The View Ð as seen from a very great height

Date Published: {J}

I suppose there’s not much point having a programme called The View if your panel subsequently turns out to have very few of them – but my God, John Kelly’s debate could do with a little lightening up.

The format is straightforward enough – the wise man of music holds court with a panel of three guests (normally a journalist or two with someone who works in an art gallery) and they shoot the breeze about a book, movie, TV show and perhaps some musical event for the next 40 minutes.

All very straightforward until you get down to the subject matter which normally falls into one of two categories; either it’s utterly incomprehensible to the rest of us – in which case you can salivate all over the studio in your praise of it – or it’s populist and popular, so you can look down your nose at the sort of nonsense that passes for entertainment among the great unwashed.

In fairness, this view is often most dogmatically expressed by Kelly himself than anyone on his panel – which also brings into question whether he realises he’s the presenter or he thinks he’s just the most intelligent of the panellists.

Last week it was the turn of the talking telephone – aka Eamon McCann – a man who would require subtitles if he was actually saying anything of remote importance, alongside journalist Marion McKeone and Peter Crawley, who apparently ekes out a full-time living as a theatre critic.

Naturally they hugely admired the Rough Magic three-hour version of Peer Gynt – complete with broad Waterford accents as opposed to the Norwegian original – even if it is an easier play to read than to view, it’s dense, demanding and you have to work at it. But then that all helps to push it beyond the reach of the great unwashed.

Ditto Tyrannosaur, directed by Paddy Considine, even though McCann didn’t like the ending or the pub scene – but it was deep, brave, stylised, heart-breaking, realistic, uncompromising and very difficult to take … although as Marion McKeone pointed out, the subject matters up for review across the board meant “this was not a happy week for The View.”

That was probably designed as an antidote to the previous week because back then, Downton Abbey was on the diet – and it got it with both barrels from our wise man of words, despite the best efforts of two of his panellists, Edel Coffey and Brenda Power, to explain to him that it’s not actually real and it’s just escapism from the worries of the world on a Sunday night.

I have to admit that, when I first heard tell of this new series last year, I first believed it was a reality show filmed at weekends on the streets of Abbeyknockmoy – until I saw the missing ‘w’ in the first world of the title.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.