UP FOR FUN
Madness and mayhem of the Late Late Show Valentine’s Special
YOUTH is a wonderful thing. Possibility is boundless, there’s no line on the horizon, and no matter what’s going on around you, frivolous distractions dilute the harsh reality of life you someday will have to face. I wrote about Derry Girls last week and said it was brave for casually dealing with the Troubles through the filter of life for a quartet of teenage girls and their one male friend.
I had no idea what was coming. The final episode of the series was a punch to the gut, an audacious reminder of horror. When one of the girls, the ditsy Orla, performed a workout to Madonna’s Like A Prayer in a school talent contest, the school assembly hall looked on with derision. As young friends tend to do, the others dashed to the stage to dance with her in a beautifully affirmative moment of support.
Then something unexpected happened. There was a cut to the home of the lead character, Erin, where her mother, aunt, father and granddad were watching a news bulletin about another bombing atrocity that had left 12 people dead. The mother blessed herself while holding a baby clutching at her hair. The aunt reached out to her. The grandfather, whose contempt for his son-in-law has been a running joke, put a hand to his shoulder. Then the music changed, to Dolores O’Riordan singing Dreams before another cut to a slow-motion scene of the friends on stage, still dancing, still laughing, still innocent to the world around them.
Not since the final scene of Blackadder Goes Forth, when the World War I soldiers we had laughed with for weeks went over the top of the trench and were shredded by enemy guns, has there been an end to a series that so perfectly made war tangible, and so devastatingly reminded us of its futility. It took half an hour for the lump in my throat to subside.
Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age, but there were more unexpected emotional gut punches in the triumphant first episode of
The Young Offenders, a series spun off from the hit movie of the same name. The lead characters, Conor and Jock (brilliantly played, respectively, by Alex Murphy and Chris Walley), are a pair of Cork schoolboys who get up to low-level mischief. After they almost were caught stealing lead from a roof, they were grilled by a garda in the presence of Conor’s mother and their headmaster. The guard tried to get Conor to rat on Jock, but there was to be none of it. In a compact couple of minutes, with tears running down his cheeks, Conor awkwardly but perfectly described what real teenage friendship is all about – loyalty.
If Derry Girls has been the surprise treat of the year to date, The Young Offenders is the icing on the cake. It is crude and won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it has a huge heart it wears on its sleeve and it is unmissable. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in South Korea centred on five young children on a journey through the history and mythology of their country. In one brilliant sequence, they walked through portals to see their future selves, all working in hi-tech jobs that hardly have been invented yet. It too was an affirmative salute to progress, made even more real by the arrival in the stadium of a unified South and North Korean team marching behind one flag. In a fractured and sometimes dangerous world, it was a sign of hope, a signal that we can do things a lot better than we do them now if we allow the young to have their moment.
They certainly had a few on the Valentine’s special of The Late Late Show – and by ‘a few’, I mean moments AND pints. The audience of young singles were up for fun from the off – when Ryan Tubridy said he later would be interviewing couples who had been together for more than 50 years, one lad booed. Another kid (well, to me anyway) called Colm was dragged up on stage for a Blind Date game. He may or may not have been drunk but he certainly made a good fist of looking absolutely bladdered, and nearly died of shock when his mammy arrived to vet his potential partners. When he mouthed ‘eff off’, she looked like she was going to give him a good clip around the ear.
This now annual fixture in the Late Late calendar comes in for a lot of criticism and, yes, it is raucous and juvenile and sweary (did we ever think we’d hear the C-word on the show?) and it proves beyond doubt, during the musical numbers, that Irish men have a very casual relationship with rhythm.
But it also reminds us, just like Derry Girls and The Young Offenders, of the joy of being young, of finding your path, of meeting your partner. One couple, James and Siobhán, even got engaged on the show, a reminder that no matter what else is happening all around, life goes on. And, just like the Olympics, the torch will pass.