Son of God BBC 1, Sunday
True Lives: Fanatic Heart RTE 1, Monday
Mono RTE 1, Wednesday
Leargas RTE 1, Tuesday
O'Shea's Dangerous Reptiles Channel 4, Tuesday
It was at the bit in Son of God when a church turned into a flying saucer and disappeared into the sky that I finally threw my eyes to heaven and asked why the god of television had forsaken us. Here we go again: another documentary that builds its narrative on computer-generated quicksand rather than good solid fact.
I enjoyed Walking with Dinosaurs a couple of years ago, but I can't have been alone in wondering if we were being more than a little hoodwinked by the fancy special effects - every time the audience started asking questions they threw in another dinosaur fight. There are no dinosaur fights in Son of God, but judging by the over-the-top computer tricks so far - houses rebuilding from the rubble, towns emerging from dust - don't bet against its happening.
Next week they promise us a look at what Jesus might have looked like, as if their artist's impression will be based on a historical revelation rather than on a television executive's eureka moment. It reminded me of the sponsor's spots before the ad breaks in Celebrity Big Brother, in which the creative types sat around a table brainstorming for ways to make the show interesting. "I know. We could let a hungry tiger loose in the house!"
It doesn't want to be seen as anything so naff as a religious programme, nor does it want to be anything so stuffy as an historical one. "Of course, there's no proof these miracles happened," Jeremy Bowen, Son of God's presenter, will say before continuing the story as if it were historical fact. Whatever about the title, it won't commit on the divine-being debate. Perhaps He was, perhaps He wasn't, it says; the important thing was that He believed he was. I look forward to the life story of David Koresh, then.
Bowen presents like a teacher who is facing a multicultural class and doesn't want to insult anybody. Any time his task seems to be getting challenging, a computer-generated temple springs up for him to escape into. If he keeps this up, we'll need to send some computer-generated lightning to smite him.
If the BBC needed any tips on how to construct a fascinating historical documentary from a seemingly dry topic, then somebody should send them a tape of True Lives: Fanatic Heart. Excellent, authoritative and smartly edited, the film gave personality to Padraig Pearse, a man who has long been reduced to an ideal. A life of breathless activity was delicately constructed: his obsession with self-sacrifice, for example, or the way his homosexual inclinations were air-brushed out in favour of a divine image of the man, epitomised by the triptych in Galway Cathedral that show him and JFK on either side of Christ. Pearse had clear martyr fantasies.
"It's a queer thought about Pearse," said one of his contemporaries. "Suppose the others had been executed, and suppose he had been spared. I think he would have gone mad."
IRISH television's first proper attempt to deal with a heterogeneous audience settled down a little this week, but there's still a sense that people will look back in 20 years' time and squirm at the simplicity of Mono. They'll wonder why we needed things spelled out to us in as non-threatening a way as possible, with nice, recognisably Irish subjects given to us with a multicultural twist.
We've had religion, music and football, all of it kicked off with Kevin Sharkey, whose presence on 1980s television made us feel great about ourselves - we had a black man on RTE - but whose story has been told more than enough times. I'm not sure if it was intended this way, but Mono feels like an educational programme speaking to Irish people rather than about the immigrant communities.
It's comforting us by telling us that, even though these people are different, we are really all the same. Most of us have been soaked in British television for years, however, on which coloured faces have long since stopped being a novelty, and where the likes of Blind Date can match up mixed-race couples without comment.
Even when Mono comes up with an interesting story it tends to get lost in the dodgy production values. Last week's obsession with Vaseline on the lens was dropped this week for lots of unnecessary false-nostalgia black-and-white footage. Worthiness, it seems, has got in the way of a decently made programme. You feel churlish criticising programmes such as Mono, but the day can't come quickly enough when they don't need to be shown.
There was black-and-white footage on this week's Leargas as well. It showed horsey folk galloping over fences at a gymkhana in a rural idyll several miles from the concrete mess of Dublin. Then, 35 years ago, the government decided to give the rural idyll a concrete mess of its own, and Tallaght was born. The population rose from 6,000 to 80,000 in 20 years.
Some engineers were sent on courses in town planning; you'd wonder if they mitched half the classes, because what they turned out was a city the size of Limerick with the facilities of a small village. The local shop arrived on wheels, and cars drove around selling pallets of eggs that were perched on their bonnets. An aerial view showed identical white semi-detached houses devouring the land towards the Dublin Mountains.
This was another fine Leargas documentary: wistful for a future that never came, and going out of its way to point out the burgeoning arts scene, the sense of community, the vibrancy generated by the arrival of a town centre. But it says something that it's still a big deal when plans are announced to put a corner shop in the outskirts. "The person who didn't make a mistake made nothing," said a civil servant, so blase you could put a wager on his having grown up somewhere else.
There's an Australian by the name of Steve Irwin who inhabits National Geographic channel and loves nothing more than to grab a venomous snake by the head, hold it to his face and say, in an accent rougher than concrete: "Look at him. He's reeaally angry." He'll grab an alligator round the throat, prise open its jaws and stick his head in its mouth before announcing: "Aw, this guy is reeaally pissed off!"
Sometimes he turns up punching sharks or wrestling a tyrannosaurus to the ground on ITV - usually around eight o'clock, as the dinner is settling in your belly and the day's work is flowing out of your toes. At those moments he's probably the most enjoyable thing on the telly.
Now, thanks to O'Shea's Dangerous Animals, there's a pretender to Irwin's throne. Mark O'Shea is a zoologist with all the nerdiness that an "ology" has implied since the advertisements in which Maureen Lipman consoled her grandson as he held his exam results. O'Shea's khakis hang off him in the style of It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum, and his hat is so ridiculously oversized it could keep Ayers Rock cool.
He is redder than the outback, with his wild beard and wiry freckled legs. Even when he opens his mouth to reveal a soft English accent, he couldn't be anything other than Irish. But O'Shea is a crazy man, and fulfils the fundamentals of his genre by yelling, "Snake!", really loudly on sighting one, then running towards the killer animal rather than away from it, as would seem the sensible thing to do.
This week he was in the hottest part of Australia, searching for the fabled Picabora Cobra. No cobras have been confirmed in Australia, but few Irish men have charged round the outback grabbing snakes rudely by the tail, so it was hard to know who would have been more surprised had the two met.
In the end, O'Shea found no cobra, but he did fill a bag with reptiles, have a python wrap itself round his arm like a spitting bangle, and did his best to flush out a lizard bigger than he was. He was loving it, stuffing his face with live ants - "mmm, nutty" - and trying to fry eggs on the pavement.
He led the way with the boldness of Just William, wading into a river to see if it was too deep to cross, and nearly ending up being washed all the way to Sydney. The Aboriginal trackers watched with a look that white Australians long ago honed to a phrase. Bloody Pom.
shegarty@irish-times.ie
