived watching-them-watching-TV sitcom about family life lived in front of the TV set. Caroline Aherne - the Manchester-Irish actress who plays the ditsy daughter, co-writes the scripts, and directed Monday's episode, - has great gifts, but I suspect they are being spread too thinly.
The Royle Family likes to recycle jokes - in fact I remember them watching a version of Chris Tarrant's Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in an earlier series. Jim the ghastly couch potato is - as always - enthroned in front of the telly along with his "son-in-lay" Dave. On the small screen Chris Tarrant says: "There's just enough time to choose a new contestant from the remaining nine."
Jim cackles: "There'll be nine arses going all at the same time, Dave."
Dave mimes an opening-and-closing action: "They'll be going like that."
There's more, but you don't want to know. That whirring sound is the late Lord Reith, high-minded creator of the public service driven BBC, spinning in his grave.
Monday's episode was more of the lavatorial same with the main event featuring the contents of grandchild's nappy. In comedy terms at least, this is thin stuff. The only thing with a bit of body to it is Jim Royle's matted hair. To say nothing of his nose. And as the Americans say, let's not go there.
The Royle Family is - sadly - being hailed as the Brave New World of British TV comedy. This is a triumph of national pride over reality . Even a normally percipient British commentator, Mark Lawson in the Guardian, this week saw the influence of Sam Beckett in the TV-transfixed family's "attempt to avert tedium and fear through circular dialogue which frequently turns to discussion of sex and bodily functions."
Oh dear.
Much of the dialogue of An Fear a Phleasc, TG4's half-hour documentary about writer Micheal O Conghaile slipped away between the large cracks in my knowledge of Irish. But my eye was entranced by the luminous camera work of Micheal O Dubhain, and my ear by the specially commissioned soundtrack by Giordai O Laoire.
The format was simple, straight-to-camera interviews with the writer, who is also a publisher of Irish literature and music, interspersed generously with dramatisations of his work. I found particularly moving a sequence from the recent novel Sna Fir which tells of a gay young man's exciting journey by train from Connemara to the big city to explore his sexuality, What could have been tacky in less assured hands came across as lyrical here. And the usual shots of the West of Ireland, and the near-deserted island of Inis Treabhair where O Conghaile was brought up, avoided the cliches which usually surround such images.
I have a problem with Vincent Browne's hair. Let me put that another way. Vincent's eponymous curls, with their distinguished grey-flecked wings, cause problems for my cathode ray tube. Sometime when Vincent is giving some miscreant of a politician or public servant a good wigging, I become overcome with sympathy for the victim, and turn the TV off. This happened during Tuesday's Prime Time when Vincent was nobly trying to settle the Aer Lingus industrial relations problems single-handedly and in doing so endeavoured to devour a trade union spokesman without salt. Being squeamish, I zapped the programme. But instead of the image contracting into a reassuring white dot, a brown halo appeared on the otherwise blank screen. Eventually it faded away. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.
But it did prompt a thought. Put Vincent in charge of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He'd soon put those money grubbing contestants in their place. There'd be skin - and hair - flying.
kfagan@irish-times.ie