So This Is Dyoublong? (RTE 1, Tuesday)
True Lives (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Short Cuts (Network 2, Wednesday)
The Real Jonathan Aitken (Channel 4, Sunday)
Stately, plump David Norris wore a brown hat, a three-piece pin-stripe suit, a white shirt and a tartan tie as he strolled along the ChampsElysees. The former Trinity College lecturer, taking time away from the very 1990s task of advertising the Internet "passing right through" his "drawing room", started off in Paris to make a documentary about James Joyce's love of Dublin. Dapper Dave visited Fouquet's, Joyce's favourite restaurant in Paris. It appears that Joyce used to be "a generous tipper" when he dined at Fouquet's. Ah . . . the struggling artist gig was a hard oul' station, all right - Paris city, in the rare oul' times.
So This Is Dyoublong? was screened on the eve of Bloomsday. In essence, it was a celebration of James Joyce - a visual fanzine - perched precariously between literary appreciation and public relations. We shouldn't be surprised, of course. James Joyce (of whom you may now get not only the T-shirt, but the tea-towel) has become a staple of the Irish heritage and tourism industries. His most famous work, Ulysses, may or may not be the greatest novel of the 20th century. But the discrepancy between the number of people who have heard of it and the number who have read it through, is almost certainly in a category of its own. There is a clarion irony at work.
As a celebration of "ordinary" people, recognising humanity's classical legacy and usually unseen heroic status, the irony is profound. Most ordinary people do not read Ulysses, although Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist remain popular. Then there is the question of the significance of Ulysses today. Though monumental in terms of the development of the novel, the book's celebrated radicalism and its assault on the "paralysis" of Irish life, have inevitably slipped into history. It's not as if there's no paralysis in Irish life today. But the forces of control are different. Quite simply, Irish writers today have different claustrophobias to write about.
Not that that devalues James Joyce. But there remains an unavoidably patronising stance in getting kitted out in Edwardian clobber - boaters, striped jackets, waxed moustaches and canes for the men; bonnets, full-length period dresses, severe hairdos and parasols for the women. The stance, though perhaps in some cases unfairly so, is interpreted as "we are literary", not "we are ordinary". Every year there is the same clash: literati dress up to celebrate literature which celebrates the ordinary, while the ordinary look on, fearful of and sceptical about the class confidence (sometimes justifiable, sometimes suspiciously snobbish) which fuels ostentation in the name of celebrating Joe Soap.
For his part, David Norris - at least in his passion for Joyce - has been able to vindicate his ostentation because of his knowledge. So, he likes to get dressed up and try out a few Dublin accents that sound like they could come only from a consumptive docker who gargles with a solution of concrete and sulphuric acid. That's fine. Excerpts from An Evening With David Norris, a kind of literary cabaret, showed us David in action. His Edwardian outfit mixed white and cream like an old-fashioned milk bottle. A dash of colour was provided by a thick-striped, two-colour tie. It was all a bit of crack, I suppose, even if the multimedia combination of text, visuals and aurals veered between admissible melodrama and dodgy pantomime. Too much surfing, David?
Then there were the contributors: Anthony Cronin, Brenda Maddox, Fintan O'Toole and Barry McGovern among them. Cronin remarked that "the sort of people celebrated in Ulysses have ceased to exist". He may have overstated the situation, but certainly the notion of the book as providing a blueprint for an unchanging, authentic Dublin-ness needs to be aired. Maybe it did, in its time, distill an essence of Dublin-ness. However, attempts to make contemporary life reflect art, which reflected life almost a century ago, are open to question. Dublin and Dubliners have changed, to the point where even genuine and would-be "rale Dubs" are unhealthily self-conscious of a preserved protocol, which, in truth, stifles rather than encourages their legendary spontaneity.
Whether Joycean culture is now more museum culture than living city culture is a key question. It's only five years to the Bloomsday centenary, but RTE and features editors and writers around Dublin seem Joyced-out. Back in the 1950s, when the city's then characteristically self-destructive literary set out on the first Bloomsday commemoration, they had glaring political as well as aesthetic points to make. There were, in the isolated country of the time, blatant and almost mediaeval repressions to be confronted. It's subtler now, of course, but not so subtle that, at least at some level, "ordinary" people won't continue to distrust celebrations based excessively on a form of aesthetics, alien (and often deliberately kept alien) to most.
Anyway, written by Norris and Nuala Cunningham, Irish television's 1999 contribution to Bloomsday was, though evocative through old stills and music, ultimately a PR job. In that, I suppose, it achieved a kind of populism understandably valued by television. There was, centrally, a hard sell of Joyce and his love of Dublin. Well, fair enough. The pity, though, is that PR itself is nowadays so often a force used to paralyse freethinking - that it, like advertising, is frequently a kind of secular sermon.
