PHILIP NOLAN CELEBRATES IRELAND’S RICH SEAM OF TALENT
Ireland’s TV3, Saturday Got Talent Derry Girls Channel 4, Thursday The Grammys RTÉ2, Monday The Pat Kenny Show TV3, Wednesday
JUDGE Jason Byrne set out his stall at the start of Ireland’s Got Talent. ‘I’m going to be buzzing them if they annoy me,’ he announced. Now there have been many times I wanted to buzz Jason himself, not least when he recently appeared on The Late Late Show dressed as an elf and spent ten minutes telling us all about his vasectomy. It was so tedious, I actually contemplated performing the snip on myself, because it would have been funnier.
As it happened, he rated low on my irritation scale on IGT, largely because everything else about it was so good. Admittedly, the format is robust, and it would be hard to make a hames of it, but a talent show still needs talent, and it proved surprisingly abundant.
Irish attempts at such shows in the past often have been toe-curlingly embarrassing – if I never again had to sit through another family trad act wearing geansaís, it still would be too soon – and often were best watched through the spread fingers of one hand.
Suddenly, all has changed. Those put through to the next round last night included an aerial artist (the last time a woman became so entangled in curtains was when her boyfriend’s wife came home early from bingo) called Keeva Air Candy, a super 13-year-old Filipina singer called Shaniah Rollo, a voguing dancer from Finglas whose name was Zacc (that second C, is, like, edgy), and a lad called Jamie Knight who played an intriguing game of keepy-uppy with a football intent on disproving every law of physics. Proper, old-fashioned variety entertainment on Saturday night – revolutionary!
As always, the best was saved until last. Evelyn Williams from Tallaght in Dublin has been singing all her life and, at 81, finally was ready to seize her moment. Her song choice was inspired. Send In The Clowns, Steven Sondheim’s hauntingly fragile hymn to regret, was written to be sung by an older woman (Angela Lansbury’s version is the gold standard), and widowed Evelyn’s delivery of it had me reaching for the Kleenex.
Judge Michelle Visage, who I never had heard of before, given that RuPaul’s Drag Race never quite made it to my ‘unmissable viewing’ list, used the golden buzzer to send a weeping Evelyn straight to the live finals, and I actually heard myself shouting ‘Yesss!’ out loud. Throw in a bubbly Denise Van Outen and the always reliable Louis Walsh to the judging panel, and TV3 has, I suspect, a massive hit on its hands. Independent production companies Green Inc. and Kite Entertainment should take a bow.
So too should Lisa McGee, the creator and writer of Derry Girls, the most joyously funny new comedy for a decade. Set in the early Nineties, at the height of the Troubles, it is incredibly brave in digging for humour in the darkest of times and somehow finding gold.
Certainly, few comedies would build an entire episode around a Catholic family heading to Portnoo in Donegal to avoid the Twelfth of July Orange parades, only to find an IRA man in the car boot trying to escape over the border.
McGee’s great skill is to remind us that teenagers, girls and boys alike, somehow managed to obsess about all the usual things like music and relationships while a war was going on all around them. If that made the sense of humour darker (Michelle, the standout character, had her priorities right when the school bus was boarded by British soldiers – ‘some of them are wee rides’), then we’re the beneficiaries. Next week is the last of six triumphant episodes. Mantelpieces will need to be extended for all the awards coming its way.
Awards of a different kind were handed out on RTÉ2 on Monday night in the highlights show of The Grammy Awards. The Grammys are an oddity – there are about 4,212 dished out and the actual presentation took almost seven hours in New York last Sunday. For many, the highlight was Blue Ivy Carter trying to stop her parents Jay Z and Beyoncé applauding.
‘Adorable’ seemed to be the unanimous opinion, though I’m pretty sure if she tried that in Derry in the early Nineties, or in any era, she would have told ‘catch yerself on’.
The border and Brexit were the main theme as The Pat Kenny Show returned on Wednesday night to TV3. Transmitted from Neven Maguire’s McNean House restaurant in Blacklion, Co. Cavan, it lacked the necessary audience interaction. That said, it still is pretty amazing that Kenny turned 70 this week. Looking as youthful as ever, he won’t be singing Send In The Clowns any time soon.
Ireland’s Got Talent A talent show needs talent... and it was here in abundance