NO WONDER!
The Irish and the Riviera’s rich set isn’t a riveting watch...
Long Lost Family: What Happened Next UTV, Tuesday
IMAGINE a documentary in which a man interviewed a woman and, for the entire show, harked back to how beautiful she was, professing undying love, and fantasising about her. You can be fairly certain the RTÉ switchboard would light up, and rightly so. When it happens the other way round, clearly not so much. In Irish In Wonderland, Drogheda actress and comedian Yasmine Akram (you might remember her from Sherlock) interviewed Irish people working in Monaco and on the French Riviera, all of whom effectively fed off the obscene wealth evident there.
After talking to an Irish chef aboard a €15m superyacht (like most of them, sleek on the outside but looking like an explosion in Beyoncé’s walk-in wardrobe inside), she interviewed the young Canadian captain, Todd. Midway through, his face was freezeframed while The Carpenters’ Close To You played in the background, and Yasmine delivered the deathly immortal lines: ‘I fancy him a lot. He’s hot, isn’t he? I think he likes me. Kiss me, Todd.’
Cringey as this was, it wasn’t the most ghastly part of the programme, not by a long shot. Wexford woman Mairéad Molloy runs a bespoke introduction service for millionaires looking for love, and charges anywhere between €10,000 and €100,000 a year to help ‘lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, lots of celebrities’ meet their perfect match. She set Yasmine up with a Londoner who ‘worked in finance’, and that led to a segment in the hairdressers’, where Yasmine kept asking if it was okay to eat chips. She had a nice night but, inevitably, there was another flashback to Todd.
Jenny Kavanagh, who played Cleo Cullen in Fair City for five years, now works as a personal trainer and nutritionist to the wealthy in Cannes – ‘I help people be who they want to be,’ she said rather loftily, and in the generally vapid style of the entire programme. She and Yasmine went off to play roulette, where they learned that the biggest loss at that particular table was €1m. There was no comment on this sort of wild and offensive excess, just wide-eyed wonder.
Then we met Dominic Ryan, who runs a bespoke kitchen business in Co. Wexford and regularly takes a truck down to the Côte d’Azur to fit out luxury villas and apartments. ‘For the super rich, the kitchen is the heart of their homes,’ Yasmine told us. In fact, that’s very true of everyday families, but not necessarily the rich, as we soon learned. Dominic told us he doesn’t bother with a job unless there’s a hundred
Irish In Wonderland Yasmine Akram, left, and Jenny Kavanagh played roulette – but the gamble didn’t pay off
grand spend and confessed that most of his clients don’t spend very much time in the kitchen at all.
On and on it went. The mother and two daughters who have a bed linen business (a good bed and all the trimmings might cost €50,000); the Ballina estate agent who had a €29m villa on her books, for sale or rent; Eddie Irvine’s sister Sonia, who runs pop-up nightclubs; and a man called Philip Culazzo, who makes a liqueur from the oranges that grow on Monaco’s streets, and who at least had the good grace to look mortified that he was on the show.
It was the sort of programme that might (and only just might) have worked in the Tiger years, but one that seemed completely at odds with our new realities. There was an attempt at the end at redemption, as Yasmine – who all the way through had gushed like a bottle of champagne sprayed on the podium after the Monaco Grand Prix – said she really wouldn’t want to be super rich at all. Indeed. It was pretty evident all she wanted to do was end up on her Todd. On Long Lost Family: What Happened Next, an Englishman called
Long Lost Family Peter Gunn (above, and as a child below) found his birth mother in Ireland
Peter Gunn (and I can’t have been the only one thinking of Duane Eddy), who went off the rails because of abandonment issues before getting his life together, found his birth mother, a delightfully impish woman called Daphne, living in Co. Wicklow.
His adoptive mother Muriel came to meet her too, and when she said: ‘Thank you for my son’, and Daphne said, ‘thank you for looking after him’, well, let’s just say I was glad I was watching alone. It is a hugely manipulative programme, but the subject matter is undeniably affirmative, and this story had an unforeseen conclusion.
Peter felt an affinity with Daphne, but also with Ireland, and decided to move here, and elderly Muriel came too. As the two women sat at Daphne’s kitchen table drinking tea, it was a blissful picture of nature and nurture side by side. Despite all the bling on offer to the Irish in wonderland, that’s something no fortune ever will buy.