Costas Costantino is in condoms. His latest business venture, Britain's National Condom Hotline, offers condoms in a wide range of flavours and designs. There's lager and lime, for instance, or curry, which, Costas admits, "isn't going down very well". (Clearly, the Spice Girls fad is wildly overstated.) For people more interested in visual appeal, Costas offers glow-in-the-dark condoms. He has three other businesses and we should be able to guess the general tenor of these enterprises.
Anyway, Costas and his wife Candy (an ironic flavour, as you'll see) joined an exclusive London health club, which quickly turfed them out. The reason wasn't perfectly clear, but I think we can take it that there was some concern over the general thrust of the couple's businesses. Costas and Candy (especially Candy) were furious. They wanted revenge. They dialled The Get Back Agency, then told their tale to Inside Story: Dial V For Vengeance. If they seemed particularly vindictive, by the end of this programme, memory of Costas and Candy would bring a warm glow.
The Get Back Agency (three blokes who have found an easy way of making money) sees itself as a kind of sophisticated "vengeance think-tank". The agency's master-plan involved hiring Dawn ("a 22-stone roly-poly artiste, ready for anything"). She was to make a big splash in the club and "get kicked out in complete and utter style". She did, and then got the support of a rent-a-crowd, who gave the Porsche-driving members an unscheduled verbal workout. Costas and Candy had all this nonsense video-taped and were delighted.
After that, the vengeance stories began to get darker. Embittered by bureaucracy, Paul and Jean, a husband and wife team from Somerset, provides a "nationwide mail order revenge service". Their top attraction is the Crapogram, a be-ribboned gold box which encloses a plastic turd. At this point, the programme consulted consultant psychiatrist Raj Persaud. Funny . . . well, sort of . . . but Raj looked quite angry, like a vengeful man unable to decide on a satisfactory strategy. Anyway, he furrowed his brow and proceeded to flog platitudes as profundities.
"It is an illusion to believe that your problem will be solved by a Crapogram," said Dr Raj. Deep or what? Still, people hope to feel, albeit only temporarily, a bit better for retaliating. "I like to think of getting even as therapy," said a New Yorker, who teaches an evening course called Hundreds Of Ways To Get Even Without Breaking The Law. We saw him in class, his normally seething students with a glint of hope in their eyes. Cut back to Dr Raj: "Seeking revenge is an attempt to reconnect with the person who has left you." Wow!
Most of the New York students were jilted by lovers. "Don't be obsessed; be objective," said their teacher. Recalling that she fantasised about stabbing her unfaithful lover to death, vengeance student Michelle O'Hagan was happy with the thought that: "Y'know, once somebody's dead, you know where they are all the time." Even Dr Raj didn't try to sort out the deeper meanings of this one.
And so it went. There was a Mr Nasty, whose main line was in telephone abuse. Then there was Kenny, a Glaswegian in dodgy shades and even dodgier moustache, who gets asked "to superglue someone's door up, put dog shit through their letterbox, blow up the car with the wife and kids in it". Kenny doesn't do the rough stuff, he said, before adding that there's a fair demand for it. Then we got a tale of real horror. Elizabeth Litchfield, jilted by Stuart Peters, employed a hit man to beat him almost to death. Peters is now brain-damaged but still fears the middle-aged, schoolmarmish Litchfield will seek him out again when she is released from jail.
It might have been coincidence, but in this programme every act of vengeance-seeking had a woman at its heart. "We're left with a nightmare vision of the future if these revenge agencies continue to burgeon," concluded Dr Raj. It was deeply disappointing that he didn't fall back on Shakespeare's "Hell hath no fury . . ." stuff. Watching him try to sell it as a unique and personal insight might not have been totally therapeutic, but the thought of strangling him would certainly have held its own gloriously dark pleasures.
It was the apparent motivelessness of the murder (for $40) of the Clutter family (parents, teenage son and daughter) by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in Kansas, in 1959, which so shocked the US. On the face of it, there was no revenge motive in this crime. And yet, when six years later, Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was published, it was clear that two broken drifters had taken terrible vengeance on their ubiquitous opposite: God-fearing, hard-working, small-town, law-abiding, apple-pie America.
Capote's book has an agonisingly slow and detailed build-up. In that, it was quintessentially New Journalism - ultra-realism minced through the techniques of fiction. This week's three-hour film was just as slow, sometimes confusing clutter (no pun) for thoroughness. Like the book, the film also used the Steinbeck technique of parallel narratives, switching between the family and the killers on their way.
