Love/Hate tries to add new depth to depravity

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

You so want to love Love/Hate – you so want to get it and understand it and revel in it and look forward to it like nothing else in the week. Because if you don’t – now that the All-Irelands are over – you’ll find yourself left out of the Monday morning chatter in the office.

But bloody hell, it’s hard work.

For sure, it’s brilliantly made and acted – gritty, realistic by all accounts, true to life on the streets, and it is as close to unmissable as anything on the box. But it’s almost like being a viciously realistic crime drama set on the streets of Dublin is no longer enough – now it has to be all psychological and deep, and it can no longer just tell a narrative without jumping back and over to Spain like an epileptic kangaroo.

At one stage Nidge is having his head beaten in with baseball bats by members of the Travelling community and the next the hole in his head that he had in the hedge has disappeared – because he’s back in Marbella talking to some money guy called Terence ‘Big Balls’ May. Or – one assumes – just Mr May, to his face.

Poor oul’ Nidge must have more air miles up than Michael O’Leary; where the man gets the energy is a mystery because when he’s not flying high, he’s keeping Trish in tight trousers and dropping in for sloppy seconds to Janet, the obligatory ‘hooker with the heart of gold’.

Whatever the state of her heart, it would appear that her knees have given up the ghost if Sunday’s events are any indicator – not that Nidge seemed overly concerned.

Perhaps he’s preoccupied with becoming Ireland’s answer to Tony Soprano, with all of this violence on the outside but the pussy cat at home, and the man riddled with regrets and doubts in those long lingering shots of him smoking endless cigarettes in the dark.

The new series picked up where the last left things – with the body of Andrew the dentist turning up in the canal after Fran went too far. Nidge has lost everything after Moynihan’s sting wiped him out – but the Detective Inspector didn’t get his man and he’s still hell-bent on doing so.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.