Making the Cut (RTE 1, Sunday) President (RTE 1, Wednesday) Prime Time (RTE 1, Tuesday) Questions And Answers (RTE 1, Monday) As friction-free as a greased bolt, the sniper's bullet whizzed through the victim's head. Fhhht . . . and a sliver of bloody brain splattered against a wall. The garda marksman had focused the crosshairs. To maximise the visual suspense, the camera had gazed lingeringly down the lens. So, the tension was established and the gore wasn't unexpected. But, the graphic violence of the moment marked a departure for RTE drama.
It marked out the reality that with its new cop opera, Making the Cut, RTE is firmly focused on an international market. Fair enough - six hours of this stuff doesn't come cheap and though RTE won't say how much it cost (even though it's made with public money!), a figure of about £3 million is reasonably accurate. The problem, however, in aiming at a blandified, transnational market is that genre cliches become tediously dominant.
Basically, the Irishness of the series has been substantially subsumed to suit a world (including its television industry) increasingly run by accountants. Globalising is the context of Making The Cut. If it can't, at least, recoup its costs, it (and its potential successors) will be as dead as the grisly corpses it is, ironically, producing to stay alive. Given such circumstances, the series' two-hour pilot was largely successful, even if, at times, the genre cliches pushed it perilously close to parody.
Consider the set-up: a flawed, loner cop, with a secret in his past, is reluctantly thrown together with a quietly brave, efficient and ambitious, female rookie. They battle against murder, corruption, bent coppers and drug-dealing, during which he braves a hostage-crisis and she takes undue risks. It could be US or British or European but, in fact, it is set in an unnamed Irish port played by Waterford, the home town of thriller writer Jim Lusby, on whose books the series is based.
Detective Inspector Carl McCadden (Sean McGinley), the flawed loner, lives in a loft in an urban wasteland. The setting, presumably, is meant to suggest a Bronx or a Bermondsey on the Suir and for an international audience, that's all very well. But in Ireland - and I may be getting very out of touch with contemporary lifestyles - would you find trendy, soulful coppers like that and living in places like that? (Can you even find places like that?) In the loft, McCadden, a smoker, keeps a piano, a roll-top desk and, on occasion, a colleague's wife - a nurse - with whom he enjoys almost gymnastic sex. Waterford - yaboyya!
Andrea Irvine plays the rookie, Detective Garda Moya O'Donnell. Do the pleasures of McCadden's loft await her? Perhaps, although, in fairness to Sunday's pilot, the sexual chemistry between the two crime-fighters was correctly and mercifully understated. Certainly, in comparison with the all-male (it was the buddy-bonding era) Batman and Robin pairing, of mature, avuncular McGettigan and young, hothead Hannon in RTE's last six-hour cop opera, The Burke Enigma (1978), McCadden and O'Donnell are better-developed characters.
Their 1990s Ireland - forgetting the genre cliches aiming at sales abroad - is a country in which a Mr Big (a corrupt businessman) can be exposed and still walk free. It is a country in which trickledown corruption ends in violence in poor, council estates, where brutalised, lumpen thugs, brutalise all around them. It is a country where computer-comfortable cops want a result and where the worst of them are bent. It is, in short, not too wide of the mark and yet it is not quite Ireland.
The desire for immediately recognisable stereotypes - mostly defined by the USA - distorts the picture. Thus, when McCadden wants to talk to a local villain/informant, he meets him in a rundown boxing gym, a staple of ethnic New York or London's East End . . . but not Waterford. This, like the loft, the dockland setting, the prostitute informer, the hostage-drama, is the McDonaldisation of TV drama. What Making The Cut proves is that RTE can now, pretty well, make a Big Mac with the best of them.
The central performances were fine. The plot had enough hooks to keep viewers engaged. The opening hour, establishing the characters, was, predictably slow. But, overall, it made for competent cop opera, with high production values and no excess of hokum. In other words, it showed, as a half-dozen Eurovision Song Contests have shown, that the national television station of the Celtic Tiger can satisfy an international market.
This represents a significant improvement for RTE's (soaps apart) practically dead drama department. But a competent Big Mac is one thing. Cooking up drama of thoroughly native cuisine - which does not involve the sort of Abbey Theatre staples fed to busloads of Americans - is another day's work. There are still contemporary stories in this country which should be aimed primarily at ourselves.
That is not to promote navel-gazing or narcissism. It is just to fulfil the remit of public service broadcasting, which, to be fair, is expected to make a profit nowadays. But RTE should also recognise that there are - even in the bloody Celtic Tiger - values more important than money. Aren't there? Anyway, if Making The Cut can cut it internationally, there can be no excuses for not making more (and less commercially-conservative) TV drama here. We'll see.
