Explaining Glenroe, our Sex and The Country

MY friend is skiving off work and texts me to make me jealous. “I’m watching the Sex And The City movie,” she says. “Which one?” I ask — “The racist one, or the more racist one?” Said friend is what she calls “Moroccney” (that’s half Moroccan/half Cockney — and let me tell you it makes for a sassy mix). She wants to talk about the problematic SATC series but I have to inform her that I never saw the show the first time around because we didn’t have “foreign channels”, which makes me sound a bit racist. She gasps as I tell her we had no BBC, no Channel 4, no Sky and definitely no Sex And The City. “What did you watch?”, she wants to know.

So I go about explaining that we have our own BBC, it’s called RTE and that there was The Den and Bosco for the paisti and for the adults — there was Glenroe. Glenroe piques her interest so I set out the premise which as far as I can remember (I was only small) was miserable people wearing Fair Isle jumpers and boiling the kettle a lot. Except — it dawns on me — for that one episode where Miley and Fidelma had it off in the barn. I have a distant memory of watching the scene where the brilliant Mick Lally (whom I wouldn’t have minded a roll in the hay with myself ) scalded the heart out of poor faithful Biddy! “Tell me the wife’s real name is not Biddy!” my friend says. Of course, it’s Biddy, I tell her. It must be Biddy! For she is the ultimate Biddy with the ultimate practical mammy haircut (“Ah sure, I’d have no time to be fooling around with me hair every morning when I have young wans to be washed and fed”). “I need to see this,” she says. I unearth (read: type into Google) and send her a clip of the scene that sent Ireland into a frenzy. It’s aged in fairness, but not as half as badly as the Sex And The City movies.