Our Gogglebox is, hands down, so much warmer and funnier than the British original
Mother’s Day RTÉ One, Sunday Oxmanstown
Road RTÉ One, Mon The X Factor Virgin One,
Sunday Gogglebox Virgin One, Wednesday
Press BBC1, Thursday
There was a spectacular scene in Mother’s Day, the drama about the 1993 IRA Warrington bombing and its aftermath, that stopped me in my tracks. Susan McHugh, the Dublin mother who started a new peace movement after three-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry died in the atrocity, visited Belfast to talk to those who criticised her for becoming active only after the death of English children, when 134 others already had been killed in the Troubles.
‘When I lost her, no one in Dublin picked up a phone,’ said the bereaved mother of a young girl. ‘No one sent flowers. Your outrage about the English children outrages me, because it reminds me of the outrage you didn’t feel.’ It was a powerful reminder that most of us south of the border looked on events further north with the same spectator detachment as people in Great Britain and, yes, very likely cared more about attacks across the water because we felt guilty by association, and worried we would be blamed.
But that aside, there was something visceral about Warrington that, as I remember vividly, felt different. Perhaps it was the cumulative weariness of quarter of a century of violence, on all sides, that had us so ground down we just wanted it all to end.
Of course, it has never really ended for Tim Parry’s parents, Colin and Wendy, or for any parent who lost a child. We all reaped the dividend of the peace that eventually arrived, while they still carry their crosses. Mother’s Day sensitively showed how Wendy’s reaction was to grieve privately and look after her two other children, while Colin wanted to use every means available – radio, newspapers and television – to ensure some good would result from unspeakable loss.
Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays more than did them justice but the star turn came from Vicky McClure as Sue McHugh, all righteous zeal and naive optimism that was slowly refashioned by realities she thus far never had to contemplate. McClure’s Irish accent wasn’t great, but she is an actor who can tell a story with a simple look or gesture, and in that, she was absolutely fierce.
Just as strong was an elderly woman in the lyrical and lovely RTÉ documentary about Oxmantown Road in Dublin’s Stonybatter. Living alone now, her family had been renting the same house for over 80 years – ‘I never married,’ she said. ‘I’m an unclaimed treasure.’ My, how my heart melted.
As it happens, I know Oxmantown Road. My grandaunt Lil lived there and my godfather Tommy lived around the corner in Carnew Street, and we often visited. I still haven’t quite made up my mind if I was happy or sad to see it become a gentrified haven for hipsters, but what did emerge is that the extant sense of community has somehow infected the blow-ins too. Long may that continue. The same can’t be said for The X
Factor, which really should be put out of its misery. Our own Brendan Murray, who appeared in last year’s
Eurovision, got a knockback that saw him having to learn a new song in a very short time. He was reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper until, his voice soaring in confidence, he scrunched it up and flamboyantly threw it on the floor as the audience cheered. Now call me old-fashioned, but Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh are best friends, and Louis managed Brendan in the boyband Hometown, and it all reeked of clever pre-planning to me, establishing the singer as an underdog fighting for the big break he’s already had, twice.
As for new judge Louis Tomlinson, ex-One Direction, he did an admirable thing by helping out one of last year’s contestants, who left the show after he got in a spot of bother and ended up in rehab. The fact that Tomlinson quietly helped him and paid for his treatment is commendable, but all that said, if he calls another contestant ‘lad’, especially one whose bedroom drawers probably contain underpants that are older than Louis, one of my shoes will go through the screen.
That’s bound to happen some day on Gogglebox Ireland, which made a welcome return on Virgin Media One. There’s not a household on that show I don’t like, from the Gruffertys to the Tully Twins to the Louth lads and all in between. This week, the funniest line came from one of the Cabra girls. After mating, a penguin ran down the beach and into the sea. ‘Ah, the old waddle of shame,’ one of them quipped. It is, hands down, warmer and much funnier than the British original.
The jury still is out on Press, the new BBC drama about rival newspapers, The Herald and The Post, that are effectively The Guardian and The Sun. All of the characters were ciphers – the harassed female news editor with no life, the slimy tabloid editor, the Murdoch-like proprietor pulling the strings, the earnest investigative journalist who looks like he grows his own clothes, and the cub reporter who learns quickly to park any qualms he might have about the profession in pursuit of the story.
It was hyper-realistic, in that it took a few vague realities and amplified them to point of caricature. Was it realistic? I’ll leave the last word on that to Meath Chronicle editor Gavan Becton, who tweeted during the show: ‘I won’t be happy until I hear: “Who the f*** is microwaving fish?” being roared across the Post or Herald newsrooms.’
That, folks, is what life on newspapers is really like.