CHANNEL HOPPER: The Late Late – Still not sure what it’s supposed to be

By: Paul Bradley

The Late Late Show – RTÉ1, Friday, 9.35pm

Strictly Come Dancing – BBC1, Saturday, 6.15pm

Apocalypse – Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm

Neagley – Amazon Prime

Secrets Of The Bayeux Tapestry – BBC2, Sunday, 8pm

Well, it’s that time of the year again already, and so we have another inevitable season of The Late Late Show.

It’s so unremarkable now that we often just ignore it; and there was a long time, remember, when you’d always have a look “just in case” there was something interesting on it. But I had a look at the first episode – and guess what, it’s still not quite sure what it’s supposed to be.

Patrick Kielty is back for a fourth run, and the format is the usual mix of chat, variety, and solemn public-service broadcast; which is to say, still an awkward mix to carry off, even if RTÉ still insist on it.

It opened with the usual monologue (some fairly weak Trump jokes), then some cheery but forgettable banter about Mayo’s All-Ireland win, and Siobhán McSweeney and Caitríona Balfe turned up for some standard promotional chat. Inoffensive, uneventful.

The only feature with any substance was a conversation with Liam Neeson and Catherine Corless about The Lost Children Of Tuam, a film Neeson has produced about the Mother and Baby Home scandal. This is a heavy subject, and Kielty handles it respectfully; in fairness to him, he has an impossible task, and he mixes the themes about as well as anyone else.

But still, shifting from GAA banter to institutional abuse by way of some PR puffery is a jarring move, and the show hasn’t managed to do it smoothly in years.

Maybe, after all, it was never smooth, but there was at least a time when TLLS was almost the only place where you could find the interesting pieces. These days, other shows do better jobs at every individual thing TLLS tries to cover, so it feels not only like a weird patchwork but a second-rate one.

An increasingly annoying thing about TLLS and many other light entertainment shows is forced enthusiasm; if Kielty hadn’t delivered those Trump jokes with such giddiness we might not have realised they were jokes at all.

Strictly Come Dancing

Over on BBC, meanwhile, Strictly Come Dancing has always erred on the side of excess excitement, and this year – for the launch of the reshaped 22nd season – it was dialled up to even higher levels. Which largely meant, yes, a lot of people you didn’t know screaming and gesticulating a little bit more than was necessary.

The big change is in the presenting team. Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman left last year, and have now been replaced by Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe. They’re probably more nervous than bad, but it’s a slightly awkward start for them; Willis is the pro but perhaps faintly overwhelmed; Widdicombe is plastered in so much makeup he looks like a paper-maché granny, laughing extra hard to make up for it; and Radebe, the most knowledgeable about dance, is the least comfortable presenting to camera.

The thing is, even if and when they all become comfortable with it, it’s too busy: three is very much a crowd here.

The lineup doesn’t help much either. It’s a thin batch if you’re hoping to actually recognise anyone, though what they lack in recognisability they make up for in volume: every reveal, every pairing, every mention of the judges is greeted with some shrieking and hand-waving.

As for the new partner-swap routine for pairing couples in the first place, well, it’s certainly a development, even if it’s a bit pointless.

Some of this, of course, is just a settling-in period, getting the formalities out of the way in a show that’s now changing from the one people have watched for 21 years already. So we’ll mark the first episode down as feet-finding and reserve any terribly harsh judgements for a while; but seriously, they need to dial down the rapture.

Apocalypse

At least one other new show could tone down the screaming too, although in Channel 4’s new survival show Apocalypse they’re generally shouting at each other about, you know, who gets to hold the torch as they walk in the dark.

Apocalypse wants you to believe it’s doing something radical: dropping strangers into an abandoned town (a former military training ground in America, complete with abandoned supermarkets and shot-to-bits vehicles) for 28 days to fend for themselves.

Will they survive? Well, yes, it’s a TV show, and whatever Channel 4 tells us, it’s nothing we haven’t already seen: think Survivor, Castaway, and Eden, and several other similar shows.

Except this time, the production crew have filled the set with chickens and half-stocked shops, so it even seems a bit less dangerous than usual. It seems to be inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road, and its timing has been immaculate, launching in the very week even the AI experts told us AI might just end the world.

A glimpse of the future, then? Hopefully not. Not only because it’s so dark and harsh, but because all the contestants feel like attention-hungry “types”: snotty ex-politicians and online influencers all hoping to find a little bit of fame by bickering about, oh, who’s thriving, who’s hungriest, and, hey, who’s that over there?

No doubt the execs at Channel 4 are laughing heartily while taking the clownish footage and layering their own portentous narration over it; they could do the same with an episode of Bugs Bunny and it would be cheaper and more enjoyable.

Neagley

Meanwhile, just as Reacher’s latest season ended, its first spinoff appeared, and it might as well be the same show. If you’ve seen Reacher, you’ll know Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) is the only person Reacher fully trusts: fierce, loyal, smart, and dangerous.

She didn’t appear in season 4 of Reacher (though Reacher turns up briefly here), but that’s OK for fans: she was obviously busy working as a Chicago private investigator. As we join her in that world, her investigation into the death of a childhood friend leads her to a kind of wellness cult running something shadier out of a barn.

Sten is physically convincing in fight scenes which, luckily, feel different to the brute-force fisticuffs of Reacher; and she’s given a reasonably engaging supporting cast.

But when it switches to backstory or exposition, it slows down too much and feels too simplistic.

Not that you want any profundity from a show like this: it’s middling viewing, sometimes unconvincing but sometimes fun, but it rarely hits the OTT heights it could, and the makers really should have done something to distinguish it – in pace, in look, in wisecracks – from its parent show.

Secrets Of The Bayeux Tapestry

Finally, BBC2’s Secrets Of The Bayeux Tapestry was a decent appetiser for anyone thinking of visiting the famous embroidery (not actually a tapestry, it seems) in London.

Michael Palin narrated a film which made a good job of juggling three separate stories: the 1066 Norman invasion, the history of the tapestry itself, and its recent, absolutely painstaking transfer from France to the British Museum for a once-a-millennium visit.

Good Sunday night viewing, and a welcome reminder that there really are people out there who care about such things.