Bawdy TV is cringey but it shows progress
The Late Late Show Valentines Special RTÉ One, Friday Inside Ireland’s Biggest Prison Virgin Media One, Wednesday Resistance RTÉ One, Sunday
Innuendo. It might be the lowest form of wit, but that doesn’t make it any less funny, and while love may or may not have been in the air on Friday night’s Valentine’s Day special, innuendo was everywhere. Inexplicably for a show that always ends up raucous – actually, that always starts raucous – the star guest was Kenneth Branagh, the ultimate theatrical luvvie, and he was talking about childhood holidays spent travelling from Belfast to Butlin’s in Mosney.
In front of an audience literally throbbing with hormones, he recalled the fact that once you paid in, that was it more or less. ‘All the rides were free,’ he said and the audience went wild. Later, talking about cattle, he said they wouldn’t bite but they’d give you a suck. And the audience cheered again.
Me? Well, I was helpless. For starters, it showed that Branagh, who I’ve always seen as very serious, in fact has a delightful sense of humour and remains Irish at heart, and secondly, it all just reminded me of what it was like to be young.
The annual special has its knockers (see, we all can do this) but I see it as a celebration of a very basic human need, the desire to love and be loved. Maybe not in a Blind Date sort of way, though, as we saw when a young woman plucked from the audience had to choose from six suitors. The lad she picked looked like he had spent a few hours melting his legs before pouring them in to jeans and allowing them reset, but they had a nice date backstage and were off to Coppers afterwards, so who knows?
The other star guests were Vogue Williams and her husband, Spencer Matthews. I have a huge amount of time for Vogue. She seemed a bit ditsy when we first met her years ago in Fade Street, but I’ve come to admire her enormously, because she makes good documentaries, she’s engaging and, above all, funny. It was telling, and rather admirable, that when Spencer was asked why he was attracted to her, he said: ‘She’s active, she’s ambitious and she’s beautiful.’ In that order. I warmed to him, too, because if he sees qualities he respects, rather than just superficial looks, then I have a strong suspicion this is one celebrity romance that will go all the way.
The show ended with a panel answering questions about sex, including the delicate subject of bodily, er, topiary. I know there are those who find all this unedifying, but when I was the age of most of that audience, such subjects never would have been aired on television. The fact that we do so now, openly and without embarrassment, is something to celebrate. If The Late Late Valentines
Special does anything, then it’s showing us, every year, how far we have come from the repressed days of my youth, accepting sexuality as an intrinsic part of all our lives. It might make you cringe at times, but I would take that over silence any day.
On Wednesday, Virgin Media One took us inside the Midlands Prison for a fly-on-the-wall documentary on life in incarceration. Inside
Ireland’s Biggest Prison was an eye-opener, introducing us to prisoners at various stages of their sentences. I saw a lot of comment about how life seemed cushy, as if people wanted the inmates to be cooped up in cells all day. Instead, we saw them prepare for the annual Christmas pantomime, filling bags in the tuck shop and learning yoga and hopefully finding new skills to take with them when they returned to civilian life. Indeed, one Colombian inmate, David, progressed in yoga to the extent he earned a Gaisce award. There’s no condoning his offence, which was being caught with almost two million quid’s worth of cocaine, but you also had to feel sorry for him, thousands of kilometres from home, serving out seven years.
The time inside made him reflective and he delivered the most telling line imaginable about life as a prisoner. ‘You haven’t died, but it feels like you’re dead already, sometimes,’ he said, a simple and chilling warning to anyone contemplating similar activities.
RTÉ’s compelling War of Independence drama, Resistance, came to an end on Sunday in brutal fashion, as Dublin castle spy Ursula Sweeney escaped while her sister was coldly executed by the IRA, the informer Brogan was shot and killed during the Bloody Sunday massacre in Croke Park, and a Free State was born out of the madness.
There have been complaints that it wasn’t historically accurate, but that’s for documentaries, not drama. Drama is supposed to make you feel like you were part of the story, not looking for nits to pick, and while I’m no republican,
Resistance made me feel like I was back there in 1921, being forced to take sides.
The ending, with former colleagues split about how to advance and the spectre of the Civil War hanging in the air, was chilling. After centuries of fighting a common enemy, the sight of young men, comrades, preparing to now wage war on each other was a startling reminder of the futility of conflict.
Sadly, 1921 also led to the creation of a repressive State that for decades tried desperately to control sexuality, especially of women. In a week that ended with a discussion on The Late Late Show about personal grooming, it somehow seemed apposite to be reminded of just how far we have come. If you don’t like innuendo and feel that the Valentine’s special was vulgar, fine, but I still much prefer the Republic that has evolved when compared to the not terribly free State we created.