Derry Girl’s new show is a bit of a misfire… so far
Big Mood
Channel 4, Thursday/All4 steaming
The Great House Revival
RTÉ One, Sunday
Rising Tides: Ireland’s Future In A Warmer World RTÉ One, Wednesday
Raised By The Village
RTÉ One, Sunday
Is mental health ever acceptable as a device in comedy? Well, yes, anything is, and I’d be pretty certain – if friends who sometimes struggle with depression are anything to go by – that people would be more offended by seeing their lives excluded. Whatever your view, one thing is certain. Big Mood, which started on Channel 4 this week, indeed does deal with mental health, but it could never be accused of being a comedy.
It’s the story of Maggie Donovan (Nicola Coughlan), a bit rudderless in life as she approaches 30, while still trying to find her niche after her debut play was savaged by critics. She volunteers to return to her old school to give a career guidance talk on theatre, but in truth wants to meet up again with the history teacher she fancied while a pupil. She drags along her best friend Eddie (Lydia West from It’s A Sin) for support, but it all soon goes wrong.
Instead of the primary children she expects to meet, Maggie finds herself in front of 100 uninterested and borderline hostile teenagers, though the gambit does pay off when the teacher reveals, rather inappropriately, that he has been thinking about her for years. They have rushed sex on his desk, but are interrupted by his wife, a former classmate of Maggie, and their children.
The scene is set. Maggie has bipolar disorder, and alternates between manic episodes and being so depressed she can’t get off the couch. It doesn’t help that she refuses to take her lithium, because she fears it will muzzle her creative voice, and her strained relationship with her mother (Niamh Cusack) over this only adds to her woes.
Written by Coughlan’s long-term friend Camilla Whitehill, Big Mood is a hard one to categorise. There
are a few giggles, not least from a scene in the second episode when a birthday party ends in a mass pub evacuation, but they come nowhere near giving any reason to keep your attention. If anything, the show most clearly illuminates the life of a best friend helping someone navigate the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder, while chronicling just how exhausting that can be.
Coughlan, as always, is great, though in scenes where she has to show hysteria, there are clear echoes of her character in Derry Girls. Overall, for a show that promised a lot, Big Mood is something of a misfire at this stage.
On RTÉ One, Hugh Wallace returned in The Great House Revival, following young couple Mary-Claire and Sully as they set about the restoration of a 200-yearold parson’s house in north Cork.
The place was falling to bits, but they slowly got it shipshape, not least because carpenter Sully and his friends did so much of the work, and it actually came in €40,000 under budget. On a couch in north Dublin, Dermot Bannon must have needed a defibrillator to cope with the shock.
As always, these shows are really about the people who have the vision to breathe new life into properties that were all but written off. Given how many vacant homes we have in the middle of a housing crisis, the Government could do worse than enlist the advice of this young pair on what can be done with a little imagination
and determination. Wallace, as always, is there to drop the occasional nugget of sagacity. One flaw he identified chimed with my own thoughts. I never can understand how people put televisions over the fireplace, meaning they have to strain their necks looking upwards. Eye level from the couch really is the only place for a telly.
The view from there was pretty scary on Wednesday night during Rising Tides on RTÉ One, when Philip Boucher-Hayes travelled to Greenland and to Malawi to predict, based on local experience, what the future might hold for Ireland if climate change continues unmitigated. Rising sea levels would wipe out many of our coastal communities, but the fact this is a crisis developing over years leaves many of us lackadaisical over its impact. That wasn’t possible when he spoke to a mother in Malawi after her son was killed as a result of one of the ever more frequent cyclones hitting the inland African country. Her simple statement was heartbreaking: ‘He was in fourth class. I hoped he would go into fifth.’
Finally, Raised By The Village also returned to RTÉ One, as two more children from disadvantaged backgrounds were despatched to rural Ireland to see how different lives are lived. I have a huge ethical problem with it, because the children cannot reasonably consent to having their experience presented as primetime entertainment.
Usually, there would a photo from each programme on this page, and while the children appeared to have a good time, that’s not the point. They deserve to return to the anonymity from which they really should not have been plucked at all.