Former Ireland football manager Brian Kerr now coaches the Faroe Islands squad, and just in case we weren't aware what this comedown meant, reporter Darren Frehill informed us at the outset of Away with the Faroes (RTE2) that Kerr's new employers constitute "possibly football's worst team", with eight years of "calamitous results" behind them.

And Kerr himself was in no doubt about the task facing him, acknowledging that this ragbag amateur team of fishermen, carpenters, policemen and students had "one of the worst records in the world" -- hardly surprising given that they come from 18 scattered islands with a combined population of 49,000 (the size of Carlow, Darren helpfully told us) and boasting one set of traffic lights.

So what was Brian doing there? That wasn't properly explained but after being summarily dismissed from his Irish post at the end of a disastrous 2006 World Cup campaign and following a few years in the jobs wilderness ("I had some offers but there was nothing that really attracted me"), the 56-year-old obviously decided that managing a bunch of no-hopers was just the challenge that he needed.

Maybe the landscape also had something to do with it, because Anne Roper's film made it look truly spectacular, all soaring green hills and plummeting cliff faces. Kerr seemed fond of the people, too, asserting that his players, unlike the star-studded French team who arrived to play a World Cup qualifier, were "in touch with life and reality". Indeed, throughout the islands there were "very good people and very honest people and I like that".

Presumably it was on their behalf that he did a Graham Taylor while patrolling the touchline during the French game, effing and blinding in his best Drimnagh tones and screaming at the nearby FIFA official when things weren't going his team's way -- though maybe he'd just been eavesdopping on the French press conference and had become incensed with manager Domenech contemptuously failing to recall that Kerr had been the manager during Ireland's ill-fated encounter with Les Bleus in 2006.

That would have placed a chip on his shoulder to accompany the various chips already there. Indeed, despite the film's indulgent approach, Kerr emerged with all his familiar whining and whingeing tendencies still intact -- suggesting, for instance, that his Dublin roots and accent had something to do with his downfall as Ireland manager.

Indeed, it wasn't easy to warm to him, even though he cut a rather lonely figure as he tried to engage with the very different conditions and culture in which he now finds himself. And the fact that there was no mention of the family ties back home made him seem even more isolated and adrift. But the viewer had to work hard to find a persuasive poignancy in his current situation. At the end, the Faroes beat Lithuania 2-1, their first win in eight years. That should have cheered him up, but it was hard to tell.

Still, he's doing an honest and worthwhile job, unlike interior decorator Nicky Haslam, who spends his life sucking up to royalty, Russian oligarchs and Paris Hilton and attending at least five parties a night, at all of which he air-kisses B-list celebs and assures them that they're wonderful.

BBC4's profile of him, Hi Society, kept insisting on his wit and charm, neither of which were to be detected in this slavishly uncritical profile of vacuity and vanity.

Speaking of which, I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here is back (TV3/ITV), and with an even more resistible line-up than in previous incarnations. Eight of them I'd never heard of, while George Hamilton's fame has always registered as entirely mysterious, his tan more potent than his talent. Indeed, snooker player Jimmy White is the only contestant of any substance, though consenting to participate in this nonsense shows that his appetite for self-destruction remains undiminished.

And what's the rationale behind Cloch le Carn (RTE1), which last week paid pointless tribute to the recently deceased Nuala O Faolain and this week offered uncritical homage to the late Joe Dolan? I learned from the narrator of the latter programme that the Mullingar singer was "famous the world over" (you could have fooled me), while Gerry Ryan sidekick Brenda O'Donohue assured me that he had "a genuine talent" and Larry Gogan commended his "tremendous voice". Larry also revealed that he'd been "completely shattered" when he learned of Joe's death. Yes, but why did I need to know this? And what was the programme supposed to be about?

At least Enid (BBC4) was about something -- specifically, the life and career of Enid Blyton, who retreated into denial and fantasy after her much-loved and put-upon father left the family home and then grew up to become a monster to her husband and daughters. That, at any rate, was the film's thesis, which it elaborated with persuasiveness and panache. Helena Bonham Carter was wonderfully good as the icy central figure, holding tea parties for adoring children while her own banished offspring watched from the landing.

Matthew MacFadyen was affecting as her despised first husband and there were telling performances in minor roles, too. Indeed, the film was so attentive to character and nuance that by the end you even felt a degree a pity for the driven and deluded Blyton herself.

Miranda (BBC2), a sitcom starring the extremely tall Miranda Hart, is old-fashioned and essentially corny, but its principal player throws herself with such gusto into the physicality of her role that she's hard to resist. The situation may be trite and maybe even sexist -- ungainly woman in doomed search of love -- but Hart is so dementedly silly that only a curmudgeon would be able to resist laughing.

The Cogar film on the Arigna mines was yet another TG4 lesson in how to cram a lot of substance into an engrossing half-hour. I'm often in that part of Roscommon, but Cyril Kelly's film was so informative and absorbing about the economic and social importance of the mining tradition that I'll make a point of visiting the museum next time I'm there.

jboland@independent.ie

Irish Independent