RTE’s new wind energy drama? I’m not a big fan
The South Westerlies RTÉ One, Sunday Fair City RTÉ One, Sun/Wed/Thur Gogglebox VMT1, Wednesday The Meaning Of Life RTÉ One, Sunday
Baffled is the best word to describe how I was feeling at the end of The South Westerlies, RTÉ’s big new Sunday night drama. There were so many questions it’s hard to know where the start, but I’ll set the scene. Kate, played by Orla Brady, is an executive with a Norwegian energy company and is just about to be promoted to a new job in Oslo. When she gets there, she also gets a shock. The CEO tells her that the promotion is contingent on her travelling to West Cork, where she must pretend to be a tourist and try to persuade locals to drop their opposition to an offshore windfarm the company wants to build.
Surely anyone who wanted to could just Google this stranger making more than enough waves to generate a few hundred kilowatts of her own? The company had thought of that and had done a ‘digital wipe’, erasing any mention of Kate from the internet. The entire internet. That’s CIA-level difficult, but we’ll let it pass.
Anyway, Kate gets to the guesthouse in fictional Carrigeen with her 17-year-old son Conor in tow, only to find that one of the two rooms she booked has been taken by someone else – and she just accepts this when any normal person would fly into a rage. So mother and son are left to share a twin room but, again, why? There was no dramatic or comedic value in it, so it just felt awkward.
Kate called in to see her friend Breege, who gave her the cold shoulder because there had been no contact for years – and even though Conor was already born at the time Kate attended Breege’s wedding, she never mentioned him. Is it possible in Ireland that someone would not know a friend had a child, when most of us could find out what the man up the road had for breakfast just by having a chat in the local shop?
Then Kate spotted Baz, an old flame from the time she holidayed in Carrigeen years before and she unsuccessfully tried to hide from him. Baz now runs a surf school having returned from years chasing the swells in Hawaii, and pretty soon it became obvious he might well be Conor’s father.
Meanwhile, very unconvincing protesters were laying siege to the local office of the Norwegian company, while Kate practically went door to door making it very obvious she had a vested interest in all this. Already, the plot seems predictable – I would lay you money she eventually sees merit in the protest, falls in love again with Baz, and tells old Mr Digital Wipe to take his Oslo job and stuff it where the sun don’t shine (northern Norway, actually, for about six months of the year).
But the single greatest mystery is why they didn’t film in a real West Cork location, because Carrigeen is very clearly Wicklow town. Logistically, that makes sense, because it’s close to film studios, so why not just set it there? What is so important about it unfolding in West Cork, especially since the accents are all over the place anyway?
Another mystery presented itself when Kate went for a walk on Wicklow Head and then to the beach for a dip. How the hell did they manage to film this looking out at sea and miss the area’s most striking feature – an actual offshore windfarm on the Arklow Banks. Mad, Ted.
Fair City came back this week and something of the spark of it has been taken out by current circumstances. Pretty much every scene was about Covid and much of the dialogue sounded more like a lecture. This is a soap, not a public information film, and clunky lines like ‘marriage counsellors must be the busiest people in the country’
fell to the ground with the dullest of thuds.
The big gimmick was to bring in Karen Byrne to dance with her Dancing With The Stars partner Ryan Andrews – two metres apart, of course, and outdoors. I appreciate the difficulty of trying to maintain social distance on set, so the only characters who manged to get any way close to each other were Bob and Renée. Bryan Murray and Una Crawford O’Brien are married in real life too, and the proximity between them merely underlined the fact that everyone else seemed to be shouting across the Grand Canyon.
Gogglebox returned on Virgin, and what a joy that was, if only to see other people relaxing in living
rooms; I’ve been in only two beyond my own in six months! One of the programmes up for review featured an old man realising his lifetime dream of learning to fly a microlite. One of the Tully twins – sorry, I don’t know which is which – marvelled at the ambition of it, then spoke for all of us by sharing his own: ‘I just want to go to the pub.’
Finally, The Meaning Of Life, the programme that often generated headlines during the tenure of the late Gay Byrne, returned with his protégé Joe Duffy in the questioner’s chair. The subject was Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits, a man we’ve never actually seen because he usually wears a plastic bag over his head, or at least a bespoke version thereof.
At a time when we all wear masks to cover our noses and mouths, it was somehow odder than ever to see a man covering his entire head except for his nose and mouth.
He’s is an interesting character, but an odd choice, I think, for the first show back, and his tendency to launch into psychobabble had the equally odd effect of leaving me feeling by the end of it that I knew less (about him) than I did at the start.
Having watched The South Westerlies on the same evening it was a feeling I was familiar with.