Television Review

ILLUMINATION COMES and goes in unexpected ways in Eureka Street (BBC2). When Jake, the hard-man narrator, comes home from a tough day repossessing household goods in north Belfast darkness wafts in from the edges of his flat: he opens the door to let the cat in, and light bursts over him. To mark the 30th birthday of Chuckie, his lumpish best friend, a barmaid balances a candle on the head of his pint of Guinness - it sputters and sinks as he broods over the passing of youth. Jake sleeps with the same barmaid, and her fiance literally punches his lights out. Eager to con a million quid out of the Ulster Development Board, Chuckie is momentarily stumped by their demand for a business plan, until light explodes inside his attache case. And radiance seems to flow around Max, the beautiful American woman who unexpectedly falls for Chuckie's "teddy bear" charms.

In all, the first part of this dramatisation of Robert McLiam Wilson's novel was dazzling. This doesn't come as much of a surprise: it is adapted by Donna Franceschild and directed by Adrian Shergold, whose Births, Marriages and Deaths has been the only other really considerable drama series of 1999 so far. This is another story about getting rich, about boozy male camaraderie, about the sheer effort of doing the right thing when you don't have much hope. The similarities are sometimes a little too apparent in the way Shergold films things - the camera swooping and racing, faces looming up against the lens.

But the calculated absurdity of Wilson's story goes a little bit further, and so does Shergold. Last night's episode was dotted with quirky, fantastic touches. When Chuckie was seized by a brilliant idea, he rushed away with the zip of a bullet leaving a gun. The idea turned out to be selling non- existent sex aids to housewives: he cashes their cheques, then refunds the money with cheques stamped "Giant Dildo Refund" - who's going to take that to the bank? The language of the characters was similarly heightened - describing his delicate position as the only Catholic member of a fiercely Loyalist "debt- counselling" team, Jake dropped into arts-page superlatives: "We were thrillingly ecumenical. We raided Protestant estates with all the grace and panache with which we raided Catholic ones."

But beneath the lyrical surface, this Belfast is uncomfortably familiar: Jake and his mates endure constant threats of kneecapping as they go about their work. Hally, one of Jake's mates, can only lull himself to sleep with rich fantasies of wiping out the Taigs. And the rich language seemed to derive energy from the surrounding violence - so a pub poetry reading began with an ecstatic ode to the joys of shooting a British soldier.

There are problems, though. Despite the self-deprecating warmth of Mark Benton's performance, it's hard to take seriously Chuckie's transformation from "Wee bollocks from Eureka Street" into a kind of Elmer Gantry of capitalism, and at this point the language fell flat: nonsense about "Unit profits... manufacture, distribution, point of sale... reinvestment" - the details of his scam kept vague in a way that felt more like an evasion than a tease. But otherwise, this looks like compelling, unmissable stuff: a ray of light.