LENTEN
LENTEN
PUBLISHED IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY, MARCH 7TH 2010
It’s Lent, I suddenly remembered, as I drained the last of a bottle of wine into a glass and ensconced myself in front of the TV the other evening. Once a Catholic…The thought occurred that I ought be abstaining from alcohol, and entertainment, and sitting here in penitential sacking knickers silently contemplating my own mortality in the scheme of bigger things…or something.
Not that I was ever into itchy Lenten knickers, if such yokes even exist. But abstinence, in the area of sweets and chocolate, was observed every Lent when I was a child, with the exception of St. Patrick’s Day. (As if in banishing the snakes etc. he was also saying, ‘Whoopee, Curly Whirlies all round’.) Now I hardly mark the season.
But. The wine was left over from Sunday lunch. So waste not want not, at least there was some moral component to my quaffing. And I was watching RTE One – penance in itself. Because if you want to watch the best thing on telly, as I did, RTE makes you wait up ‘til midnight, on a Monday. I’m talking about the series Mad Men. I’m complaining about its time slot. But hey, it’s Lent, why complain? Thanks for the time tribulation RTE, for your atonement scheduling.
And thanks for doubling it with the choice of programme you deem essential enough to bump your biggest diamond back to the dead of night – Design for Living. Wherein eager house-builders (remember them) are teamed with architects (remember work, guys). Not only is it entirely out of kilter with the times, but it’s a repeat. I repeat – A REPEAT. For this my date with Don Draper is postponed ?
Not only that, it had the whiff of a fossil when it first aired last Spring – Why? Because filming began mid-2006 – I hardly need make the point that things have conspired to huff and puff and blow the idea of fancy self-builds off the menu of national aspirations in the intervening years. Do I? Maybe I do. To someone in RTE. The person responsible for scheduling a repeat of this now cringe-orama of a documentary – Maybe RTE’s exploring a whole new genre of telly – The docu-cringe-amentary; the cringe-odoc; the just plain ‘Wrongoprog’. Or maybe this is just the dumbest scheduling ever.
But you know what would have worked? Putting a laugh-track and additional voice-overs on, to up the comedy-thriller vibe of this now passé prog. The night I watched the presenter began ‘Architects design homes, but not enough homes, and certainly not enough Irish homes.’ Cue canned laughter. With over 300 000 vacant houses and apartments in the country we need to hear this? Don’t even invoke the ‘d’ word when the next instalment of Ireland’s property love saga will most likely feature development demolitions. ‘And were they architect designed?’ we won’t be asking. Does it matter when ultimately all you’re talking about is a pile of rubble. Bank-breakingly, Nama-esquely expensive rubble.
The couple that want to build have full-time jobs in IT, the presenter reveals. Cue den-den-den music, and an ‘oh-oh’ voice-over. They have a lovely site, ergo they must have ‘something really special’. Voila the philosophy of ye olden Celtic Tiger times. The lovely lady of the couple says she wants ‘something that sits perfectly naturally’ in the idyllic setting. A yurt, a log-cabin, a rose-covered prefab? The perfectly natural choices are perfectly endless. But no.
The couple have an absolute maximum budget of 250 thousand euro. The architect has some lovely pens. He designs something ‘really special’. They love it. The quantity surveyor says it will cost 650 thousand to realise. Design for Life? They hum, they haw. They want to stick to their budget. They want the ‘really special’ thing. They’ve compromised, we’re told. You want to hear them say – ‘Actually, designy man, we’ve decided to go for the rose-covered prefab. Three rooms and a flush toilet will do because we’ve realised what’s most important is we love each other, we own a lovely field and the loveliest thing would be if we could afford to have children before we’re 70.’
But no. The compromise is they’ve stretched the budget to 350 thousand. ‘Den, den, den, credit crisis, it’s creeping up behind you’ goes the new v/o. But they can’t hear, because that was then.
So. In the end we’re walked through their sprawling split-level ‘really special’ build. They’re delighted. The architect is miffed at dimension compromises that had to be made. What a waste of lovely pens. The presenter wraps it all up by congratulating the couple on their tenacity. Final budget? 375 thousand euro. Oh, oh. And you half-expect a final voice-over update saying ‘Since this programme was made X and Y (not their real names) lost their jobs, handed the keys to the bank and have disappeared in the direction of Australia, it’s believed. The architect is now designing Big Macs to go in his local MacDonalds. Meanwhile, NAMA is enjoying association with another ‘really special’ project.
I sincerely hope not, because for me the star of the programme wasn’t the house, but the love, respect and support the gorgeous young couple quietly showed for each throughout. What a sombre Lenten-tinged reflection on past sins of property lust, I mused, as I sipped my left-over vino, and the opening credits finally rolled, in the dead of night, for Mad Men.
