Tallafornia Dreaming
…Or your idea of a nightmare? Four gym obsessives, three party girls, one house in west Dublin and a whole load of cameras. Craig Fitzpatrick meets the cast of Tallafornia and assesses the Dublin ‘Situation’.
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 14 Feb 2012
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the festive TV schedules of the late ’90s (bear with me, I’ll get on to the west Dublin massive in a moment) and you may recall the luminous host of Supermarket Sweep fronting a number of Christmas specials, replete with a bevy of B-list guests. It wasn’t great, but it had a great name – Winton’s Wonderland. It’s a nice example of a phenomenon that shows no signs of disappearing from creative brainstorming groups the world over.
Gimme a good enough pun, and I’ll give you a show. Which brings us to Tallafornia. Series creator Fintan Maguire has talked openly about its genesis and it has more in common with Dale than a ridiculous amount of fake tan. Maguire says that TV3’s director of programming, Ben Frow, loved the title and told him, “I don’t know what the programme is, but go make it.”
What he managed to cook up debuted with a pre-Christmas teaser episode that scored high ratings and is set to run well into the spring. A new addition to TV3’s Friday night schedule – which now amounts to ‘Take Me Out… To Tamangos And Then A 24 Hour Tescos’ – Tallafornia sticks 20-somethings from the Tallaght area in a house together and waits for sparks to fly. It’s a recipe that borrows liberally from the trashy likes of Jersey Shore and English cousins Geordie Shore and The Only Way Is Essex, aiming for in-fights and no small amount of raunch.
As early as last summer, the media were already whipping themselves up into a frenzy over what the magnificent Tallafornia seven would subject the nation to – sex, drinking and vagazzles. At the time of writing, there’s been small amounts of each, but nothing to stir much outrage. Compare it to James Joyce’s love letters, and the Irish really aren’t getting more vulgar. The cast, too, while slightly vacuous and self-obsessed, don’t come across as hideous and fame-hungry as their reality show predecessors overseas. There’s a bit of bickering and a song or two – basically a grown-up Gaeltacht supplanted to Tallaght, with the inhabitants speaking broken English rather than broken Irish.
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