In the television age the goggle box is our authority figure and it makes us act strangely, though in the interests of entertainment rather than science. Countless programmes exist solely to place people in contrived and stressful situations and observe their reactions.
Some, such as Time on Their Hands (RTE 1, Sun), are contrived to the point of silliness. The sight of the former rally driver Rosemary Smith and her friend Eileen Murphy swanning around Milan in fur coats while pretending to be budget travellers was risible. The show’s only moment of interest came when Smith took her car for a high-speed lap of the Monza race track. At least her enthusiasm, and Murphy’s bat squeaks of terror, seemed genuine.
Television has an ambivalent fascination with eccentricity, any mild deviation from social norms, which are grist to its mill. On the one hand the medium devours eccentrics because viewers find their strangeness exciting. On the other it persists in trying to cure them, summoning up a battery of style gurus to explain where they’re going wrong.
A classic example is It’s My Party (RTE 1, Tue), in which the party experts Sinead Ryan and Joanne Byrne oversee the efforts of a bumbling amateur host. Last week a cheerful make-up artist named Ken Boylan attempted to hold a formal dinner party.
His original concept — a starter and steak for eight friends, lots of wine and camaraderie — was too easy for the gurus. It wasn’t enough of a challenge and the programme format demands the subject be given the opportunity to make a fool of himself.
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So they loaded the dice by adding four low-wattage celebrity guests. Suddenly the party took on a new dimension. Instead of relaxing with his pals, Boylan was being observed, weighed, measured and judged.
Nervy to begin with, he came close to panic as zero hour approached. His efforts to appear classy began to seem ludicrous as he dashed around Dublin delivering home-made invitations. By ignoring the advice to include a map and directions, he made sure the newcomers got lost in a maze of suburban warrens and had to interrupt his cooking to grovel apologies into a mobile phone.
Despite the potential for chaos, things seemed to go rather well. The visiting food critic noted that attempting individually cooked steaks for 12 people is the height of folly. Another commented snidely that this alfresco back garden affair looked like a miniature wedding.
There was plenty of snobbery: contemporary Ireland’s favourite form of schadenfreude. One celeb guest thought the whole idea — black tie dining in a suburban garden — was vaguely naff, reminiscent of London in the 1980s.
But Boylan coped. His friends enjoyed themselves and you got the feeling the celebs were only nit-picking because they were expected to. In the end, events such as this function on a mix of bonhomie and alcohol — or sovinnon blonk, as the man in the off-licence called it (if that’s not too snobbish to say).
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There was much greater psychological depth, and rather more genuine eccentricity, in Life Without Me (RTE 1, Fri), directed by Judy Kelly, a rising star of documentary television.
Again, the programme makes an Orwellian intervention in the life of its subjects, then sits back to digest the result. Unlike It’s My Party or Time on Their Hands, Life Without Me had an original idea and a fascinating pair of subjects.
Twin sisters Gemma and Triona King are 50, but appear to be in their mid-thirties, which is not to say they look particularly young or subscribe to the gym-and-botox regime of consumer Ireland.
Their agelessness — down to the severe eyeglasses and old-fashioned clothing — is like the youthful appearance nuns often have. And indeed the King sisters are nuns, of a peculiarly home-brewed variety. They have all the tics of pathological twinhood: telepathy, a private language, the tendency to undergo similar feelings at the same time. In addition, both are committed Christians who consider themselves married to Jesus Christ and have taken a vow of celibacy to prove it. They live together and are rarely apart for more than a couple of hours.
This is the point where the programme intervened. Gemma was taken on a week’s holiday in Rome, while Triona stayed behind with their matching teddy bears. The cameras followed them through their separate experiments in solitude.
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According to psychologists one twin is usually dominant, although this dominance can be subtle. For all their apparently identical lives, there was a network of tiny imbalances running through the sisters’ lives, and Kelly’s camera caught them with appropriate subtlety.
Gemma showed greater independence by going abroad. She also left behind a to-do list for her twin, instructing her to carry out such unheard-of ventures as attending a tea dance and taking a riding lesson. Even though each obviously missed the other’s support, it was clear Gemma was more adventurous, while Triona was timid and dependent on her twin’s support.
She soldiered on, though, the way people always seem to when the cameras are watching. Gawky and terrified during her first attempt to dance, she gradually began to loosen up. She even began to show something approaching enthusiasm during her horse-riding session. Then it was over.
The problem is that a week is too short a time to effect any changes in such long- established patterns of domination, submission and co-dependency. Reunited after seven days, the twins kissed frantically and swore they’d never be apart again. Each, separately, confessed to hoping she would die first. Perhaps, they said, Jesus would take pity on them and take them together.
If these seem like unusually morbid thoughts for a pair of healthy 50-year-olds, they are. They tell us there is something pathological in this relationship that goes beyond mere eccentricity.
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Wisely, Kelly did not editorialise. The holiday routine was a device for revealing chinks of truth, not the first step in some normalising makeover.
People have a right to be strange: it is oddly poignant when one source of that strangeness, extreme religiosity in middle-aged women, was a social norm only a generation ago.