TV Review Shane HegartyReviewed this week are: Prime Time RTÉ1, Tuesday, Léargas RTÉ1, Monday, Living the Dream BBC2, Tuesday, No Going Back, Channel 4, Wednesday, Charles II: The Power and the Passion, BBC1, Sunday, Absolute Power, BBC2, Monday, Michael Jackson Press Conference News programmes, Wednesday
On Tuesday, Prime Time broadcast its 1,000th programme, but passed on the opportunity to make a fuss about it. Instead, it investigated credit-card fraud. Fake cards with real names on them, shop assistants who don't like to examine signatures for fear of causing offence, criminal gangs picking through bins before the seagulls do. There are many ways to steal someone's identity. Pay for a couple of coffees and a scone in Cork one week; the next, someone's buying up half of Hong Kong and sending you the bill.
Una Smith's report was the latest example of the investigative zeal that has gripped Prime Time and which has ensured that it suffers from no such identity crisis. RTÉ's flagship current affairs programme is in fine shape given how leaky it had become only a few years ago. It regularly breaks stories where once it seemed only to break presenters. In a time-slot that might long ago have been surrendered to big dramas and bigger movies, it has built an audience. At a time when television executives increasingly view current affairs programmes as an impediment, it offers hope that Prime Time might still be at prime time after another 1,000 programmes.
Léargas examined that notion of packing it in and moving to the country, one that clogs the daydreams of many a city-dweller. Among those featured was Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin, an RTÉ presenter until he and his family decided to make for a new life in Connemara.
"We had come to a crossroads of our life in Dublin," he explained. It is while still sitting at the crossroads two hours later that many of us begin to seriously consider pointing the car west.
Mac Dhonnagáin found himself a cottage so quaint he would wake up some mornings, draw the curtains and find groups of Japanese tourists snapping their cameras.
But the cottage was too small. He cycled to work, but missed meeting people on the roads. "The only people you see walking are blow-ins," he remarked.
He was so stressed he even missed the traffic. The jams provided a buffer between professional and private, a refuge from the stresses of the day. Perhaps people crowd around the Red Cow Roundabout as some sort of pilgrimage.
It takes two years, apparently, to settle in to a new life. When city folk visit during the summer, they often overlook the fact that when winter comes in, the gales tend to sweep the romance away.
Léargas also followed Tony Ó Ciarba and Eimer Ní Dhúill as they looked to the Burren for salvation. Come back and see us next year, they suggested. If you see them walking, you'll know they haven't gone native quite yet. Mac Dhonnagáin, meanwhile, had bought a plot of land and said he now visits Dublin only as a tourist. You may open the curtains of your semi-d some morning to find him outside taking pictures.
RTÉ could make a series of this sort of thing, given that everyone else is doing it. BBC2 has Living the Dream, which this week featured a couple who gave up dispatching taxis in Cheshire in favour of corralling giraffes and zebras on a South African game reserve. Idyllic notions, of course, were swiftly knocked cold by reality, but this is the way with television.
There is more drama in misfortune, so the genre tends to relate these stories with all the melodramatic disapproval of a parent. It is quite unsure how to deal with contentment. Channel 4's No Going Back has always been the best of its type, but this week's story of a family moving to Australia's Gold Coast to set up a fishing business had it rummaging desperately for heartache. Every storm-cloud brought the possibility of disaster, every minor leak might sink the fishing boat. Ultimately, there was no such bad luck. It was tough to settle in, but the family met the challenge and eventually only fuelled the viewers' daydreams. Would the last person to leave the city please turn off the traffic-lights.
Having spent a decade chewing dry the bones of the thriller, British television has found fresh meat on the carcass of its own history. Better still, the blood still pours freely. Like cinema, television drama has increasingly ordered its violence with a dollop of perversity. Over the past decade, thrillers, much as they have done in the US, have summoned often outrageous methods of murder to give a spark to otherwise lifeless scripts. A bullet to the stomach or a knife to the back was no longer worth solving. People could not die unless it was in a manner so dripping in irony that even with their final thoughts they would acknowledge the brilliance of their killer.
That genre, however, has largely run its course. The period drama has always been popular, but having adapted almost every major literary classic to the point where the minor novels of major novelists had been run through, the history books now offer a fresh source. Even better, it allows the screen to wring with both sumptuous costumes and vivid violence.
The Forsyte Saga or Pride and Prejudice were all very well, but they really needed at least one scene in which a man's intestines were wrenched from his body and waved at a delighted crowd.
Luckily, history offers many such scenes. As with the recent dramatisations of the lives of Boadicea and Henry VIII, in which the sound of steel meeting flesh was the soundtrack, Charles II: The Power and the Passion began with Charles I's head bidding farewell to his shoulders, the blood decorating the face of his son and future king (Rufus Sewell). Such was the trauma inflicted that Sewell's eyelids remained half-closed for the rest of the episode.
The beheading was part of a dream sequence, but fair warning of what lay ahead. With Charles's return from exile, there came some enjoyable blood-letting: hanging, quartering, disembowelling. The blood ran so freely that it eventually began to fall again as rain. Yet, the script demurred at the opportunity to recreate Oliver Cromwell's exhumation and his head's 20-year residency on a pole outside Westminster. Then again, he died of natural causes. Such an unimpressive death is most unworthy of attention.
Following his enjoyably smart-arsed quiz show, QI, Stephen Fry now stars in the sitcom, Absolute Power. It is set in a public relations firm. You will never have a sitcom set in a PR firm in which all the characters are gentle folk out to better our lives and be damned with profit. Here, they are the secret rulers of the world, the puppeteers behind everyone from government to church. Fry's Charles Prentiss is in business with veteran Martin McCabe (John Bird) and newcomer Jamie Front (James Lance). They are engaged in an arms race of amorality, with Prentiss its high priest, a man who meets newspaper editors to see if he can grant them their scandal wish-lists.
TV critic Mark Lawson wrote this week's episode. This is a little like criticising the man who feeds the lions before accepting the challenge of going into that cage and feeding them yourself. However, it is solid comedy, and while its wit may not always match its cynicism, it involves actors in whose mouths grubby lines get a good polish before being spoken.
"Never ask a PR man for the truth. Never shake hands with a gynaecologist. These are basic professional rules," said Fry. One of many lines that could have been a little ashamed of its vulgarity instead emerged proud as punch.
Michael Jackson's people claimed that this week's arrest warrant was a plot to divert attention from the release of his greatest hits album. Perhaps it was instead a Bush/Blair conspiracy to divert attention from the state visit. The Jackson scandal stole the headlines on Wednesday evening and will do so intermittently for some time yet. In Wednesday's press conference, Santa Barbara district attorney Tom Sneddon made his pitch for the celebrity that will be conferred upon many involved in this affair.He knew the world was watching and felt it necessary to entertain it. It didn't matter how many times the phrase "child molestation" needed to be uttered; nothing was going to ruin this man's big day.
"Without further ado, I'd like to introduce a good friend of mine, Sheriff Jim Anderson," he said. Hey, why not give him a warm round of applause too.
The press conference was like improv night at the DA's office. A rowdy crowd shouting from the floor, Sneddon batting back answers in double-quick time.
Is this a ploy to ruin Jackson's new album?
"Yeah, like the sheriff and I are really into that kind of music!"
What do you say to Jackson if he is watching?
"Get over here and get checked in!"
At one point Sneddon knocked over a microphone on the podium.
"I got carried away there," he chortled. The press chuckled along too. What a merry old time. Sneddon was both compere and clown. The circus is back in town.