No need to fake reality TV conflict with the world outside falling apart

OUR grandparents used to tell stories of terrifying storms they had witnessed. Beatrice Coogan wrote a novel about the night of the Big Wind, a legendary storm.

But flash floods in August? The Dublin Port Tunnel awash? The M50 impassable? Once the weekend rain started, I placed tightly rolled towels along the windowsills in what we laughingly call the sunroom. The windows in that room have seen better days and when the negative equity headache wears off, we’ll get them replaced. In the meantime, they leak like the Titanic.

When I went to check on the wetness of the towels halfway through Saturday, I realised this might be more than a dampness issue. This was climate change wanting to be taken seriously. The sunroom was ankle-deep in water. Not through the windows, although they were making an energetic contribution. A river was running through the room, its source the underside of the outside door. I’ve been meaning to make up a few sandbags, but wasn’t sure if I had to ask the local authority or the Department of the Marine if it was okay to nick a few bags of the local beach material, so I had put it off.

The water covered the new wooden floor in the hall, too. The fact it was about a hair’s breadth away from inundating the electrical sockets made it clear that it was time to bail. Four hours and 70 bucketsful of water later, I blocked the door under which the stuff had flowed with banked newspapers held in place by water-filled buckets and sat, feet still flood-covered, too exhausted to do anything other than wonder how I was going to get the towels used for mopping clean again, since the relatively new washing machine quit this weekend, too, thereby exemplifying the little-known truism that God never shut one door but He shut two.

I did take the time to text concerned relatives, who turned out to be not the smallest bit concerned. One of them was watching something in Croke Park and his only issue was that the torrential rain affecting me might blow inland and put the lads off their stroke.

One of them had gossip about Fáilte Towers and what Bibi Baskin is really like, and suggested my situation was mild compared to what the TV/temporary staff of this two-star hotel were suffering.

The third was in town at a movie about a guy walking a wire he had strung, 30 years ago, between New York’s Twin Towers. The man who had gone to this popular documentary was mildly sympathetic to me and my personal flash-flood, but in an insulated kind of way: He probably wouldn’t be able to reach me to help, he said, because most roads between us were impassable. Yeah. Right.

The following morning, Dublin Airport Authority were warning prospective passengers to plan ahead and leave early because the entrance to their long-term carpark was a bit damp, and a major agricultural event had been cancelled because drowning animals in liquid mud in the Taoiseach’s constituency wouldn’t look right. My own situation was almost under control. My wooden floor had gone as corrugated as a Toblerone, my hands were swollen from towel-wringing and the entire house had a curious smell, like a recently laundered but definitely dead sheep. I resumed bailing at dawn, and wondered about insurance for the destroyed floor. Without doing a Pollyanna on it, the 16 hours of hard labour required to push back the tide and prevent everything in the house rotting were oddly welcome. If the liquid inundation is an aspect of climate change, the minor challenge to which I had to rise proves that unprecedented bad weather is a lot easier to deal with in Ireland than in, say, Bangladesh, one of the countries grievously threatened by rising sea levels. The ESB kept the power on, food supplies stayed strong and the water flowing in from the garden was unlikely to be contaminated with a killer bug (although I did toss a bottle of disinfectant into the mess halfway through the bailing, just in case). But here’s the rub. This last weekend, annual events had to be cancelled and roads closed because of untypical weather, giving a threatening sampler of what will happen as global warming continues. Hotels slashed their rates in a desperate attempt to fill some of the beds left empty because customers no longer find them affordable, thanks to the economic sink-hole we’ve all fallen into.

Half-way across the world, old women lay dead in their back gardens because Russian jets had bombed a separatist province in Georgia. That conflict, which has already cost thousands of innocent lives, threatens the oil pipelines from Russia to the West, further endangering the economic health of the West.

The President of the United States of America, who was a) undoubtedly responsible for the tardiness of the developed world’s response to climate change and who b) has presided over an egregious abandonment of human rights called Guantanamo Bay, first of all got headlines by criticising China’s human rights record, then not only went to the Olympic Games (synchronised swimming and hypocrisy must figure among the minority sports represented in Beijing) and was photographed patting the backside of a (female) volleyball player, this vulgarity explained away as being a typical way to wish this kind of sports person good luck.

Climate change. War. Abandonment of human rights. Threat to energy supplies. That’s a lot of reality to be going on with. Yet nearly as much coverage went, this weekend, to a TV programme about a group of people dealing with other people’s urine and puke in situations faked in order to create conflict, yet marketed as “reality” TV.

One can’t help but wonder if this is a kind of displacement activity; if the problems facing us are so massive and insurmountable that it’s easier to stop concentrating on them at all and look, instead, at invented problems inflicted on the nearly-famous backed by the rationale that some charity gets a few thousand quid out of the ritual humiliation broadcast. In the past few years, this country has not only built many (perhaps too many) high-class hotels which strive to be world class in their offerings, but it has also — through its EU membership — signed up to work practices that prevent bullying, harassment and exhaustion.

Against that background, we create a TV series where a two-star hotel is staffed by untrained semi-celebs using (according to themselves) unacceptable kitchen equipment, subjected to guests primed to be exceptionally difficult, forced to work hours which break every rule in the EU book and subjected to personal abuse and a manner of firing which, in a genuine workplace, would land the employer in court.

And we call this strange form of perverted entertainment reality.