Get your stetsons at the ready...
LATE LATE SHOW RTÉ ONE, TONIGHT, 9.35PM
THERE are some things that are just baffling, but few are as truly baffling as country’n’Irish music.
For starters, it’s neither country music as we know it nor is it Irish music.
Instead, it always sounds like some showband types went through the great American songbook, removed all the angst, heartbreak and soul searching that comes with this great genre and then repackaged it for people who don’t really like music at all.
Still, 700,000 people can’t be wrong (well they can, but that’s another story) and that was the number of viewers who tuned in for the first Late Late (RTÉ One, tonight 9.35pm) country music special two years ago, so it’s no surprise that it has now become a staple of the season.
There’s a tinge of sadness to tonight’s musical extravaganza (ahem) following the death this week of Big Tom, who is like a God to the people who are into this kind of music, so while the centrepiece of tonight’s show was meant to be a tribute to Glen Campbell, the producers and presenter have promised that this will be a Big Tom special.
Younger people, and those of us who grew up in a city, will probably find the whole thing rather mystifying, but Big Tom and his Mainliners were a massive cultural touchstone in rural Ireland at one point.
Indeed, it has been interesting to read so many pieces about the man which all stressed just how excited whole towns would be when he turned up to play.
If you’re in the mood for music that isn’t awful, Discovering Radiohead (Sky Arts, tonight, 8.30pm) is, as the programme title suggests, a documentary about the beginnings of the Oxford band, followed at 10pm by Radiohead – Austin City Limits...
There was a time when Somalia was the basket case country on everyone’s lips.
The events that would later form the movie Black Hawk Down stunned the world and the sight of the Americans’ defeat was a national humiliation that would later convince the Yanks not to go near the genocide in Rwanda.
Unreported World (Channel4, tonight, 8.30pm) travels to Mogadishu to see how the city has coped now that international attention has moved on to the newer, shinier disaster zones.
The answer? Well, it’s not great.
A thousand people were killed by al-Shabaab bombs last year, while tribal and religious violence is endemic, crime is through the roof and the whole city only has one working ambulance.
Unreported World is one of the best things on TV and Seyi Rhodes presents this timely report from a city which has been ignored and abandoned as a lost cause by the West...