David Norris is right to try and keep the memory of James Joyce alive. But the funny clothes, funny accents and funny anecdotes have lost power through repetition. Such annual celebrations are inevitably transforming aesthetics into anaesthetics. Their sameness is paralysing: Ulysses is a classic, but Bloomsday celebrations are dating badly. It's time for Joyceans to rethink instead of rehash - before we all nod off.
Immediately following its eulogy to the fiction of James Joyce, RTE screened True Lives: Sai Baba Strange Avatar. Well, Baba is certainly strange whatever about being an avatar, a deity descended to Earth. In a recent interview he was asked if he was God. "Let us say that I am the switch. One flick and I could make the entire universe disappear," he replied. Not since Cantona has one flick carried so much menace. Sai Baba is an Indian. He looks like a bloated, androgynous Johnny Mathis wearing a bloated, androgynous afro hairstyle. Apparently, about 60 million people believe he is a messiah. God does, indeed, work in strange ways.
Baba's devotees credit him with many miracles. Having come to Earth to redeem mankind, Baba, they say, has raised people from the dead; held off rain while it has fallen in torrents all around a small area where poor people were being fed; turned water into petrol (reflecting, of course, a post oil-crises consciousness of divinity). If these miracles remind you of Jesus Christ, then that's not terribly surprising. Baba, you see, is, according to his followers, the one who sent Jesus to Earth. In fact, Baba has the full 16 powers of a true avatar - Christ had only 15, said one of his disciples.
So now you know. Ironically, central to the propagation of Baba-ism is the incontrovertible notion that if it happened before, it can happen again. Mind you, whatever about the qualities of their alleged miracles, Christ would appear to have bestowed more in the way of a message. Baba, media-wary, refused to be interviewed for this documentary. Many of his followers were not so shy, however. Among them was an Irishman, Sean Lucey. There were also believers from Australia, Holland, Singapore, the United States, Argentina and, of course, home support from India. But Baba (Christ-like!) has his detractors too.
There were suggestions that he is nothing more than a conjurer, who likes young males; that he is involved in rackets with bent coppers and politicians; that he may even have orchestrated killings. One American Biblebasher, happy to be returned to that state of sanity in which he reads the Bible as literally as most people would a phone directory, is not impressed. A former Baba-ite, he recalled how Baba, eh, interfered with him. "He could be diabolical - a world-class anti-Christ," said the Yank, quoting from the Book of Revelations to bolster his argument.
A psychologist suggested that since kids used to tease the young Baba, because he was gay, he decided to impress them. So he became God, which is, in all fairness, quite an impressive transformation. Eat your heart out, Rehab. Perhaps that's the reality of this wildly unreal "real life". As the programme progressed, it became increasingly like a parody. Was it all a mick-take? Was it an anti-Christian allegory? Was it as off-the-wall as its subject? We left Baba telling his massed devotees, all dressed in brilliant, David Norris white, that they were God. Even the love- bombing in India has gone nuclear.
There was a rather more conventional religious theme to this week's Short Cuts. Written and directed by Peter Sheridan, The Breakfast was set in an industrial school run by Christian Brothers. The period was when Khrushchev was in his pomp. As a backdrop to recent documentaries and a mini-series, the industrial school or orphanage is fast becoming a sub-genre of television. Perhaps such stories will have their own dedicated channel when the digital abundance reaches its full flowering.
Anyway, Gavin Dowdall played Curly, a young inmate detailed to bring breakfast in bed every morning to the ill, disciplinarian Brother Ledwidge (Frank McDonald). One morning, Ledwidge finds a hair from his porridge-and-bread-fed, small-fry servant in his big fry breakfast. So, he orders another, older boy to shave Curly's curls. Curly - "little Valentino" to a matronly cleaner - is not best pleased. We see him flushing a toilet on his own reflection in the water of the bowl - very D.H. Lawrence. The next day, however, Curly finds Brother Ledwidge dead in bed.
Earlier, we had seen the boy peeping longingly through a keyhole as Ledwidge gorged himself. So, after initially fleeing, he returns to the bedroom and eats the breakfast in the company of the corpse. Though it risked tweeness, there was a life-affirming quality to this poignant little drama. After the horrors of recent TV programmes set in industrial schools, this was a chink of light in the gloom. It was hard not be reminded of Brecht's "grub first, then ethics" - especially true when you're young and hungry.
Finally, The Real Jonathan Aitken. A Dub (born here in 1942), though not obviously so, even James Joyce could hardly have invented Aitken. This profile of the politician, now widely regarded as "the embodiment of Tory sleaze", painted a picture of a well-connected, talented, utterly ruthless man with an ego to match Sai Baba's. A few relations and supporters attempted to voice Aitken's "good qualities". But it was an almost hopeless cause. He didn't seem all that clever when it came to it, either. "To dump the prime minister's daughter is not exactly a great career move," said the former Guardian editor, Peter Preston, of Aitken's relationship with Carol Thatcher. You could understand why Joyce stressed the heroic qualities of ordinary folk. They were absent in this tale from the big houses.