Puns were milked too much down on the farm
The Zoo RTÉ One, Sunday Big Week on the Farm RTÉ One, Monday-Friday Alison Spittle’s Culchie Club RTÉ Two, Monday
You can only imagine that the toothy macaque whose selfie photo went viral would be cackling his head off if he only knew that silly humans had been arguing over who owned the copyright. A judge ruled last year against Peta’s petition that it belonged to the macaque while snapper David Slater, whose equipment he used, was ordered to donate part of future revenue to wildlife organisations. The macaque had made monkeys of us all!
In light of this legal lunacy, it’s worth positing whether we are the superior species after all and if we have really evolved.
I couldn’t help thinking of the smiling macaque and indeed Not The Nine O’Clock
News’s Gerald the Gorilla, who loved to listen to Johnny Mathis and ‘talk about David ‘‘Bloody’’ Attenborough’, when watching Dublin Zoo’s efforts at match-making in this week’s episode of The Zoo.
Titled ‘Tinder for Orangutans’, Sibu, a Dublin Zoo orangutan, is introduced to Sari, an eligible single female from Barcelona. It only just stopped short of saying that she liked to go for country walks and loved music and going to concerts. I’m thinking The Monkees or Gorillaz but these kids probably like something more hip.
Much was made of how Sibu’s eyes were fixed on the video feed of Sari but I can’t help thinking the staff were projecting their sentihave mental notions on the orangutans… an ‘aaaw’ emanated from the womenfolk in my house from across the couch.
There’s no doubt the orangutans are amusing, and I’ve been known to dwell for a good hour at their enclosure, watching their daily rituals. But I can’t help thinking that the Not The Nine O’Clock News team got it right in sending us humans up in the Gerald sketch.
Quite what the animals have been making of Áine Lawlor and Ella McSweeney this past week in the excruciating Big Week On The
Farm I’d love to know. It got off to an unpromising start when Áine and Ella traded soundbites. ‘We have births, deaths and marriages,’ and ‘we have more blood, sweat and shears.’
Now I like clever wordplay as much as anyone but Big Week also gave us ‘through the tree hole’ and ‘the parlourment’ too. Ouch! This was a punch to the stomach!
Still that was nothing compared to what the poor old cow who had to a Caesarean section for our viewing enjoyment was going through.
Despite being warned that the show would contain scenes of veterinarian surgery (surely, a first such heads-up in TV history) I very nearly brought my dinner up.
Of course, Big Week had its lighter moments too with the return of ‘Pull the udder one’ where celebrities are timed on how long it takes them to milk a cow. It wasn’t the only thing that was being milked. Never has a pun been so torturously squeezed as this one.
First up was comedian Alison Spittle, all bright and breezy, so much so that I had to turn the colour down on her rainbow jumper.
Day two offered some hope in the form of Marty Whelan, but even the dapper one, who is about the only man on TV who can pull off a tweeds and wellies look, could rescue I soldiered on, but after Marty, it’s always a let-down.
I got to the last night, though, and was hoping to see Jake Carter and Karen Byrne ‘pull, pull, pull the udder one’ but instead had to make do with a burly north Dublin farmer instead. Maybe they were worried about snagging manicured nails. Kenny Smith was trying for a new world record but, alas, nearly 2 litres isn’t quite enough.
It seems that RTÉ can’t get quite enough of Alison Spittle and she popped up again after her stint on the farm in Culchie Club!
But whatever misgivings I had about more of Alison were allayed and I am pleased to say that this is definitely more her milieu.
Culchie Club tackled all the old clichés – but only by putting them in the mouths of Dubs.
Alison also gave an honest insight into her difficulties in trying to fit in, having come to Ballymore, Co. Westmeath, from London, as a child and being treated as a blow-in by locals and as a culchie by Dubs. We were also introduced to Ballina’s Bradley, a drag artist, and followed his emotional journey through to Mayo’s first Pride march.
And best of all, Culchies or not, no cows had C-Sections or were milked in the making of this programme.
PHILIP NOLAN IS AWAY
There was an ‘aaaw’ from the women in the house