This will dominate the water cooler for weeks
Gold Digger
BBC1, Tuesday
Will Ireland Survive 2050
RTÉ One, Monday
The Young Offenders
RTÉ2, Monday
Ant and Dec’s DNA Journey
UTV Sunday/Monday
It is one of the most famous lines in chatshow history. ‘So what first attracted you to the millionaire magician Paul Daniels?’ asked Mrs Merton (the late Caroline Aherne) of Debbie Magee. It was hilarious but also cruel, because despite the 20-year age gap, the pair clearly were besotted with each other, as Magee’s palpable grief after her husband’s death so clearly demonstrated. If we are honest, though, we do subconsciously attribute ulterior motives to younger women who date or marry older men, and whisper that most demeaning of putdowns – gold digger. Only last week, Keanu Reeves stepped out on the red carpet with his new girlfriend, Alexandra Grant, who at 46 is only nine years his junior, and the relationship caused a frenzy because for once and bucking the trend (hello, Leo DiCaprio) a Hollywood A-lister was in an ‘ageappropriate’ relationship.
But what is age appropriate? If two people of any age fall in love, is that wrong? This is an issue, it’s safe to say, on which everyone has an opinion, which is why BBC1’s new series Gold Digger is sure to dominate watercooler conversations for the next five weeks.
Julia Day (Julia Ormond) is 60, and coming to terms with the fact her husband has left her for her best friend. Her three adult children are self-centred and distant – the youngest, Leo, sees her as little more than a walking ATM, while the eldest, Patrick, is obsessed with work and desperately trying to avoid having an office affair behind the back of his Irish wife Eimear, played with some relish by Yasmine Akram.
When none of the children is available for her 60th birthday, Julia visits the British Museum, where she meets 36-year-old Benjamin Greene (Ben Barnes of Prince Caspian fame), who immediately sets about seducing her. Despite her own worries about the age gap, they soon are having enthusiastic sex in her five-star hotel bedroom and, as we learn in episode one, eventually decide a year later to get married.
But are Benjamin’s motives pure? Her children certainly don’t think so, as we learned at the most excruciatingly awkward dinner since the first episode of this year’s series of Fleabag – and as we also saw in the opening flash-forward, something goes seriously wrong at the wedding, because Julia hops into her car in a bloodied dress and speeds away.
Filling in the gaps promises to be hugely entertaining, though the series has a fatal flaw. Every potential gold digger needs gold to work with, and since Julia owns a country mansion, a villa overseas, and has enough stocks and shares to bail out a small country, we once again are in that territory of the effect of love and romance on the very posh. Ormond makes her character a sympathetic one, but everyone else frankly is loathsome – the response of the sons in particular, as they see their inheritance in peril, gives them more in common with their view of Benjamin than they might think. It’s enjoyable in a soap-opera way, though, if a little unbelievable. As one woman on Twitter reminded us of life in the real world: ‘The writers of Gold Digger seem to think middle-aged women want to be picked up in a museum when really we yearn for someone to put the bins out without being asked.’
The cold hearts in the programme were at odds with The Young Offenders, which returned in triumph to RTÉ2 this week with just as much warmth as we have come to expect underpinning the slapstick and risqué plot. Teenagers Jock and Conor are as roguish as ever, but with Jock’s girlfriend Siobhán now heavily pregnant, and her headmaster father and her mother determined to adopt the baby, fresh challenges await. As a test to prove he could be a good father, Jock had to mind an egg for a month without breaking it, and managed to do so despite a few heart-stopping moments. Meanwhile, Conor and his girlfriend Linda (the headmaster’s other daughter), decided to have sex in her father’s office but accidentally broadcast the encounter on the school PA.
One friend told me he found the entire programme a feeble rip-off of gross-out American comedy, which is well wide of the mark, because The Young Offenders actually is quite moral at heart. The takeaways from this first episode were that even a feckless teenager will step up to the plate and face his responsibilities with the support of the adults around him – and that young people have to be ready for sexual relationships (it didn’t work out for Conor and Linda) and not be forced into them. I’m not sure I can see anything wrong with either of those messages.
A starker warning came in Will
Ireland Survive 2050?, part of RTÉ On Climate week presented by meteorologist Gerald Fleming and Green activist Cara Augustenborg. The answer was yes, though not without the likelihood of rising sea levels and extreme weather events (unsophisticated but effective computer-generated imagery showed the GPO under water and Athlone in the middle of a drought). The message was clear – there is still time to make changes, though the elephant in the room, as always, is that Ireland alone cannot make them, and with the United States now officially out of the Paris Climate Accord, maybe 2050 actually will bring untold cataclysm. If I see it, my 87-year-old self will be buying an amphibious wheelchair.
Finally, Ant and Dec traced their Irish roots in a Who Do You Think You Are? rip-off that took them to Leitrim and Derry. During the original making of the programme two years ago, Ant’s addiction became public, and then he had the car crash that almost derailed his career. The two addressed the problems this caused with admirable frankness, and a programme that ostensibly was about family instead became a powerful testament to the power of lifelong friendship. When you have that, who needs a gold digger?