Boxing Clever: Dead Still is funny-haha and funny-weird
Aidan O'Hare as Frederick Regan in Dead Still
(RTÉ One, Sundays, 9:30pm and RTÉ Player) is a funny one. Literally.
It’s funny-haha because bits of it will make you laugh out of the blue. That’s funny weird, because it isn’t every RTÉ comedy drama that will make you laugh out the blue . It’s also funny weird because the subject matter is the 19 th century practice of memorial photography, which is like wedding photos, but with a corpse. Popular in Victorian times, the idea was that you’d get a memento photograph taken with a freshly-deceased loved one, often before you’d call a doctor or a priest or check ed if you made it into the will. The extra spook here is that the corpse is propped up in a chair with their eyes open and make-up on — as if they were still alive. It looks like a posh response to the traditional Irish wake, which was basically like Leaving Cert night but with more priests.
Anyway, the message is clear — t he Victorians were quare ones. In fact, ‘quare one’ is the preferred catchphrase ( has a catchphrase) of Detective Frederick Regan, played by Aidan O’Hare. Regan is that rarest character in a comedy drama — a Cork person who sounds like they’re from Cork, rather than sounding like the actor that says ‘boy’ and ‘Tanora’ a lot and hope s for the best. In fairness, this is because Aidan O’Hare is from Cork and has the accent to prove it.
He is also typical of the sweet-spot comic acting in , which sets it apart from super-clunky predecessors. The main character, renowned memorial photographer, Brock Blennerhasset, is played to a posh, contemptuous 'T' by Michael Smiley — no stranger to fans of on the BBC. Eileen O’Higgins, Saoirse Ronan’s nice friend on Brooklyn, is just the right amount of coy as Blennerhasset's niece.
The plot had me scratching my head a bit though . Detective Regan is investigating a series of murders that look like they were committed to capture memorial photographs of people in their death throes. Nice idea, but it took a while to emerge in the first episode as the point of the whole thing. But then it isn’t really the point of the whole thing. Dead Still is less a macabre thriller and more a caper with smooth acting and nice views of Georgian Dublin. That’s not a criticism: November 2020 seems like the perfect time for a sho w that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
on Netflix is enough to put me off chess for life. In a good way. Anya Taylor-Joy, plays Beth Harmon, an orphan child-prodigy who rises to become one of the best players in the world. It has cold war tensions; the guy who played Liam Neeson’s son in cool clothes,; a better sound-track; and most of all, incredibly compelling chess games. Who knew? While the story is fiction, the chess games are real, in part designed by grandmaster Garry Kasparov. It’s gripping, gorgeous TV and if you ever see me trying to take up chess, please shoot me. All that moving pieces around in my mind would give me a headache. Far better to watch it on Netflix.
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