I’m sticking with this... but it better up its game
Darklands Virgin Media One, Monday
Simon Reeve’s America BBC2, Sunday
Goodbye House RTÉ One, Tuesday
Claire Byrne Live RTÉ One, Monday
Mark O’Connor’s gritty Cardboard Gangsters was the most successful Irish film of 2017, a bleak look at naïve young men trying to get in on the drugs action in Dublin’s Darndale and invoking the wrath of bigger players. At 90-odd minutes running time, it was taut, tense and terrifying, with a memorably macabre ending. Now O’Connor has been given a bigger canvas to tell a similar story, but after the opener on Monday night on Virgin Media One, there is the strong feeling that six episodes might be a step too far, with a familiar plot feeling limp and lacking urgency.
I say that advisedly, because I remember being unimpressed with the first episode of Love/Hate and that became a national phenomenon, but Darklands, for now anyway, has added nothing new to a slightly jaded genre.
It’s the story of Damien Dunne, a teenager with his eyes on mixed martial arts glory and whose older brother Wesley is a member of a gang importing heroin to Ireland.
Wesley is not the sharpest tool in the box, and after failing to steal a getaway vehicle, he borrows his father’s van and drives to Bray harbour, where he and his cohorts are soon intercepted by gardaí. Would an ostensibly covert operation really be conducted in broad daylight? It certainly stretched credibility to breaking point.
Along the way, there were some wearisomely familiar and hoary old chestnuts. Damien is sleeping with a girl whose brother is in a rival gang, adding a touch of Romeo and Juliet to the mix, and the family scenes – careworn Da trying to keep his son on the right path – also felt like we’d seen all this before.
By way of consolation, the photography by veteran Seamus Deasy was terrific, as was young Dane Whyte O’Hara as Damien. His stillness conveyed a lot of inner turmoil with just the mildest of expressions and, as his trainer, Mark O’Halloran (last seen in Channel 4’s extraordinary The Virtues) brought his usual authority to the screen. Sadly, many of the supporting cast played it all just a little too broadly – there were so many wide-eyed expressions, it often looked like they were having tests in Specsavers.
I’ve heard good things about how it develops so I’ll stick with it for now but the pace needs to pick up, and soon.
Simon Reeve has spent most of the past two decades travelling around the world. In Simon Reeve’s
America, his trip will take him from Alaska in the far north to the southern tip of South America. Reeve’s unique selling point is that he doesn’t just do the sort of happygo-lucky Daniel and Majella travelogue, he also scratches beneath the surface, even when that surface is pristine and beautiful. So, as well as breathtaking filming of snow-capped peaks and glaciers, he also looked at the effect of oil drilling on indigenous populations, the alarming number of unsolved disappearances of indigenous women in Alaska, and the opioid crisis in Vancouver in Canada. While the apparent laxity of investigation into the disappeared was news to me and worthy of exposure, there are drug crises in every major city in the developed world, and it seemed oddly jarring that Vancouver should be presented as some sort of outlier, when Reeve would have to travel no further than parts of London to confront similar addiction and rough sleeping.
What really is irritating about him, though, is his strange tic of repeating 50% of what he is told. When the son of one of the women who simply vanished said: ‘The police haven’t talked to me about it’, Reeve’s response was ‘The police haven’t talked to you about it?’ and it was one of maybe a dozen times he did that. He might well see it as emphasis, but I expect conversation to develop, and that just stifles it completely.
Thankfully, there was lots of conversation on Goodbye House, in which the delightfully quirky 78year-old Ita Coonan enlisted younger friends Michael, Verna and Val to help her downsize from a five-bedroom house. Each picked what they believed would be the best buy for her, and all the potential properties had to have an upstairs – while many Ita’s age would love single-storey living, she was determined to remain active by using a staircase every day.
She eventually settled for Val’s choice, a smart terraced house in the heart of Cobh with a lovely small decked area out the back. An end title, however, told us she changed her mind and went with an altogether different house in the end, which didn’t surprise me. Feisty and funny, Ita always looked like the sort of woman who would make her own future, and fair play to her for it.
Finally, Claire Byrne Live saw the panel and audience discuss the recent controversy over the conversion of an Oughterard hotel into a direct provision centre for asylum seekers, and it benefited greatly from being given a lot of time (a good 40 minutes, I reckon) to tease complex issues out.
Byrne is a savvy and well-briefed moderator but is often let down by a show that tries to cram in too many topics. Given space to breathe, she is commanding.
DP centres are loathsomely unfit for purpose and should be abandoned for a less cruel solution to emergency housing of newcomers, one that would starve the emerging far right of oxygen. Mature debate rather than populist direct action is what we need, and hopefully this in-depth examination of an issue that isn’t going away points to the programme’s future.