This worked well, for even though you knew there was going to be horror when the murderers reached their prey, there was some relief in having it delayed. Kansas is a big place, maybe not a great plain, but, at least, a good one. Slide guitar and harmonica backtracks provided appropriately cliched mood as the murderous and pathetic pair (Anthony Edwards as gormless, slack-jawed Hickock; Eric Roberts - Julia's brother - as the half-crippled Smith) drove their stolen car towards the moment you didn't want.
When they got there it wasn't so much mood and background and cliched Americana any more. Now it was nasty, exceedingly nasty, and you could recall that Capote waited six years for the killers to hang before publishing his ground-breaking best-seller. It is possible to be cold-blooded for art and success too. The build-up had suggested that Hickock was the gung-ho killer. In the end, it was the tortured Smith who pulled the trigger and Truman Capote, journalism and fiction took over.
Not that the then new genre "faction" made all that difference: the killers still became more famous than their victims and many of the more status-conscious, pretentious fogeys in the literary world fretted desperately that "imaginative literature" was being debased. Talented novelists, of course, saw the positive, as well as the negative side, to the new departure. This film accurately reflected the strengths and weaknesses of Capote's book: character and motivation excellently established - but at the price of a peculiarly cold ponderousness.
Whatever tiffs there were between journalism and fiction back in the 1960s, the literary changes which followed seemed mild compared with the, eh . . . revolution in interior design. Sure, your average introverted bedsit sensitive needed just a Che Guevara poster (red and black was best), a Leonard Cohen tape and an appalling dollop of self-obsession to start living the life. But the extroverts . . . well!
All Mod Cons: The Pad, with a Kinks, Procul Harum, Shadows, Moody Blues, Marvin Gaye, Troggs and Louis Armstrong soundtrack, reminded you about cardboard furniture, "easy to assemble" plywood and plastic furniture, inflatable furniture, perspex furniture and the low-living hippy look. "It was," said a gay bloke, "a cornucopia of wowness". Yes, the language of the period was as memorable as the furniture.
Consider the story about the cat who got a chick back to his pad. It was all kinda groovy, man . . . until his inflatable sofa began to hiss gently and he knew he was heading for a downer. "It's hard to look cool when that's happening," he said. He might have tried to pass it off as some kind of karma thing edging him towards the low-living (no seats, no bed supports, tables with six-inch legs) hippy look. But he'd need the best of the stash to have the neck even to try it.
This little documentary hit the right notes. It was playful without being derisory; anecdotal instead of hard-edged; wistful without gushing. "The art directors of the Sunday newspaper supplements were the real style gurus of the age," said one contributor. Television producers and directors were influential too. Looking at it 30 years on, you could see that, as ever, the fast buck merchants shouldn't be discounted either.
The 21 chicks and one transvestite cat - all New Yorkers - on Breasts were mostly topless. Some of them, it would have to be said, didn't appear to have anything up top at all. But others in this talking chest documentary were humorous and matter-of-fact. Like a topless beach, there was nothing very sexual about this programme, but then again, that was pretty much the point: to free breasts from being objects of titillation.
The best line in it came from a small-chested woman who remembered being "vice-president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee at high-school". She could, as an under-inflated adolescent, have taken the huffs and gone big on vengeance. But, she just waited her time and seemed to be among the best adjusted of the women - emotionally as well as physically - at this stage. Perhaps, contrary to reasonable expectations, it was the girl-talk which would have been most surprising to male viewers. Some of it seemed self-consciously candid - unnaturally natural - but there was a healthy kind of deflation about it all.
Finally, after vengeance, murder, furniture, breasts - art. As part of the marking of India's 50th anniversary of independence, Omnibus screened If - A Film About Rudyard Kipling. Though Mr Kipling's exceedingly popular poem - If - has been almost as big a hit with bedsit sensitives as the Che Guevara posters, it is difficult to imagine a greater divergence of world-views between living creatures.
Quite frankly, Kipling was a racist imperialist but even he hardly deserved this television nonsense, in which an actor named Mace teamed up with a Kipling groupie, Liz, in search of a missing Kipling manuscript, Mother Maturin. You don't need to know the rest as Mace 'n' Liz traipsed around literary London and the Internet, travelling, for some reason, on canals a lot of the time. Far too precious and self-regarding. Having watched this . . . if only I'd had the Get Back Agency number at the time.
RTE's The Art Files, starting at midnight on Monday, clearly wasn't aiming for a mass audience. But it was most interesting in reminding those of us who have seen too much television that RTE seemed far more enthusiastic in the 1970s. The rig-outs of Robert Ballagh (1971) and Jim Fitzpatrick (1978) showed you that, back then, glam rock had an effect even on serious artists. There is something chilling yet strangely comforting about that.