By Luke O’Connell
It saddens me to learn that there are still people who haven’t seen a single episode – let alone followed it with fervour – of the seminal and peerless TV triumph Tallafornia. All human life is there. By the time you read this, the final episode (for now, one hopes) will have aired. It was, undoubtedly, the finest debut season since HBO’s The Wire, blending humour and pathos, love and hate. Above all, it was a sharp commentary on Dublin life, and asked us questions of ourselves such as what it means to be a young person in urban Ireland in 2012.
I was delighted, then, to hear that David Norris, the failed and weird presidential candidate, had piped up on the subject in the Seanad the other day. It was going to be good no matter what he said. He was quite right to describe it as “compulsive and repulsive viewing”, although I suspect he meant that to be pejorative. “The type of language, I have to say, is something which even in my neck of the woods I wasn’t entirely familiar with on a habitual basis.” What a snob! The language in his beloved Ulysses isn’t something which even in my neck of the woods I am entirely familiar with on a habitual basis. He has called for a debate on “standards in Irish life and values” after watching a bit of the show. Jay, the blonde male stripper who provides most of the homegrown wisdom and down to earth morals of the episodes, responded to this jibes by saying it was simply a publicity stunt by Norris but thanked him for raising awareness of the show just in time for the final episode.
The title, a clever pun on the well-known US state California, is defined in a faux-dictionary style at the beginning of the show as “the growing spread of west Dublin culture”, a culture which Norris presumably knows little about. Whatever about the show in general, Norris must surely have appreciated the natural televisual talent of the show’s anti-hero Cormac Brannigan, an obscenely big weight-lifter who moonlights as a Dublin taxi driver. He is a modern Heathcliff: muscular, brooding, solipsistic and suspiciously tanned. A Rathcoole native who acts like David Brent on steroids, he considers himself above some of the others in the show, much like Norris, and recently told Herald Dubliner “there were a few different classes in the house and that caused a bit of conflict.” He hit out at the idea that the show was bad press for Tallaght and. in an astute remark which might be worth listening to by Norris, said “And I’m like, ‘How am I making you look bad? Do you not go down to the Plaza [the popular Dublin nightclub] and get locked and probably start a fight? I’m not doing that, so I’m making you look good, so just shut up you fool!” His Facebook page (which I attempted to add a fortnight ago but have yet to receive a confirmation notification) lists his favourite things as “babes, BMWs and bodybuilding”, none of which, one imagines, would be in Norris’s Top 10.
It was suggested by James Joyce that if Dublin in 1904 were obliterated, it could be reconstructed perfectly based solely on Ulysses. Well, if west Dublin in 2012 went instead, let Tallafornia be our blueprint. It juxtaposes the sublime and the ridiculous, the spiritual and the mundane, and all in 30 minutes per week of entertaining gold. One of the main reasons that Tallafornia was such a hit with middle class Dublin might be a smug superiority complex. It feels good to watch those less fortunate than you making idiots of themselves, especially if the producers are on your side and are fully compliant with maximising their supposed idiocy. But it’s good to watch anyone making an idiot of themselves on TV, regardless of class, as we saw in the glorious presidential election last year, which was essentially one eternal episode of Tallafornia with a different cast. Seven non-entities attempted to become famous at any cost but were savaged by those on the other side of the camera. It was all pre-rehearsed and the level of backstabbing and mud-slinging was unprecedented, as with Tallafornia. Doesn’t Norris see this? Doesn’t he see that Tallafornia is the zeitgeist of modern Ireland in a way that his or his opponents’ campaigns could never be? A new season of the presidential election airs only every seven years; on the bright side it should be less than one year until we see the Tallaght Seven return. By then, maybe the Seanad won’t even exist and Norris will be out of a job, but, one hopes, Cormac will still be cruising around in his BMW and picking up babes, before politely asking them for the fare at the end.
