The attitudes of country people towards urban interlopers can be equally deceptive. Aggressive friendliness can mask belligerent snooping, while outright hostility does not rule out a willingness to lend a hand in a crisis.
Though it has remained largely unexplored by home-produced television drama, the curious stand-off that occurs when city slick meets country cute is a defining feature of our increasing suburbanisation. When the rural natives are hard-nosed Ulster folk and the blow-ins hail from the hedonistic Free State, however, the grounds for mutual suspicion spread to the size of a Texan ranch.
All of which should provide rich dramatic grazing for Adharca Fada (TG4, Monday), a promising new serial about the clashes of culture and personality that ensue when two veterinarians from the republic and a third from Belfast find themselves jointly running a beleaguered practice in rural Northern Ireland. Though it’s ostensibly devoted to the welfare of pets and livestock, the primary concern of this animal hospital is the fate of fish out of water.
Written by Anne McCabe, the show offers a contemporary update of All Creatures Great and Small, the popular BBC drama set in the 1940s Yorkshire Dales. Where James Herriot’s cosy tales emphasised the warmth and humour of pastoral life, however, Adharca Fada seems more interested in the foul-smelling undergrowth. Most of the farmers we meet are scheming curmudgeons, as happy to fleece their neighbours as their flocks.
In the opening episode, doe-eyed idealist Colm (Sean T O’Meallaigh), scruffy biker Shay (Colm Mac Aindreasa) and Daithi (Nollaig Mac Aodh), a veteran horse doctor with a past as chequered as his ill-considered ties, all arrived separately at an auction for an elderly vet’s country house and the clinic that goes with it.
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The three outsiders were blissfully unaware that they’d disrupted plans by a coven of local politicians and developers to buy the premises at a knockdown price and replace it with an apartment complex. When they then befriended the heartbroken seller and agreed to take over his practice as a partnership, the trio earned the undying resentment of much of the community they were proposing to serve.
Stylistically, Adharca Fada is pure daytime soap, all vivid colours and spoon-fed plot exposition. The relentlessly facetious efforts at sexually provocative dialogue are already tiresome and suggest we’re in for an extended rutting season.
This unfortunate impression is borne out by the show’s title, an untranslatable Gaelic pun with connotations spanning the stud farm, the bedroom and the bullfight arena; think competing stags locking horns and horniness, and you get the picture. “I’m very good with the fillies,” Daithi tells his nursing assistant on arrival at the clinic. “Give me a big stallion any day,” she retorts.
Nevertheless, despite such infelicities, Adharca Fada has considerable dramatic potential in its setting and characters. By ploughing deeper for its story lines than similar shows, the producers display a rare familiarity with the complexities of modern rural society. Let’s hope they’re capable of reaping what they’ve sown.
There are fewer rural sounds more disconcerting than the giddy bluster of a townie who believes he — or she — has just discovered the promised land. This was the noise that drowned out all else in the opening edition of the latest run of Wild Trails (RTE1, Tuesday), the wildlife photography series, which featured George Hook, the rugby pundit, broadcaster and self-confessed metropolitan elitist.
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Though he admitted never having set foot in Donegal before, Hook pounded about Glenveagh national park as though to the manor born, apparently besotted with the notion of a countryside free from all signs of human life.
When he eventually bagged a shot of his allotted prey, the golden eagle, he lost the run of himself. “Forget radio, television or rugby, this is where it’s at,” he burbled, with the air of a man now determined to visit every branch of his favourite theme park.
There are, you see, good reasons why country dwellers are so fond of switching around the local signposts.