The Lilac Bus
The Lilac Bus
The Lilac Bus was the 1991 adaptation of the Maeve Binchy collection of short stories following the lives of a group of people from a village in the west of Ireland. Each Monday, these people travel across to their prospective lives in Dublin where they spend the week. Friday evening sees them travelling back to their homes in Rathdoon, back to their families and other lives.
Each of these people has a secret, a reason for leaving home and living so far away and, one by one, the viewer discovers what each character is hiding. Dervla plays Celia Ryan - coincidentally another barmaid! Celia is 26, her father is dead and her two brothers and sister live abroad. During the week, Celia is a well respected and highly valued nurse in a large hospital in Dublin. Every weekend, she returns home to cope with her alcoholic mother who refuses to admit she has a problem. Celia finds it difficult to cope with her own family and turns to the driver of the Lilac Bus, Tom for help. Tom has his own problems - an anorexic sister in Celia's hospital, and doesn't realise that Celia is in love with him.
Celia decides that she has to take control of the situation and help her
mother to recover. Finally, Mrs Ryan admits she is an alcoholic and agrees to get help. Meantime, Tom has realised that Celia is interested in him and they begin to talk.
For anybody seeing this programme after watching Dervla in such shows as BallyK and Goodnight Sweetheart, it is a bit of a shock. She is noticably younger and very much an Irish girl, with a very thick accent that has lessened in the time she has lived in London - a fact that I had previously not been aware of. Again, it is a role filled with drama, another character with a tortured past who has to learn to deal with a situation that is not ideal. It is, however, a gentle story which contains some truly beautiful Irish scenery and well worth chasing up. (For the lucky few, it is shown in England on the cable only Carlton Select channel every couple of months.)