Stephen says sláinte

DID you hear the one about the big British star who walked into a pub in Ros Na Rún?

See for yourself on Thursday on TG4 (8.30pm). Stephen Fry’s much publicised cameo appearance in the Irish soap is here at last.

Not quite a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ scene, but the former Jeeves and Blackadder star only appears in the pub for a short exchange with the local barflies. Unsurprisingly, he’s perfect as the bumbling Englishman, Irish dictionary in hand, trying to communicate with the natives.

And, in a typical twist from the people behind this excellent series, the locals’ response is far from what Bord Fáilte would have scripted. Instead of doffing their caps and dancing a jig, they try to fleece him. Realistic, or wha?

But when it comes to the R word, it doesn’t get more real than Dermot’s Secret Garden (Thursday, RTE One, 7pm). Originally, the makers of this show intended to follow gardener Dermot O’Neill as he put his savings into buying Clondeglass Walled Garden and bringing it back its productive 19th century heyday, along the way becoming almost totally self-sufficient for food. And that’s what we get at the start of the show. It plods along at a suitably easy pace as O’Neill sorts out soil, fowl, bees, etc. Then we get a scene where he casually talks about getting his “gout” sorted. Cut to an ashen-faced O’Neill telling us of a visit to St Vincent’s Hospital: “They listed off a whole lot of different things, and the only thing I heard was ‘cancer’.”

This suddenly becomes a whole different show. It’s difficult to tell whether the garden is now more important or less important as O’Neill sits on his bed, hair gone and head scarred from the chemo treatment for the treatable tumour in his stomach, talking about how he still thinks of Clondeglass every day. For the programme’s makers, it obviously provided them with some tricky choices about what to do with the show. A story of a cancer sufferer or the tale of a garden’s transformation? They’ve opted to combine both, and will hopefully keep the right balance over the next few weeks.

As well as the season for garden growth, spring is obviously the time for forgiveness as RTÉ’s twin prodigal sons make their return to our screens. Charlie Bird’s return from foreign parts saw him being foisted on the plain people of Ireland as he did his vox pop thing in the lead-up to the election.

Now it’s the turn of George Lee, the former economics correspondent with the brilliant future behind him. It remains to be seen whether The Business (Friday, RTÉ One, 8.30pm) can rehabilitate him in the eyes of viewers and voters, but his foray into the world of politics looks even more disastrous as time goes on. If Lee hadn’t jumped ship from RTÉ, the national broadcaster would have had the perfect man in the perfect place to report on the economic meltdown. A meltdown he was even ridiculed for predicting. And if he had stayed with Fine Gael, he’d be looking at taking up an influential government job next week. Talk about a lose-lose situation.