“I’ve never told this to anyone in my whole life,” says Eamon, fixing a brand new acquaintance with his customary dead-eyed stare, “but . . . I like you.”
People seem to like Bridget & Eamon too (Mondays, RTÉ Two, 9.30pm). A married couple from the Irish midlands in the benighted 1980s, they began life as a jokey reminiscence on The Republic of Telly: impoverished, unhealthy, Catholic by default, viciously competitive, somewhere between loveable and pitiable.
Jennifer Zamparelli's wound-up, chain-smoking housewife, with glasses as big as two television sets, and Bernard O'Shea's incompetent, sour, mean simpleton, turned out to be a hit. Shucked free from the sketches and unleashed upon their own series earlier this year, the couple who could only account for the size of their family in rough estimates ("six to eight children") and who seemed terminally prone to "notions" found favourable ratings at home, secured syndication in the UK, and won IFTAs for Best Comedy and Jason Butler's zippy direction. In an era when Mrs Brown's Boys can be voted the best sitcom of the century, anything is possible.
Nobody appears to be more surprised by Bridget and Eamon's popularity than Bridget and Eamon, though. The second series, commissioned and delivered with telling speed, begins by giving them anything they want. "If only there was some couple that would move into town that we could hang out with," seethes Bridget, and, before you can say choppy-changey, an American couple (gamely played by Mark Huberman and Aoibhinn McGinnity, a conspiracy of plaid and teeth and Farrah Fawcett hair) instantly appear, to answer every wish and pay for every round.
Satirical point
It’s the closest the episode comes to making any kind of satirical point: the awkward flowering of Ireland’s obsession with Americana in the 1980s. But there’s no bite in it. Thin as Zamparelli, O’Shea and Butler’s comedy has been so far, previous episodes framed around illegal condom dealing or competitive housewife tournaments at least poked fun at targets more satisfying than passé fashions. The joke here? Americans are credulous; Eamon is tight-fisted; and – ha ha! – tight fists! (The luridly kitsch design work is still the most pleasing, and often the only pleasing, thing about it.)
Fans who can remember as far back as distant February, an admittedly simpler time, when Eamon first confused “swingers” for playground apparatus in a weak but throwaway gag, may be surprised to here find a whole episode hung around it. Or they might recall his high anxiety about not speaking “Northern Irish” when he now says the same thing about not speaking “Dublin”.
Repetition is the prerogative of a sketch show, but stretched over a sitcom, without variation, even undemanding viewers will begin to worry about diminishing returns. In this episode, Bridget and Eamon know the problem intimately; reluctant to step up their game, even at the prospect of wider fortune, they lose their new friends pretty quickly.
If your only source of digital awareness came from RTÉ during Science Week, you could be forgiven for now feeling utterly confused.
While Ireland's official Digital Champion, David Puttnam, continued to assuage the fears of technophobes in Making Ireland Click (Monday, RTÉ One, 7.30pm) other programmes, influenced by Ireland's unofficial Digital Doomsayers, did their best to scare the living clicks out of them.
Hacked (Monday, RTÉ One, 9.35pm), a nervy documentary on cybercrime, repeatedly told us that Ireland is "vulnerable like never before". In a series of urgent interviews, mostly with cyber security executives, presenter Keelin Shanley was equal parts earnest and alarmist, guiding us through a dizzying trail of internet viruses, organised crime, the dark web ("where criminals meet", like an evil singles club), malware, ransomware, cyber hackers, Russian hackers, hackers-turned-hacktivists, online banking fraud, state-sponsored cyber attacks – in short, the plot of any given episode of Mr Robot.
Weak spots
"They are experts in finding the weak spots in all of our security," we were warned about hackers. So are documentary makers. Director Ross Whitaker prefers the nervous twitch of handheld cameras, the jittery editing of two-second shots, and sinister string music lifted from Bridge of Spies. This science documentary would prefer to be a paranoid thriller – which is to say, it is quite enjoyable. But that means its less exciting heft – big money lost to cybercrime or spent on its ineffective defence – is overtaken by apocalyptic fantasy. Next to Stuxnet, a cyberweapon against Iran's nuclear centrifuges, the calamity of a hypothetical attack on the Irish gas grid was harder to appreciate. A complete national shutdown? Or, more horrifying, relying on the immersion?
By contrast, Cloud Control: Who Owns Your Data? (Thursday, RTÉ One, 10.15pm) was a much calmer, more wide-ranging, sometimes genuinely frightening look at our obliviousness to digital invasion. Hacked highlighted how vulnerable "wetware" is to attack (a charming term for "humans"). Anne-Marie Tomchak's programme showed you how leaky that wetware already is.
Tomchak, a digital evangelist turned sceptic, had an interesting perspective; brought up on a Longford farm without a phoneline, she is now a London-based tech exec. Early on, she snaps a selfie with her father, which seems a self-regarding gesture for a documentary. But the picture resurfaces ominously when, at Tomchak’s behest, a cyber security company investigates her, and the depth of that anonymous regard is truly astonishing.
With the zealotry of a stalker, the investigator reveals what she paid for her house, her plans for home improvements and, chillingly, her likely route to work. Tomchak is genuinely stunned.
The focus moves far beyond her, though, to include a young family that posts daily videos of intimate domesticity on YouTube, an exhibitionist money-earner with barely considered ethical implications. How would their father respond to future objections from his children? “Please forgive me?” he shrugs.
The Hacked team would have made darker interpretations of this material, but Tomchak covers vast ground. Perhaps too vast. "It's kind of overwhelming to think how much data is being deposited every single second," she muses, which also feels like a fair assessment of her programme.
But her interviews are grounded and informative, from Mark Boyle, seeking a refuge from technology (“I’m trying to localise . . . Social media is unsocial.”) to Max Shrems, an Austrian privacy activist, who knows that pulling the plug on our online existence isn’t an option.
Combined, the lesson of Hacked and Cloud Control is that we may need to upgrade our wetware. Make sure that data companies are compliant with the law, treat free wifi with utmost suspicion, and adjust your individual privacy settings. On one thing the conspiracists and proselytisers of the internet age agree: everything is connected.
Internet-Troll-in-Chief
If so, the guardians of America’s late-night talk and entertainment shows were clearly considering their roles in the shock election of Donald Trump, each of whom had previously dismissed the Internet-Troll-in-Chief and now seemed to be transiting through the stages of grief.
There was denial, on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah ("It feels like a funeral for America"); bargaining, as Late Night with Seth Myers wanly hoped Trump's racism was just a tactic to court voters; depression on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ("I wouldn't want to be alone right now"); and, sadder still, acceptance, where Saturday Night Live's solemn serenade for Hillary Clinton to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah began the process of normalising the result – even while New York erupted outside in street protests.
The most interesting part of this spectrum, though, was anger, nowhere better expressed than on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Thursday, Sky Atlantic, 11.20pm). "Keep reminding yourself, this is not normal," insisted Oliver, an impassioned purveyor of research, common sense and sometimes even jokes, in the last episode of an excellent series, while offering unusually practical steps to help curb the worst of Trump's expected policies. "It can't be just sounding off on the internet, sharing think-piece or videos – like this one – that echo around your bubble."
This digital bubble may be bursting: search engines and social media platforms have begun cracking down on the mental hacking of fake news. But television itself may be shocked into becoming more vigilant. As Seth Myers put it, in a tortuous message of congratulations to the president-elect, "We here at Late Night will be watching you."
