Lately I have been watching epicodes of Ballykissangel, an Irish television series, and the little voices inside my head are now speaking with an Irish accent and talking to people with names that I can't pronounce and can't spell. (The voices don't care. They aren't talking to me right now.)
As I've mentioned before, I find British, and now Irish, television to be frequently unsettling as they have no problem killing off regulars. In America, for the most part (and not counting daytime soap operas that kill off anybody any time and later bring them back as their own twin sisters even if they were brothers before their demise), the main characters of a series leave intact and of their own volition. Sometimes you get shot and we think you're dead, but in a season or two when you couldn't get decent work anyplace else, they bring you back and explain it was all just a dream.
Not the British. Not the Irish. They just kill you off and be done with it.
So far in Ballykissangel, the agnostic owner of the local pub died of electrocution. As this was a month or two after she was married and an hour or two after she and the local priest declared their love for each other, some in the village were thinking it was only just punishment. But to make it worse, Father Clifford, in his grief, left Ballykissangel and the series. I wasn't upset at their departures. Disappointed, yes, because I liked both Father Clifford and Asumpta and hated to see them replaced, but I didn't shed any tears.
On the other hand, last night they killed off Ambrose, the local Garda (policeman to you). I've seen the series before so I knew it was coming. His fickle little wife, Niamh, had decided she loved somebody else and was going to leave him, not because he was a poor husband, far from it, but just because she had 'the grass is always greener on the other side' disease. Ambrose's heart was breaking because he knew they were growing farther apart and he didn't know why and he didn't know how to stop it, so he turned off his police radio and took a walk along the craggy Irish sea side. The whole time he's walking and thinking, Niamh is off betraying him with her new boyfriend and I'm crying buckets of tears because I know Ambrose, with his breaking heart, isn't coming back from that walk. He dies while saving a couple of tourists that are stranded on a rock with the tide coming in. Even in the next episode, when his Mummy came to visit for her grandson's birthday, she teared up and I teared up. But I never cried when Niamh cried. My heart was hardened against her.
That's BallyK for you. The people aren't plastic surgery pretty, their teeth aren't artifically white and straight, the priests stray, the girls have freckles, people you like die, and life goes on.
Remind you of any place you've been lately?
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