I used to pig out on soaps but it's all got a bit hammy
SETS THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS
HE acts tough because he’s an actor and he knows how. But in this role he walks the walk and he talks the talk convincingly, and in his line of duty he has put himself into extreme circumstances across the world, dealing with murderers, rapists, drug dealers, vigilantes and maniacs with guns.
But in his series, Ross Kemp’s Extreme World, for some reason, he has failed to explore the most extreme world of all – East Enders.
If you remember, until the year 2000, Ross played the part of Grant Mitchell in the popular English soap. At that point Ross took a chance and quit East Enders to present Ross Kemp’s Extreme World, followed by another series, Ross Kemp On Gangs, where he visited some of the toughest gangs in the world.
Fair play to Ross, pictured, he never flinched in the face of hostility, which was the hallmark of the kind of riffraff he confronted.
And he never shirked asking the hard question, such as, ‘how many people have you killed?’
It didn’t do him any harm that he looks tough, with his shaven head, his bull neck, his obviously toned body, and an unflinching stare which allowed him to keep calm when surrounded by gun-toting criminals who have scant regard for life.
Ross’s Extreme World series ran for six years and, enthralling as it was, I still think he chickened out by not exploring the extreme world that is East Enders. I see it these days ‘en passant’ and the characters are either shouting, crying, fighting or having sex with a neighbour. This week Phil Mitchell, Ross’s soap brother, went mental with a baseball bat.
I prefer my soaps to be like Dallas or Dynasty , where people have good hair, good teeth and good clothes. The country went bananas when oil baron, JR Ewing, the villain in Dallas, was shot by an unknown assailant. That was the night before Johnny Logan won the Eurovision. At the victory party for Johnny, held at The Country Club in Portmarnock, two big screen videos were rotated for the duration of the party – one with Johnny Logan singing ‘What’s Another Year?’ and the other with JR Ewing being plugged with a bullet in Dallas.
That’s not to say my soap-watching career is not without blemish. On a personal history note, when I was a cameraman in RTÉ in 1964, I had the very first shot on RTÉ’s very first soap, Tolka Row.
The popularity of Tolka Row was due in no small measure to the fact that it showed city life to a rural audience. Then in 1965 the balance was redressed when The Riordans brought rural life to the city, to the shouts of ‘Get up the yard, there’s a smell of Benjy off you’.
The romance of Benjy (Tom Hickey) and Maggie (Biddy White Lennon) had the country transfixed and that intensity was mirrored when Miley (Mick Lally) courted Biddy (Mary McEvoy) in the most successful soap of all, Glenroe, which ran from 1983 to 2011.
ICONFESS to having a weakness when it came to Neighbours, the breezy Aussie soap which introduced us to Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. The common thread that runs throughout all the soaps I’ve mentioned so far is that they were good storylines which were relatively free from mayhem, murder and gender politics. Ross Kemp got out of East Enders just in time.
Sad to say, Fair City lost me when they introduced the storyline of the young girl imprisoned in a room for months. Where the hell were the Gardaí? Where the hell were her family? It was so implausible as to be incredible and so I switched channels and never went back.
Now I am bereft of all soaps and in order to stay away from all the violence and the shouting, I may just have to turn to Peppa Pig.