Can this crime drama deliver on its promise?
RTÉ2, Monday
Crime drama is a hard thing to get right, especially middle-class crime drama. Love/Hate worked brilliantly because it felt gritty and tough and never flinched from showing the seamier side of gangland life. Whether it was accurate or not is irrelevant, because it played into what the vast majority of us believe to be true of that lifestyle, the addiction of the drug dealers themselves, the double crossing and turf wars, the ‘rats’ who keep gardaí informed, and the occasional honour among thieves.
When crime drama moves into a more familiar realm, it becomes a little harder to convince. I can’t be the only one who watched the first episode of Smother and thought, I don’t really care that the father is dead, or why, I just want that house – or, at the very least, the kitchen in the house of the young garda with the pregnant girlfriend.
Smother opened with a 50th birthday party for matriarch Val Ahern (lovely to see Dervla Kirwan back in Irish drama) at her home in Lahinch, at which her husband Denis announced they would be separating. This proved a little more final a separation than Denis presumed, because he went for a walk afterwards and was pushed off a cliff by a person unknown.
As is the case in all crime dramas, everyone had motive and opportunity to despatch him from this earthly Colditz, and there was a touch of the Agatha Christie lockedroom claustrophobia as they all gathered afterwards, only for wilful daughter Grace (Seána Kerslake) to accuse Val of driving Denis to suicide. Was this display all for show? After all, Grace had reacted worst to news everyone else seemed to expect, not least because Val has a lover living nearby, and maybe she floated the idea of suicide before gardaí had a chance to confirm murder. Grace’s behaviour on the night also was erratic, and the first episode ended with her walking into the sea, ostensibly to take her own life, but that makes everything just a little too obvious, and clearly there is a lot more to be revealed.
The problem with the first episode was that the device of gathering everyone together meant we had a lot of people to get to know, and in a world in which we haven’t met anyone new for a year, it proved a more difficult ask than expected. Fortunately, at least some of the faces are familiar, including Conor Mullen, also to be seen in Virgin Media One’s The Drowning, and Lochlann Ó Mearáin, who is more familiar to most of us as the lad who promotes meat for Bord Bia.
What I didn’t quite get was a handle
on any of them, though Ó Mearáin’s character seems to live in a state of unsuppressed rage, and might be worth keeping an eye on too. I’m pleased to see there are six episodes and not four, which I imagine would make it difficult to expand the mystery in any meaningful way. Already, the four-episode arc is looking like a problem for the BBC’s Bloodlands, which has a lot of loose ends to tie up in tonight’s finale.
I enjoyed Smother, but I’d be
lying if I said I felt actively invested in it just yet, but there at least was more drama in it that in the entirety of the recent The South Westerlies, so for that much, thanks.
On Wednesday, I almost fell off the sofa when a man in a vox pop on the street referred to Peig Sayers as ‘a middling-height woman built like a brick *s**thouse’. It was a harbinger of things to come on a playful TG4 documentary about the Blasket island storyteller who blighted the lives of a generation of
Leaving Certificate students. Her miserable book, full of stoicism in the face of poverty and death, was utterly irrelevant to those of us who grew up in the Seventies. As a council house kid in Dublin who wore flares and cheesecloth shirts and lived week to week for Top Of The Pops, the tales told by an old dear with ‘one foot in the grave and the other on the edge of it’ were laughably alien.
It nonetheless paved the way for a later slew of misery porn, not least Angela’s Ashes, so Peig was nothing if not influential. Presenter Sinéad Ní Uallacháin, an engaging and inquisitive host, revealed that Peig actually was known to smile, which was as shocking as if we had been told she knew how to rap. It seems the son who actually ghost-wrote the book was something of an ascetic who wanted to present her as a model of piety and purity, and so left out some of the bawdier tales of island life. The great shame is that a few of those might have kept us interested, when instead the book completely turned us off learning Irish. To this day, every time I hear someone say ‘ochón, ochón’, I think only of a cone from Teddy’s ice cream parlour in Dún Laoghaire.
Finally, a woman sat down on Monday and interviewed two people about the husband’s family and the couple’s new life in another country. Between RTÉ2, UTV and catch-up services, a staggering one million people in Ireland have now watched the chat, and surely ended up left with more questions than were answered, not least how to get their hands on a house like the one in which the interview was conducted.
Just like Smother, in fact, though at least we know there’ll be some sort of closure to that.