TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: Reviewed this week are: Meitheal sa bhFásach/Dust Devils; Diarmuid's Big Adventure; Mono; EastEnders and 24
Meitheal sa bhFásach/Dust Devils: TG4, Saturday
Diarmuid's Big Adventure: BBC2, Tuesday
Mono: RTÉ1, Wednesday
EastEnders: BBC1 and RTÉ1, all week
24: Network 2, Tuesday
In Meitheal sa bhFásach/Dust Devils, a man attempted to sum up the Burning Man festival, during which a temporary city is created in the middle of the Nevada desert: "There's genius here. Innovation, science, technology, awesomeness, wizardry. You can be weird, crazy, perverted and silly, and it's normal here." All he really needed to say was that it's not something you'd bring your granny to, and we'd have got the gist.
Burning Man, though, is an event that defies simple description. So here goes. Thirty thousand people travel into the flat, hard desert for a week, create the most wonderful displays of art, party around or in them, and then burn them all alongside a giant effigy. I've been there and it's astonishing. But an event that is about temporary community, with a barter economy and a self-sufficient population, is also about individual experience, about what your mind manages to absorb. So while television has sometimes had a go at capturing its essence, it has too often been distracted by the superficial wackiness and accompanying nudity. It's understandable. Try standing on a desert playa as a naked man cycles past you, his body painted the colours of an exploding sun. It's difficult not to stare.
Meitheal Sa bhFásach was different. Film-makers April Blake and Dearbhla Glynn were tuned to the event's unique frequency. They understood how it is both disposable and lasting, how the experience can graft itself on to your character. It captured the thrilling creativity of the art installations and the rampant imagination of the participants. It listened to the hippy-speak but wasn't always satisfied by it. Irish writer Julian Gough was present, wearing his Sunday suit while reading his work to a bare-skinned audience. He knew that tolerance is subjective.
"It's all very well loving gay people, transgender, or loving piercings. Love a real estate guy, that's the test!" he said.
Burning Man is a festival that, when viewed from outside, can be either intimidating or just plain comical in its unconventionality. Only by being there does it make any real sense. It resists explanation, but Meitheal Sa bhFásach came as close as is possible.
The Chelsea Flower Show does not quite fall into the same category, but everyone gets their kicks in their own way. In Diarmuid's Big Adventure, we're following Irish garden designer Diarmuid Gavin as he prepares a garden for this year's show. He is proving to be a most obstinate optimist, unwavering in his insistence that his ideas are blossoming, even when everyone around him sees them slowly being strangled by logistics.
As we left him this week, his business partner seemed to have done a runner, while Gavin had taken pruning shears to the truth in telling the rather sniffy Chelsea committee just how much of the £180,000 cost he had raised. In fact, he has not yet found anyone to sponsor his garden. At least he has balls of steel. Stop your childish tittering. As the narrator pointed out, unusually for the Chelsea Flower Show his garden contains no flowers.
Instead it contains thousands of brightly coloured balls. We watched as Gavin went through an A-to-Z of business numbers in the hope of finding interested sponsors, but the obvious thing might have been to get straight on to M&Ms.
Perhaps Gavin's biggest problem, though, is that his Big Adventure is scheduled opposite Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, because from all the way over on Channel 4 you can hear the chef barracking some poor devil; until the urge to turn over to find out why really becomes too great.
Mono this week featured a short film about a Romanian, Claudia Chirta, bringing her parents to see her new home in Dublin. She has lived in the city for three years, since leaving a job in Romania to come and work here. Her accent is spotted with Dublinese and she says the nicest things about our capital, far more complimentary than you will hear from any Dubliner outside of an Irish bar in New York.
The piece was about pulling gently away from deep roots. It was Claudia's parents' first trip outside their homeland and the first time they had seen the sea in 20 years. They too said some things about Dublin that made you blush with gratitude. They proved that family dynamics are universal across cultures.
They would like their daughter to return home and live close to them, to raise a family in the apartment they bought for her in Timisoara - a place which sparked the 1989 revolution but which has been dampened under a dulling grey. Even as they softened to Claudia's Irish life, they wielded a sharp turn of phrase. Her father said: "Our wish is for you to furnish your apartment with another soul."
This edifying but touching story was the latest evidence that Mono has come a good distance since its first series, when it was sometimes a little too sensitive to the temperament of the old Irish to fully explore the impact of the new. It is now far more at ease with itself and its audience. Scheduled against the ratings-magnet that is Coronation Street, it's not a voice that is always heard, but it's one often worth listening to.
In EastEnders, Janine Butcher (Charlie Brooks) is finally getting her comeuppance. Her uppance, you must understand, has been coming for a long time now. Over recent weeks she has unwittingly been framing herself for a murder that has not even been committed. It may mean the end of a character so rotten that if she were to sit beside Genghis Khan on a train, he would most probably move to the next carriage. Now she's is in jail for something she didn't do, having escaped jail for all the things she did.
"She's going dahn," said her unsympathetic stepmother Pat Evans, who herself has always looked as if she wandered into EastEnders having taken a wrong turn from the set of Prisoner Cell Block H. Following a lengthy run-in with Janine, Laura Beale - soapland's most unremittingly dull creature - finally did something interesting and fell down the stairs. Janine has previously been involved in her husband Barry's fatal fall down a hilltop, but succeeded in pinning the blame on gravity. Gravity, although guilty, is refusing to take the rap this time.
Eastenders' growing body count has nothing on 24, which for five consecutive episodes has killed at least one leading character. Meanwhile, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has been chasing an apocalyptic virus across Mexico and LA.
However, impatient with the baddies' slovenliness in releasing the thing, the programme has set about wiping out people at such a rate that by the time the virus is released there'll be nobody left to kill.
If you are watching the series on the tardy Sky One, then look away now.
This week, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke) got the chop. For those of you whose lives have passed by unhindered by the television opiate that is 24, Nina has been Jack's nemesis. An agent-turned-traitor, she killed his wife in series one and tried to kill all of Los Angeles in series two. She has remained at large primarily because they keep letting her go in return for her not being bold again. Every time she comes back with a dastardly new plan, the good guys react with tiresome naivety.
"Nina!" they always gasp, as if they believed she had retired from trying to kill everyone on the planet and opened a small wine bar in Provence.
Anyway, Jack had held a gun to her head so many times over three series that she had begun to look bored. But this week, he finally pulled the trigger.
So far, all of those who have died in this series have done so with a look of great surprise smacked across their face. Not Nina, who seems to have been the first to have spotted the pattern and, in fact, looked a little relieved; perhaps because she has now got her Tuesday nights back, while the rest of us remain suckers to the plot.
At least all of these people are dying by relatively conventional means, such as heartattacks and bullets. In the last series, Jack's boss, George, having already been exposed to a fatal dose of radiation, killed himself by flying a plane loaded with a nuclear bomb into the desert. Under what column this featured in the annual Los Angeles crime statistics has never been explained.