TELLY SHOCK
The most astonishing TV moment of the week was the Late Late revelation that Pat Kenny was 70
Kavanaugh Hearings CNN Sick Of It Sky One, Thurs Tonight Show Virgin Media One Tues The Late Late Show RTÉ One, Fri
Over the past few years, lavish praise has been heaped on political dramas. From Netflix’s House Of Cards to the Danish import Borgen to NBC’s The West Wing, we have become accustomed to the chicanery and infighting that goes on behind the scenes, and gasped at the venal, self-serving career politicians who will stop at nothing to protect themselves and their grip on power.
All pale in comparison, though, when set against the drama of the live coverage of this week’s Kavanaugh Hearings – the confirmation hearings to decide on the suitability of judge Brett Kavanaugh as Donald Trump’s appointee to the US Supreme Court.
On Thursday, Dr Christine Blasey Ford gave evidence to a Senate committee that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers. Her testimony was delivered evenly and, for the most part, without any excessive emotion, and she came across as credible. Her detractors pointed out that she was sketchy on detail, which is ridiculously dismissive. I remember wandering around Barcelona on a school tour when I, too, was 15, but don’t ask me if I got a train or a bus, or the names of all my classmates who were with me. Only the central fact of most of our past experiences is the one that sticks, and I would imagine Dr Ford’s memory of a boy lying on top of her with his hand over her mouth as he groped her is one that would be very hard to shake.
On Thursday evening, Kavanaugh delivered his rebuttal, and it was extraordinary television. His temperament alone should disbar him from ever serving as a Supreme Court justice. From the off, he was shouty and belligerent, dismissing his accuser’s intervention as a revenge plot by the Clintons, and he came across as the bar room lout who never would understand why others found his behaviour reprehensible. Unlike Dr Ford, his voice quivered and he cried, but his tears never once seemed like those of a righteous man battling some Kafkaesque nightmare – just those of a little boy suddenly aware of the fact that what he thought was his, by birthright and entitlement, would be taken away from him.
On Friday, the drama ratcheted up a notch. Arizona’s Senator Jeff Flake announced he would deliver the vital vote to confirm Kavanaugh, but soon after was accosted by two women who said Kavanaugh also sexually assaulted them. Flake looked like a man realising for the first time that the dull ache in his head actually was a conscience, as they appealed to him to take such claims seriously, and to think of the signal a failure to do so would send to teenage girls (you won’t be believed) and teenage boys (this is a natural part of growing up and you’re basically just a massive, uncontrollable hormone).
It was a riveting intervention, and it led Flake to call for a week’s delay to allow the FBI fully investigate the claims. I believe Dr Ford and that’s why I am conflicted – her life-scarring assault should not be in any way considered entertainment, but this was the drama of the year to date. What the live coverage showed, in the most compelling way imaginable, was that real democratic processes are just as complex as fictional ones.
Karl Pilkington is long familiar as a hapless ingenue travelling the world in An Idiot Abroad, and from radio podcasts with the odious Ricky Gervais, a Jeremy Clarksonalike who takes pleasure out of belittling all around him. Freed from that repellent dynamic, Pilkington showed a more nuanced side in Sick Of It, which he co-wrote with director Richard Yee.
Unexpectedly, it proved to be the gentlest and most reflective of comedies, about a London taxi driver followed around by a sort of anti-Jiminy Cricket, an alter ego also played by Pilkington, who encourages him to make bad decisions. The first episode was all about the disposal of a sofa after the end of a ten-year relationship, and the way it came to symbolise everything Pilkington had lost – his girlfriend, the chance of marriage and children – was deftly handled.
There weren’t many belly laughs, but a lot of wry smiles of recognition, and it’s well worthy of your time on catch-up.
On Tuesday, on the last night of a holiday in France, I went to bed and inexplicably started watching
The Tonight Show on my phone. Ivan Yates was away, so Matt Cooper was joined in the presenters’ chairs by Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae. Why? Two other politicians, Senator Lorraine CliffordLee and Sinn Féin TD Eoin Ó Broin, were on the panel and if MHR wanted to challenge them on their policies, the place for that is in Leinster House, not on a current affairs show.
Given that the topics covered were the housing crisis and cancer warnings on alcohol, two subjects which, as a landlord and the scion of a pub family, Healy-Rae is far from ambivalent about, it was a bizarre editorial decision, and one that hopefully will not be repeated.
Friday night’s Late Late Show punched a hole in the space-time continuum as Ryan Tubridy interviewed his predecessor, Pat Kenny, who was honest about why he left RTÉ for Newstalk, even sneakily working in a mention of that channel’s slogan, Move The Dial.
In a week of astonishing television – a woman holding herself up to opprobrium for telling the truth, an unstable and angry man rebutting her, Senator Lindsay Graham acting the panto dame in a hysterical outburst about witch-hunts, Europe’s Friday afternoon whitewash of the USA in the Ryder Cup – one moment stood out as the most astonishing of all.
I found out Pat Kenny is 70. Now I know why he battled so hard in court for Gorse Hill. It must be where that fountain bubbles up.