As promised, I am being more diligent about the non-book media that I am consuming. We’ve watched two TV series since I last updated on this line, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast on Netflix and Small Prophets on the BBC.

How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is an eight-part story about three friends who receive news than an estranged fourth friend has died in Donegal, and team up to try and find out what has happened. Here’s a trailer.

The leads are Sinead Keenan, who was also one of the leads in Being Human and was an alien in the two-part Tenth Doctor finale, and Roisin Gallagher and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who were both new to me. Gallagher, playing Saoirse, a TV dramatist in a failing relationship who gets entangled with a young Garda in Donegal, has the best arc and performance of the three. The scripts are by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls, and there’s an actual fanvid showing the actors who appear in both.

Those crossovers include Bronagh Gallagher (35 years on from The Commitments!) doing some first-class villainous glower, and Ardal O’Hanlon turns up playing the same character that he has played since 1995, but that’s presumably a contractual obligation for any Irish TV series these days. It was also fun to see Patrick Kielty playing himself – it brought me back to the cellar of the Empire on Botanic Avenue in Belfast in the mid-90s, when he was the compere of the Comedy Club and was usually funnier than the visiting acts.

I felt that there were some great moments here but that the overall plot didn’t make a lot of sense. Some of the individual lines are hilarious, and there are some great set-piece scenes – the two that linger in my memory are the moment when the three encounter a pilgrimage in County Fermanagh, and the moment when Saoirse unexpectedly ends up talking live to Patrick Kielty on The Late Late Show while zonked to the eyeballs on tranquillisers. But the mystery became both implausible and incomprehensible, or perhaps I was just not concentrating. I was talking to an Irish friend yesterday who said that she had watched the first two episodes and wasn’t planning to watch the rest, and I think that’s fair.

Small Prophets is a different matter. Here’s a trailer:

It is written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who I remember particularly as the gormless Gareth from The Office, though apparently he was also in the third season of Game of Thrones; and he appears here as the manager of the garden centre employing the protagonist, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley who was new to me but whose quiet, comedic performance is devastating. Michael’s father is portrayed by Michael Palin (who turns 83 a few weeks from now); his vanished partner’s brother is Paul Kaye, who was Thoros of Myr in Game of Thrones and has also been in Doctor Who, though I particularly remember his spoof celebrity interviewer Dennis Pennis. Apart from Quigley in the lead role, the performance that grabbed me most was Lauren Patel as Michael’s co-worker Kacey – I had previously heard her as the voice of PC Mukherjee in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (where Paul Kaye played her boss).

Like How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, Small Prophets is very much set in the world of today, and in a particular place, in this case Manchester. The core story is that Michael, whose partner disappeared without trace several years ago, listens to his father’s advice about creating bottled homunculi which will always answer questions truthfully, in order to try and find out what has happened to the missing Clea. That’s basically the plot; the rest is character and incident interacting, with a hilarious ending combining a meteorite and a valuable ornithology book. Most of the characters are single-beat, but sometimes it works just to point them at each other and let them interact. And the six episodes are beautifully directed.

It’s interesting that both of these shows feature their own creators in different ways. Saoirse in How To Get To Heaven From Belfast nibbles away at the fourth wall, and the subplot of her travails with her TV production company while attempting to spin narrative gold out of the straw of daily life cannot be very far from Lisa McGee’s lived experience. Mackenzie Crook, as writer and director of Small Prophets, self-deprecatingly puts himself on screen as the annoying character who gives orders to everyone and gets steadily more annoyed as his instructions are ignored and defied. I guess it fits the age of Tiktok.