There has never been any doubt that Mary Robinson cut it internationally as President of Ireland. A 90-minute documentary, titled President, stitched together highlights from her seven years in office. As reportage for the record, it was commendable, recalling events in a clear, chronological order.
But ultimately, it needed a synthesis - what did all the pictures add up to? What did they say about Mrs Robinson, about the presidency, about the times?
The documentary was produced by Ed Mulhall, compiled by RTE newsroom teams and fronted by megahack Charlie Bird. From the early years of poetry and invitations to dance in Ireland, through a score of State visits, reachings out to "the marginalised", controversial handshakes (18 visits to the North in all!) and occasional controversies, this was a presidency of public performance. "It was like living in a goldfish bowl on top of a pedestal," said Mrs Robinson, who, nonetheless, seemed to enjoy the gig.
It opened with her and Mr Bird walking along a Mayo strand last January. Both of them wore green combat jackets (Bodenstown 1970s style!). Mrs Robinson was deliberating about the prospects of serving a second term in office. It ended in the kitchen of Aras an Uachtarain, where the pearl-bedecked President and her husband Nick chatted quite informally to a blazingly enthusiastic Charlie. In between, the programme was a cross between a history lesson and a PR video.
There were, in fairness, contributions from Bertie Ahern, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton and Dick Spring. Nothing too critical mind: Ahern said that the "diaspora" speech to the Oireachtas was "boring"; Bruton continued to insist that Mrs Robinson's West Belfast handshake with Gerry Adams was "wrong"; Spring felt there had, in the long run, been too many presidential visits to the North. But that was about as critical as it got, which seemed fair enough.
Among the catalogue of images, it's a subjective matter to choose the most memorable. For what it's worth, the five most striking to me were Mrs Robinson clowning around on holidays (great dance); being barracked by unionist matrons in The Village area of south Belfast ("Get back to yer own territory, ye oul' cow."); listening to Amhran na bhFiann at Buckingham Palace; emotionally distraught at the horrors of Somalia; and pulling the plug on the diaspora light.
President was, really, a homage to the Robinson presidency. Certainly, it was worth compiling, worth screening and the interviews at the start and end helped to frame the Pathe News material in between. But it did need synthesis, because without it the documentary seemed not quite finished. Still, the pictures were evocative. Set like The Rock 'N' Roll Years to popular music from their times, they could have a powerful, imaginative impact. A working title? Come Rock 'N' Roll With Me In Ireland, of course.
Candidates hopeful of succeeding Mary Robinson as President pitched up on current affairs programmes this week.
Dana featured on Prime Time, Mary Banotti and Adi Roche on Questions And Answers. Michael Heney's report on Dana clearly trawled the archives. We saw her with President Dev, after she had won the 1970 Eurovision. In time, though the polls suggest not, this footage could become our equivalent of Bill Clinton meeting JFK.
"I'm being called a right-wing extremist, an ayatollah, an enemy even," said Dana on a radio talk show before moving briskly to dissociate herself from Gerry O'Mahoney. Gerry, by his own account, supports Dana, because he is keen "to close the sluice gates of liberalism opened by the Robinson presidency and to bring us back to God". It is no surprise that Gerry didn't feature in the Mulhall/Bird documentary.
Other footage of Dana included her wedding in 1978, a Late Late Show appearance in 1980 and singing for the Pope in New York's Central Park. The gaze of incipient rapture which she wore for the Big Apple gig was alarming. But she's right to point out that she is not "stupid, bigoted or dated" and that she's entitled to be a traditional Catholic.
Dana is not going to win the presidency, but she's cool and calm on TV - a real pro, actually.
Meanwhile, Mary Banotti and Adi Roche never really played hardball on Questions And Answers. Banotti's remark about Mary McAleese being from Belfast was ill-judged but, to be fair, probably not as partitionist as the spin-prats have since termed it. Still, it all leaves Ms McAleese as the strong favourite to be stalked by Charlie Bird for the next seven years. Then again, Fianna Fail had it in the bag last time - until Brian Lenihan appeared on live television. The fat lady hasn't cleared her throat yet.
It has been a strangely vibrant week on RTE. In drama, documentary, current affairs and soap opera (wild excitement on Fair City with Helen bolting from the altar instead of marrying Mike), the national broadcaster showed energy. OK, RTE characteristically retains a timidity and often undue reverence for the status quo - political control encourages as much - but, for a change, things looked up on Irish television.