New property search shows offer viewers the best seat in the house
THE GREAT HOUSE REVIVAL
RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm
THE GREAT INSPO HOME ADVENTURE WITH JAMES KAVANAGH
Virgin Media One, Sunday, 8pm
THE SECRET ARMY
BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm
Ibow to no one in my fondness for property shows. I’d even defend them from the pofaced accusation that they’re distasteful at a time when so many people are struggling to afford rent and mortgages.
No one had much money in the 1980s either, and everyone still watched Dallas. The Ewings didn’t exactly live in a shack. Sometimes TV is just escapism.
Even I’d have to admit that it’s getting out of hand, though.
Last Sunday, two new property series began on the same evening. Admittedly, “new” is stretching it in the case of The Great House Revival, now in its fourth series.
You know the score by now. Architect Hugh Wallace helps homeowners turn their pile into a swanky property fit for Hugh’s other big show, Home of the Year.
This time, a couple needed help with their Georgian house in Churchtown, Co Cork.
It was good, but not a classic episode. The renovation came in €40,000 under budget, and the couple didn’t even fight once. We cut our teeth on Grand Designs. If the ones undertaking these projects aren’t financially and mentally broken by the end of the episode, we feel cheated.
The only source of conflict came when Hugh didn’t like their plans for a giant flatscreen TV. In the spirit of compromise, MaryClaire and Sully made it nine inches shorter just for Hugh, but he still wasn’t satisfied. “No telly” at all was his preference.
Design, be damned. Mr Wallace seems to have forgotten that it’s the people watching those TVs who are paying his RTÉ salary.
On the other side, The Great Inspo Home Adventure with James Kavanagh prompted an important question.
Namely, who is James Kavanagh? You usually have to be very famous to get your name into the title of a TV show. According to Google, the 34-year-old is a “social media personality”. He also has a podcast. Then again, who doesn’t these days?
Together with his partner William Murray, a Ballymaloe trained chef, James is looking to get on the property ladder in rural Ireland after years renting in Dublin, to which end the pair have embarked on a journey around the country in search of inspirational (hence “inspo”, which I also had to Google) homes.
As “two city slickers lost in the wilderness”, James and William make an extremely likeable couple – and unlike many people on such shows, they’re working with a comparatively modest budget. It’s beautifully shot and offers a fun twist on a familiar format.
They should probably dial down the blather about finding a home that’s “kind to the planet”, though. Yes, climate change may be, in William’s words, “probably, like, the biggest single issue facing everyone right now”. But all that Googling brought up an interview with James from January which referred to him “posting snaps from his trips abroad to Kenya, Barbados, Quinta de Lago, Ibiza and Paris”, and how he and William don’t exchange Christmas presents but get “each other flights” instead.
That’s not very green, is it?
It was 1972, the bloodiest year of the Troubles, and an American filmmaking team was granted extraordinary access inside the IRA, allowing them to film bombing missions “from start to finish”.
The IRA hoped it would capture the moment they drove the Brits from Northern Ireland. That obviously did not happen.
In The Secret Army, reporter Darragh MacIntyre set out to discover what happened to the film.
For the first half of this feature-length documentary I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. The old footage definitely had a curiosity value, and it’s always instructive to see old men still dredging up the same feeble excuses for civilian casualties.
Only in the second half did the purpose become clearer, and that was to determine whether the US historian J Bowyer Bell, who fronted the film, and his Israeli director, who had no previous history as a filmmaker, were actually working at the time for the CIA and Mossad, who both had an interest in Colonel Gaddafi, who was funding the Provos.
That the men had links to government and security agencies at various times was not in doubt.
Ultimately, though, the suggestion that the film may have been part of that work has to be labelled “unproven”; and indeed that’s where MacIntyre left it after 90 minutes, concluding that it was “impossible to be definitive”.
The fact that Bowyer Bell gave the IRA editorial control over his film is reason enough for criticism. Its status as crude propaganda was too obvious after Bloody Friday to be picked up by any serious TV network.
“We were idiots,” said one former IRA man when looking back on the vanity project, and that much at least is undeniable.
“The whole endeavour,” as MacIntyre said, “made very little sense” when spy agencies were desperate for inside information.
The tangled tale behind it made an intriguing, if slightly over-long, aide-memoire about a strange and terrible time all the same.
Finally, Virgin Media has asked me to point out that the incorrect subtitles which I mentioned recently in relation to the new comedy Faithless were not their fault.
Instead the problem seems to have been caused by the video-sharing platform hosting the link to the programme which they kindly sent me in advance.
I’m happy to set the record straight. I don’t want to fight with Virgin. They might not send me the second series of Faithless, after all, and it really was one of the best Irish-made shows in years.