Impressive Courtney finds his niche
WHILE still best known to many for his time presenting fashion programmes, Brendan Courtney has been dipping his toes in deeper waters of late.
Last year’s documentary We Need To Talk About Dad saw Courtney explore caring-options for his ailing father as he got older, and last Monday saw the companion piece to that,
We Need To Talk About Mam, which looked at the struggles facing his mother, Nuala, who is still healthy but is, as they say, getting on a bit.
He returns his attention to the younger generation tonight with the last episode of This Crowded House (RTÉ 2, 9.30pm).
A timely addition to what the great and the good like to call a ‘national conversation’ about our housing crisis, This Crowded House will, at the very least, have dispelled the myth that the only young adults who still live at home with their parents are work shy millennials who have spent all their rent money or mortgage deposit on avocado toast.
If there has been one real benefit of This Crowded House it will surely have been to remind the thousands of people who are stuck at home with their parents long after they wanted to leave (and, similarly, will have reminded many parents who are stuck with their kids long after they wanted them to leave) that they are not alone.
In fact, for all the talk in the papers and politicians that the economy is improving, it’s not much of an improvement if even people who work hard, save and try their best simply can’t get a foot on the property ladder.
Courtney tapped into the frustration felt by so many people who feel abandoned by a system which now seems to work against them and in this final episode, the presenter meets two young
THIS CROWDED HOUSE RTÉ 2, TONIGHT,9.30
adults who are still stuck at home.
RTÉ has a habit of taking relatively new presenters and then exposing them to the point of where everyone is sick of their faces, but Courtney has been around the block for long enough to know the pitfalls. Fashion guru-cum-social affairs correspondent may seem like an unusual transition but on the basis of the more serious programmes he has fronted, he may well have found his niche...
The annual James McClean-poppy row has almost become something of a tradition at this stage – the Halloween decorations are replaced and James McCLean is back in the news? Ah, it must be nearly Christmas! – but The Last Tommies (BBC4, tonight) is a frequently harrowing reminder of the reasons why people wear those divisive little symbols.
Veterans of the battles of 1917-18 discuss their recollections of the carnage.