Wedding Belles
Channel 4, 10pm
Mummy's war
Channel 4, 9pm
Ding-dong, ya pure mad wee radge! Wedding Belles found the scabrous sage of Muirhouse, Irvine Welsh, up to his usual loud and shocking shenanigans again. He's a proper monkey for waging war on bourgeois society's perceptions of the feckless post-industrial under-class and all that, is Irv.
So jings, crivvens and help ma boab if we didn't once again have our snooty, well-to-do noses rubbed in some frightful imaginary hard-core realism, dears.
Wedding Belles offered us four feisty burds in wedding dresses storming about Leith, swearing too much, smoking crack, kidnapping a priest and conducting late-night gangland-style executions. When the four weren't doing that sort of malarkey - routine around Leith, apparently - they were staging the hilarious business of calling adults with learning difficulties "mongs" and advocating the benefits of intimate plastic surgery. Charged with giving a graphic demonstration of the latter's cosmetic worth, Michelle Gomez wound up startling a passing postman. She's always an eyeful, Ms Gomez - but you couldn't help feeling she was terribly wasted in Wedding Belles.
Elsewhere, it was priapic OAPs experiencing an all-too-prominent hardening of the arteries (yon Viagra) or pegging out while clad in bondage gear.
There was much more graceless, charmless stuff, too. Shocked? I almost dropped my syringe. Or, in other words, I wasn't shocked at all, just bored and mildly scunnered. Irvine's shtick boils down to predictable cartoonery and rude slogans.
As political protest placards go, one soon stood out in Mummy's War. You had to respect its sentiments, while deploring its errant spelling and wonky grasp of idiomatic English. There it was, amid various placards being brandished by angry Argentinians greeting a new arrival to Buenos Aires airport: "You Are Non Pleasing Person, Thacher."
Sadly, it was the wrong Thacher - or, as the placard should of course have read, "Thatcher" - who was being protested against: the lumberingly eccentric Carol, rather than her frightful mater, Mrs Margaret.
Poor Carol, guilty only of being a 10-watt lightbulb, albeit a jolly enthusiastic one. Nevertheless, in bidding to establish the lasting effects of the Falklands conflict in this, the year of its 25th anniversary, dutiful daughter Carol wound up copping some blame for mummy's war.
Mummy's War actually turned out to be as much about mummy's girl and the maternal shadow under which she toils as it was about that crazy conflict in the South Atlantic. There was a moment early in the programme, as Carol bustled about her flat packing clothes for her chilly trip - "Layers, Carol, layers!" - that provided a fleeting insight into her girlhood, ineradicably scarred by Maggie's election as an MP when Carol was six. "She was more of a politician than a mum," Carol confided, her tone coloured with the tiniest shade of accusation, dolour and self-pity, before moving briskly on: "But never mind!"
There was an equally revelatory millisecond when Carol's 18-hour flight to the Falklands touched down at Port Stanley International (a small group of corrugated hangars). "Is this it?" Carol said in a confused, childlike tone, inferring no cosmopolitan disappointment at the airport's bleak locale. Rather, she seemed genuinely baffled as to where she might be. (If her mum had been there, she might have got a clout round the ear for asking such a daft question.) Off the plane and skipping along the runway with girlish glee, Carol hugged a plastic replica Falklands penguin, asking its name and wondering whether she'd be allowed to see some real ones.
Carol? The poor dear gel's a lamb. Shame about her mum and that bally war of hers, mind.
david.belcher@theherald.co.uk
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