The Thorne identity

TV REVIEW: Thorne: SleepyheadSky1, Sunday; Young, Dumb and Living Off MumTV3, Wednesday; The Eagles ReturnRTÉ1, Tuesday; Ireland's GreatestRTÉ1, Monday

THERE'S A CHOICE of Aidan Gillen at the same time these Sunday nights. In Love/Hateon RTÉ1 he's the Dublin gangland boss with a nice line in V-neck sweaters, an out-ofcontrol coked-up brother and a drug empire to control. Over on Sky1 in the three-part serialisation of Mark Billingham's Thorne:Sleepyheadhe's a taciturn, gay police pathologist who'll gladly help his friend DI Thorne (David Morrissey) but to everyone else seems a monosyllabic weirdo jobsworth. Thanks to some fine acting Gillen is more convincing in Thorne.

A Sky-made drama is an event in itself (as is finding anything on Sky1 to watch other than The Simpsonsand Modern Family), and this slickly filmed cop drama is definitely worth it, with last Sunday's penultimate episode leaving a tense cliffhanger.

Set in London, the plot sees DI Thorne attempting to track down a serial killer. In TV crime thrillers, is there any other kind? The killer has murdered three women, leaving his fourth victim Alison in hospital in a “locked-in” state where she can see and hear everything going on around her but can’t communicate or move anything except her eyes. So Thorne has a witness, though not an ideal one, obviously, and it soon becomes clear that the killer is taunting him – leaving messages written in blood on bathroom mirrors, that sort of thing.

The star cast includes the brilliantly creepy Eddie Marsan as Thorne’s former police partner, and the gorgeous Natascha McElhone as the neurologist treating Alison; by the end of episode two even these two were starting to look suspicious.

It has to be the first crime series in ages in which the identity of the killer wasn’t blindingly obvious from the off. When Sleepyhead wraps up tomorrow night there’ll be another three-part Thorne mystery to look out for, this one staring Sandra Oh of Grey’s Anatomy – more proof that Sky is taking this drama seriously.

THERE'S NOTHING EVEN remotely serious about Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, which is a clever title for a silly, watchable, shamelessly low-budget show, though you might find your blood pressure tipping over the edge at the sight of such rampant laziness. It's the Irish version of the BBC3 series in which eight mollycoddled young people with an average age of about 20 are fast-tracked into becoming fully functioning independent adults.

Each week they are given challenges, and the worst performer is voted off by the mothers. The prize for the winner at the end of the series is a trip abroad, which is worrying, as you wouldn’t trust any of the eight we saw on Wednesday night to find their way to the end of the garden, never mind leave the island.

The chosen eight were proudly hopeless and magnificently delighted with their own laziness, though they did seem to know a lot about hair products. Typical of the group is Kim, who, at 18, spends most of her time in her pyjamas and won’t look for work because she “hates stupid jobs that have nothing to do with who you are”, or 20-year-old Ross, who has already been fired from three jobs. And, anyway, why would they bother when the Bank of Mum and Dad is always open and everything, right down to their ironing, is done for them?

For the series they’re put into a house together to fend for themselves. One of them had seen his mum put on a duvet cover and felt that if he could just remember how she did it he’d be fine. In each programme the gang is given a different task. In the first programme they were brought to work in a Dublin hotel under the watchful eyes of the super-professional and hard-working staff there. The slackers were mostly hopeless, and not because they couldn’t do it but because they seemed to think they were a bit too good for it. Also, they’d never really been told to do anything before. Besides, stuffing sheets and towels into a laundry bag was – and bear in mind these were young, able-bodied people – “very stressful”.

The mothers took most of the blame for their giant babies, but, looking at the sulky, uninterested faces of the young ones, you can see why they just caved in rather than deal with the aggravation of all that backchat.

The best moment was when they had to go supermarket shopping. One of them knocked on the house next door and asked for a lift. “He’s so used to being driven everywhere he just assumed it’d happen,” said his mother, watching the scene later. I hope that bit was a set-up, because I doubt anyone could be that dumb, though this series seems determined to prove me wrong.

LEAVING THE NEST was a cause of major celebration in Donegal in the superb wildlife series The Eagles Return, in which two fluffy, impossibly cute golden-eagle chicks grew from white fluffballs into magnificently feathered adults. We caught up with them as they spent their last few days in the nest with their mother, flapping their wings and learning to fly.

This is a fantastic and – absolutely no pun intended – uplifting series. Just when you feel snowed under by economic meltdown and start to become convinced we’re sinking into a dark pit, this stunning series shows Ireland at its glorious best. Amazing scenery, open skies and a group of people passionate about their work – reintroducing wild birds of prey into Ireland after an absence of more than 100 years. John Murray, the director, filmed his series over three years, and it shows in the unhurried editing, beautiful pace and depth of specialist knowledge that’s conveyed with an enviable ease by the wildlife experts.

In this week’s programme Damian Clarke, project manager of the Red Kite Reintroduction Project, went to Wales to collect chicks to reintroduce the species to Wicklow. “We never had any trouble with the kites,” said one Welsh farmer. “The ravens and crows, yes, but the kites, no. They don’t kill anything; they just sweep up the remains of dead animals.”

Lorcan O’Toole had the nerve-racking job of searching for nests to see if any of the golden eagles had produced chicks. If they had, the project he has been working on for 10 years would show signs of real long-term success. The chicks were there.

And then they showed a clip of next week’s programme, in which one of these magnificent eagles is lying dead on a slab, the victim of poisoning. The day this first programme was screened, legislation was put forward to make the poisoning of these breathtakingly beautiful creatures illegal. We need legislation for that? Back to sliding into the dark pit, then.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Vex factor: How Ireland's greatest became Ireland's latest

Wonder if more people are voting for X Factor's Mary than for Ireland's Greatest? Bet they are. It's apples and oranges there, too, of course: eccentric Wagner versus cat-fighting girl band Belle Amie, belter Mary versus pretty-boy band One Direction.

But it at least makes some kind of sense, which Ireland's Greatestabsolutely doesn't – on so many levels. Now that we've seen all five candidates, isn't it a lot about whoever is doing the pitch? If Michael McDowell brings you out in hives, you're going to have a hard time voting for Michael Collins; if you fancy Miriam O'Callaghan, then John Hume might be worth a 60c text. Reductive reasoning, of course, but then TV is a reductive medium.

And, even though they're far too big and noble, both Hume and Mary Robinson (well pitched this week by David McWilliams, right) could easily cry foul. The first three Ireland's Greatestcandidates – Collins, Bono and James Connolly – were given an unfair advantage by RTÉ simply because of a change in scheduling.

In the first three weeks, when the programme ran directly after the nine o'clock news, viewers averaged 311,000. But, for some reason, RTÉ moved the final two programmes to after The Frontline, resulting in a significant drop in viewership, to 233,000. According to OwensDDB/Nielsen, which crunched those numbers, that's still a respectable viewership for late on a Monday night, especially when up against TV3's The Apprenticeand The Apprentice: You're Fired, but still.

The decision to tinker with the timings must have been last-minute, because the listings in weekly magazines, which work to an earlier deadline than daily newspapers, got it wrong. Good news for Pat Kenny, who got his audience, but one for the grassy-knoll merchants.