TV REVIEW:CHANNEL 4 has the no- nonsense supernanny Jo Frost, who goes around in an old London taxi calling at the homes of dysfunctional families and sorting them out with her near-obsessive use of the naughty step. RTÉ has supermanny David Coleman, who has a nice line in outdoor clothing and a similar mission to sort out chaotic families but who makes use of little more than a few sessions of calm-voiced chat.
For his previous series Coleman, a clinical psychologist, tried to help a group of difficult teens by taking them out of their own environment and into the countryside. This time, for Families in the Wild(RTÉ1, Monday), he's taking entire families to his version of the naughty step: Kerry.
The three families were billeted in a remote house for a week each while a programme of adventure activities was laid on. The idea was that they’d bond with each other over abseiling and hillwalking, while Coleman analysed and encouraged from the sidelines.
He has his work cut out for him.
It’s not just the 10-year-old charmer who calls her mum a “fat c***”, among other things, or the 14-year-old with an attitude as wilfully ugly as the piercing in his cheek and the pink stripe in his hair.
Nor is it that the parents have such a skewed attitude about what is normal behaviour. In an uncomfortable peek into their everyday lives, one mother criticised her partner’s parenting techniques on the grounds that although she can forgive her children, her partner (who is not their father) can’t. “If he sees Adam . . . even if he’s just hitting me or cursing me, he can’t forget it.”
No, what’s truly disturbing is the anger that radiates from each family, which will be hard to dissipate during the four-week run of the series. The parents themselves understand the fundamental problem. As one father said after describing how difficult he finds the whole business of child-rearing: “They don’t come with a manual.”
The shots of the amazingly tranquil Kerry scenery were a welcome breather between the bouts of aggro.
JAMIE OLIVER is three weeks into Jamie's Dream School(Channel 4, Wednesday), his experiment in education. This involves taking 20 children who left school with poor GCSEs or none at all and, with the help of cerebral celebrities (or "the most brilliant people in Britain"), trying to devise the ideal schooling experience to encourage them to learn. The "kids" have even been given uniforms, as if they are at proper school, even though some of them are 18 and they're all gobby and couldn't seriously be bovvered, no matter what anyone does for them.
Jamie’s gone all serious for this: no highlights in his hair, no pukka drizzling of virgin olive oil, and he’s given to earnest pieces to camera when you worry that his ego has gotten so big he might actually believe he’s doing something groundbreaking and worthwhile. His teachers include the actor Simon Callow for Shakespeare, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion for poetry, David Starkey for history, Rolf Harris for art and around-the-world yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur for I’m not quite sure exactly, other than she’s another celeb to add to the flashy roster.
The teenagers inevitably come off badly once they’ve been through the edit suite, and the fun for the viewer is waiting for the inevitable moment when the celebrity teacher blows a fuse at the hostility and indifference they’re met with.
The unstated premise of Jamie's Dream Schoolis that wage-slave teachers are a bit rubbish. Histeachers, Jamie says, "won't have any constraints or baggage", such as, er, a basic curriculum to teach or, indeed, actual teaching qualifications. The spin doctor Alastair Campbell came along to teach politics and enthused that Jamie's teachers (including himself, obviously) are "motivated, achieving, edgy sorts of people". This week the American entrepreneur Alvin Hall came to teach maths. The teens found basic division a major challenge, and Hall took issue with Jamie's repeated comments about how bright the pupils are.
“Some are clever, some wily, some emotionally intelligent, but bright isn’t the word I would first use,” he said wryly.
Jamie’s experienced head teacher seems to be having difficulties imposing any sort of discipline, and there are only 20 teenagers in the entire school. School principals who manage hundreds of teens must be laughing their heads off at the artificiality of the experiment.
It's one thing for a chef to persuade school-dinner providers that pizza isn't the ideal breakfast, as he did in his previous series, but this smacks of a vanity project that went off the rails yet had to keep going because of the high-wattage celebrity involved. Watch out for next year's Jamie's Hot Hospital, where celebs pretend to be doctors and do a few operations, and Jamie's Fierce Fireman, where he has A-listers play at firefighting and riding around in trucks.
FR BRENDAN SMYTH: even the name is enough to cause a flash of anger, and that's just in those of us who remember the cover-up, the evidence at the trials and the paedophile priest's face leering into the camera on his way out of the Four Courts in 1997. What it must do to the many hundreds of his victims is unthinkable. So Michael McDowell, the director of the two-part docudrama Brendan Smyth: Betrayal of Trust(BBC1, Sunday and Monday) had to walk a fine line. It would have been so easy to tip the balance into sensationalism and melodrama.
Instead his TV version of the investigative journalist Chris Moore’s book of the same name was simple, powerful and restrained, mostly because of the performances in the key roles. Ian Beattie, as Smyth, played him first as a charming, plausible young priest insinuating himself into family homes to gain access to children, then as an evil old ogre. He captured Smyth’s evil persona in a truly creepy performance.
Maria Connolly and Paddy Jenkins played Ann and Patrick, devout west Belfast parents of four abused children who, once they realised what had been going on in their own home, repeatedly tried over several years, and in the face of intense opposition and cover-ups by the Catholic Church, to bring Smyth to justice. There were flaws in the production: it stayed too close to the book, the sense of it being filmed chapter by chapter giving it an uneven pace; the dialogue was poor in places, making it feel over-long when it shouldn’t have done; and the soundtrack was intrusive (why bother with one at all?). But the docudrama did comprehensively reveal the key truths of the sordid story: the impact on the victims and their bravery in coming forward, and the criminal way Smyth’s superiors in the church behaved in protecting him, thus permitting him to abuse generations of children.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
What not to miss next week
Women in Love(BBC Four, Thursday, 9pm), has gorgeous costumes and a top cast, including Rachael Stirling and Rosamund Pike, as the Brangwen sisters (below), and Ray Kinnear. A two-part drama based on The Rainbowand Women in Love, by DH Lawrence, it's a good old yarn about thwarted love.
