Travel

Coronation Street Sometimes TV is amazing and the BBC4 drama The Road to Coronation Street, about the way Granada began to make this soap was such a buzz to watch. You could feel the excitement from a top class cast who knew they were recreating history since 1960. The Tony Warren character as the original writer,...

Back to School Yes, it is once again the season of yellow fruitfulness, last years gym vest and the new uniform as thousands of kids and others go back to school. For Waterloo Road, it’s a new head-teacher and a seeming shift of local to Yorkshire Dale meets shades of Heartbeat or Peak Practice and with the very...

Hero Watch out for a new six-part RTE slice of life programme, Rescue 117. Filmed at Waterford Helicopter base at Waterford Airport it is a fine mix of good news and some bad. I saw a preview episode shown in the Mayor’s Office recently and it was gripping stuff and I feel that viewers will get involved in the lives...

Auto-tuning The X-Factor returned for a 7th series and the talking point was not the crazy eliminations and auditions but the accusation that the programme makers used auto-tuning to improve or enhance contestants that the judges favour to make them sound better. Auto-tuning is used in studios to improve performances...

Alan Smith The Waterford fire fighter Alan Smith is going to swim the English Channel this autumn as I watched the More4 documentary Big River Man. Martin Strel a Slovenian swimmer and celebrity swam the length of the Amazon in 2007 and the documentary won an Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. What an amazing...

A Guard TV3 popped out a great feature-length crime drama last week, Jack Taylor, starring Iain Glen as an unshaven ex-guard who becomes a finder. In his words, a person who looks for people and takes on the dark jobs, the guards won’t take on. But as it’s written by Irish author Ken Bruen, from his novel The Guards,...

Moving statues RTE1 moved into “moving statues” territory with an honest and balanced view of an ordinary man who claims to have visions and communications with and from the Virgin Mary at Knock. Joe Coleman seems an ordinary man. A Ballyfermot man, who claims to be a healer through light and to reveal ordinary...

Seahorsemen Full marks to RTE 1 for their fascinating four part series last week, Seahorsemen, about Marine Biologist Kgalan Doyle and his U.C.G. friend Ken Maher who set out to save a species and breed seahorses. The particular beauty of these creatures with the head of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo and a monkey...

Choice? Try as you might, it is hard to avoid football on the tele. Whether it is the disallowed English goal and all that excuse palaver or the complaints about the type of ball used, called the TSB, or as some pundits say The Stupid Ball. Despite complaints the FIFA general secretary said “FIFA is not deaf”. No...

Imagine Imagine there was a time I thought John Lennon was the sun, moon and stars of music, freedom and doing your own thing. So it was a shock to the system, a slap in the face of nostalgia to watch the scaring and painful BBC 4 programme about fatherhood, Lennon Naked. I love his wit, his smart-assed quips and his...

Celebrity Not sure what TV3 mean by celebrity these days but some of the faces in that yoke Celebrity Salon seem like a blank canvas. I recognised Leigh because she was in The Clinic but she keeps talking about acting the doctor. There’s a wrinkly older one, a busty wan who was the butt of Podge and Rodgering at The...