Secret Millionaire given the gift of charity in public dressing-down

NOT SO long ago, I found a sticky note on my desk asking me to ring back someone with an unfamiliar name,described in a scrawl as a TV producer working on a new series.

Now, when a C-lister like me gets that kind of message, we are immediately persuaded that this, at long last, is going to be our big break. All we have to do is call the number on the Post-IT note. Household name status awaits us. We’re going to be a weekly judge. Or an occasional mentor. Or get the once-off chance to drive Nell McCafferty around the country. Even that programme where they find out your ancestors were fourth-century rat catchers wouldn’t be the worst. It might, let’s be honest, be less of a challenge than driving Nell.

We live in hope, but that hope always falls on its smiley face. In recent years, the best offer I got was a chance to cook dinner for 10 total strangers for a charity of my choice. Right. While a camera rolled, I was going to slice my fingers into the chopped basil and then sit redfaced while the 10 guests dismissed what I’d cooked as dated, tasteless, and (knowing me) probably burned or incorporating a foreign object such as a baked oven glove.

If you’re a C-list woman, you can’t afford to get notions about why they want you on reality TV. The fact is that, once a woman reaches a certain age, TV producers don’t care if she can walk upright without dragging her wrists on the ground. All they want is for her to be feisty. Feisty is the new black for over-the-hill mná na hÉireann. Every behaviour despised in younger people, like being bitchy, loud, overdressed, self-absorbed, bad-tempered, profane, and waspish, gets sugar-coated as “feisty” over a certain age.

As it turned out, the invitation I got when I rang back the name on the sticky note was even funnier. They wanted me to consider appearing on The Secret Millionaire.

Laugh? I almost wept. As, indeed, did the producer when she found that my financial situation is so woeful, I’d be selling my loose gold except I don’t have any loose gold. Her reaction was endearing. She wasn’t that sorry for me being broke. She was, however, sorry for herself having been fooled by me into thinking I was rich. I apologised for misleading her. Easy to miss the fact that the car is 12 years old with prolapse of the side-mirror.

A more genuine Secret Millionaire landed herself in the news in the past few days, not because of her philanthropy to worthy causes, but because she got done for speeding. She’d never been caught speeding before, which may explain why she got around to paying the fine two days too late, and so found herself in court. Given the connection with a TV show, inevitably, the court case got rather more coverage than would otherwise have happened. Most speeders absorb their licence points anonymously.

I, for instance, got done for speeding on the day of the count following the last general election but, up to today, that was a secret between me and the garda involved. Said garda was minding his own business in an unmarked car going through the Dublin Port Tunnel early on a Sunday morning when my car passed him. He stuck one of those vehicular fascinators on the roof of his own car, flagged me down, and asked me if I knew the speed limit in the tunnel. I did. Did I know the speed I was doing in the tunnel? I did — it was more than the speed limit. He looked askance. I said I was sorry, I was running late for a TV programme, I shouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t an accident. He wrote up the documentation and told me I now had points on my license. Full stop. And rightly so.

The Secret Millionaire was in a rather different situation. Even before seeing her on the box living on jobseeker’s allowance and then giving loads of money to impoverished people, the judge was not minded to be too hard on her. In fact, he said that if she divvied up 300 quid for a charity (the one chosen was Barnardos) he wouldn’t put points on her license. She did. He didn’t. The job was Oxo.

This kind of judicial approach has a long track record. My mother came to the same deal with a judge back in the 1930s. She had close to a dozen brothers, one of whom fell foul of Lugs Branigan, the local garda sergeant. James Christopher Branigan was a boxing legend with a vigorous personal interpretation of peacekeeping, and ears sufficiently prominent to generate their own definition of their owner. Sending the offender into court against the formidable sergeant didn’t seem as good an option as sending my then teenage mother to abase herself on behalf of her family.

On the day, the judge told her a fiver would cover it. My mother, anticipating that the judge was unlikely to execute or incarcerate her delinquent brother, had brought roughly that amount with her, mostly in threepenny bits, which she immediately offered to Lugs, who was affronted by the very idea that he, as an upstanding member of the force, would take her cloth bag of weighty cash. It was, he told her with wounded dignity, to go in the poor box.

The whole episode stayed with my mother, mainly because — back then — for a fleeting moment she considered swinging the moneybag and braining Branigan with it. Fifty years later, she said if she’d worked up good enough speed, the impact would have floored him like a felled yak and she wouldn’t have been one bit sorry for someone making such a fuss over one accidentally broken window.

My mother kept her brother out of a reformatory and the Secret Millionaire kept her license free of points. The poor box gained in the first instance, Barnardos in the second. In each case, you might regard the outcome as a win-win.

Except that points on your licence set out to discourage bad driving. They are cumulative. The more you notch up, the more likely you are to lose the right to drive, albeit for a relatively short period. To lose your license is disproportionately disabling to some workers.

For example, a sales representative depends absolutely on their capacity to get around the country flogging the wares of their employer and, for one of them to be put off the road effectively puts them out of a job, whereas to someone who lives on a bus or train route while working in the same place every day, losing their driver’s licence is an inconvenience and perhaps a moral reproof, but carries no wider implications. Similarly, s rich person can take taxis if put off the road, whereas someone who isn’t rich doesn’t have that option.

And finally, if judges are going to continue this “poor box” tradition, the sum levied should more closely relate to charity need and repugnance toward speeding.

Three thousand would be better than three hundred.