No sweet side to diet of harsh truths

Monday morning was greeted with chatter about the contents of one’s stomach and adipose fat. I’ll own up, I didn’t know what adipose fat was but a quick google search soon put me on the path to enlightenment.
The reason for such talk amongst work colleagues and later some women in the gym changing room was down to What’s Ireland Eating?, which aired on Sunday night.
I don’t know how many more times the country’s population can be told that we are eating too much, but a reminder never hurts I suppose. I had missed it on Sunday, so I chose the RTÉ Player route on Monday night and I was glad I had just been to the gym. It might have been three weeks since I was last there, but hey, every bit counts.
Interestingly enough, as Philip Boucher Hayes was telling me about the dangers of fast food, there was an ad on the side of the screen on the website for McDonalds; a lovely picture of a giant double quarter pounder with cheese informing me their beef is 100% Irish. There was no mention of the fact, as a talking head from Safefood would later inform me, that had I consumed it with a side portion of chips and soft drink that I would have demolished almost 2,000 calories. No worries though, the beef is local.
Our problem, it turns out, is our brains. After millennia of fine-tuning to find grub in even the most adverse circumstances, we now live in a consumer society with an abundance of food freely available.
Boucher-Hayes darted back and over between Dublin, London and Copenhagen looking at various studies into why one in four children and two in three adults are now overweight or obese. He even volunteered for one himself along the way, which all drew to one conclusion – sugar is bad.
This is hardly news and we’ve heard it a thousand times before but maybe if people saw the image of the man’s stomach laid open on a surgical table with his adipose fat on show, it might mean less Chinese takeaways are consumed. I overheard one woman saying she’s giving up the weekly takeaway – so maybe it was worth something then.
From a diet of harsh truths to something completely different. I took a peek at House of Lies on Tuesday night on Sky Atlantic, the rather dark comedy set in the world of corporate consultancy. Don Cheadle is cutthroat professional manipulator, Marty Kaan, who heads a crew of damage-control consultants from Galweather & Stearn, the number two management consultancy in the US, based in Los Angeles but take on projects across the world.
He and his colleagues Jeannie (Kristen Bell), Clyde (Ben Schwartz) and Doug (Josh Lawson) have their eye firmly on the number one spot but still have plenty of time to get up to all sorts of other shenanigans on route to the grand prize.
It’s a case of the contemptible fleecing the detestable and, let’s be honest, with the state overpaid fat-cats have left the world economy in, who doesn’t want to see the filthy rich get fleeced?
The only problem with House of Lies is that there is no empathy with the creeps who are conning the creeps, as Marty and Co don’t seem to have too many redeeming features themselves. You’re expected to root for the slightly less nasty folks and you do to some extent.
An attempt to humanise Marty is made in his home life. He lives with his father (Glynn Turman) and son, Roscoe (Donis Leonard, Jr), who likes to dress like a girl. Marty is billed to be a great dad for defending his son’s conflicted sexuality against the criticisms of his ex-wife (also a consultant and an even more psychologically broken specimen than Marty) and school officials when he goes for the part of Sandy in Grease. But it’s hard to reconcile the two sides of Cheadle’s character.
Also, much of the humour is too reliant on a gimmick where the screen freezes and Marty gives a layman’s account of whatever jargon was just muttered actually means. When characters aren’t having sex, they are trying to have it and it’s the rather unpleasant sort.
While Cheadle and Bell do have good chemistry and Glynn Turman is brilliant as Marty’s dad, I just don’t see how this can be developed into something that you want to invest in the characters and care enough to root for anyone involved.
It’s the season for scares with Hallowe’en around the corner and so The River began airing on Syfy on Tuesday night. I’ll be honest, horror is not my genre of choice. I spent most of The Ring wishing I was elsewhere and I didn’t see much of The Grudge because my coat was blocking my view of the screen.
The River was co-created by Oren Peli, who gave us Paranormal Activity, so that should give you a hint as to where this eight-parter might register on the scare scale. It doesn’t stray too far from the perimeters of the paranormal/horror/found footage idea of the likes of Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project either.
The premise is such – A famous explorer Dr Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) went looking for a bit of magic somewhere in the Amazon basin but never returned. Dr Cole is a bit like David Attenborough meets Yvette Fielding and was a bit of a hero to the millions of children who watched his nature show. Not so much to his son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), though.
Six months after he vanished, Cole’s emergency beacon suddenly goes off and, on mammy’s request, the reluctant Lincoln joins her on a search for his father on the family boat Magus. To fund the venture, Cole’s old producer Clark (Paul Blackthorne), films the mission for a documentary, which means there’s a conveniently placed TV crew present to capture events when things take a turn for the creepy.
The motley rescue crew also includes the missing cameraman’s daughter Lena (Eloise Mumford), mechanic Emilio (Daniel Zacapa) and bodyguard Captain Kurt Brynildson (Thomas Kretschmann).
The battered boat Magus is also bedecked with cameras so, as the crew float down the Amazon attempting to follow Cole’s trail, all manner of shadows in the corners are recorded. Spooky hijinks ensue but after one episode the whole thing feels terribly contrived.
The better frights come courtesy of the shadows or images moving across one of the camera screens but the bigger set pieces don’t fare as well. If you like horror B-movies with a mostly competent cast, you could do worse than this show. But if you really want unsettling happenings, a stellar cast and depressingly grim outcomes, then stick with The Walking Dead, which makes a welcome return for season three on October 19 on FX channel.