The Wednesdays

The twitching net curtains of suburbia set the scene for this offbeat comedy in the Father Ted mould. An elderly couple live out their days in the mix of boredom and comfort that comes from knowing your partner far too well. “We love each other,” Mrs O’Leary tells a police interrogator “But you run out of things to talk about.”

A twist of fate brings a chance to leave behind the daily grind and the Wednesdays are created… but not even the elderly are beyond the reach of the law.

This is a sweetly comic tale, which perfectly grasps that sense of ennui that hovers about the elderly, the sense of not only having seen and done it all, but of having forgotten how to do it in the first place. But as the country song which plays over the early part of the action says, “Old loves never die” and thanks to a bit of substance abuse we’re transported into a world of the Wednesdays, where the O’Leary’s can recapture their youth.

Director Conor Ferguson makes great use of contrast; images of a stark police station interview room segue into the warm glow of the O'Learys' house on Wednesdays, filled with rich colours which perfectly evoke the O’Learys' little trip to heaven, while the slowness of Mondays and Tuesdays contrast with the dreamy movement midweek.

The script by Ferguson and Luke Clancy moves with a spring in its step, and gives elderly patter about the mundane aspects of life and The Late Late Show a craftily surreal edge, thanks to the predicament the central character is in. Most of all it celebrates the wisdom and humour that comes with age. Wednesdays have rarely looked so appealing.