News Specials (Various channels, Wednesday)
Omnibus (BBC 1, Tuesday)
True Lives (RTE 1, Monday)
Prime Time (RTE 1, Wednesday)
`Degrade' was the word and the word was with Clinton and Blair. They would "degrade" Saddam Hussein's capacity to wage war. On Wednesday night, as all news and general channels screened specials to cover the American/British attack on Iraq, "degrade" was indeed an apt word. Physicists use it to refer to reducing energy to a less convertible form - in that sense, Clinton and Blair were semantically correct. But in its more everyday meaning, degrade, as we all know and use the word, means debase or humiliate.
Watching the green glow of infrared camera pictures from Baghdad under attack was indeed a debasing experience. It looked like a yet-to-be-perfected computer game for a PlayStation or a Nintendo. Very Christmasy! And yet, we knew that the flashes and striations would be accompanied by the dismemberment of men, women and children. Only Tony Benn on Newsnight's Special (BBC 1 & BBC 2) pointed this out with anything like the prominence it needed and Benn - Tory and New Labour politicians have ensured - is a political dinosaur.
For the most part, the rest of the studio pundits and the dentally sublime Washington correspondents spoke in grave, thoroughly patronising, frequently hypocritical voices. Yes, yes, Saddam Hussein is a murderous dictator and is a menace. But seven, almost eight years ago, we watched similar green images from Baghdad. Then, around 200,000 Iraqis were killed and a million children still remain gravely undernourished. Estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died because of sanctions imposed after the 1991 bombing. Saddam is still standing.
The last time we saw similar pictures from Baghdad, television was so degraded that it effectively became an arm of the Western military. "Surgical strikes"; PR campaigns featuring downright lies; Airfix studio generals with model aircraft-carriers, planes and tanks; ludicrous "pool" reporters in army uniforms; propaganda piled upon propaganda (just more sophisticated and plausible than Saddam's) . . . and very seldom a dead body in sight.
With techno-buffs almost reaching orgasm, we were incessantly bombarded about how clean and precise modern war had become. The murder was devastating for Iraqi people and degrading for TV and for its viewers. Here we go again? That seed on Monica Lewinsky's dress, planted by Bill Clinton and nurtured by his fanatical opponents, is in full flower now, alright. The last time round the computer game might have been titled "Blood For Oil". Now we've got the sequel: "Blood For Semen".
CLEAN as a precision bomb, Julie Andrews, Hollywood's singing spoonful . . . sorry, shovelful . . . of sugar, was the subject of this week's Omnibus. Symbol of sweetness, purity and sincerity, even Julie's topless scene in SOB couldn't undo her image. Come to that, even a role as Hannibal Lecter's more cannibalistic, sado-masochistic, porn star sister, would not dent Julie's image: her gigs as Maria Von Trapp and Mary Poppins have hermetically sealed her in the chastity section of showbiz history.
However, a recent surgical strike to remove cancerous nodules from her larynx may have ended her singing days. Leaving aside the sugar, Julie Andrews could sing. It was not her voice, but the songs (too many of them anyway) which were atrocious - bloody well supercalifragilisticexpialatrocious. Still, some of them were huge successes in their time, ironically perhaps, in an age (from the mid 1950s through the 1960s) when popular music was being transformed like never before or since.
Using the current threat to her career as a news peg, Omnibus trawled through archives to tell the Julie story. Born in 1935, she was a child star at the age of 12, singing with an extraordinarily mature voice coming out of her skinny, little body. By the time she was 20, she was a Broadway star because of her performances in The Boy- friend. Then came the 1956 stage musical of My Fair Lady opposite the "quirky, selfish, clowning, dashing and brilliant" Rex Harrison. Andrews, you'll note, can spout luvvie guff with the best of them.
Four years later, Julie starred in Camelot with Richard Burton. When you saw the tights that poor oul' Burton had to wear, you could understand why he took to the whiskey. Soon after (though in the meantime, she was turned down for Audrey Hepburn in the film of My Fair Lady) Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Julie Andrews a major, international, A-list star. Wealth ensued for Julie as, all over the Western world, tills were alive with the sound of her music being bought.
As documentary history, all this was fine; as a profile, however, it was weak. Occasional anecdotes, such as Burton's telling her that Time magazine was about to report that she was the only leading woman he hadn't slept with, shed some light. (Really, after those tights, what could Burton have expected?) "Well don't tell them that. It'll make me seem even more square," she said (well, she said she said) in reply. But mostly, this documentary was just a recap of Julie's career. Her character remained inscrutable.
All of the contributors were friends or relations and it may well be that Julie Andrews is just a nice, pleasant woman. But a bit of balance - even from bitter, old showbiz rivals - would have made her seem more real. Instead, she was presented as being alarmingly like the stage and film characters which made her famous. This Omnibus was soft, uneven and, uncharacteristically, from the PR school of documentary making. Even RTE's Limelight could hardly have soft-pedalled any more.
Neither was there any serious attempt to place her or her films in context. Lerner and Loewe and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have their fans and deservedly so. But much of their output is so lamentably smarmy and saccharine that to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. Of course, it's not meant to be hardcore blues or to have anything like soul, but some of the values and snobberies promoted by the worst of these shows are no laughing matter.
BETTER by far was this week's True Lives offering: Faith, Hope and Chalet Keys, which recounted 50 years of the holiday camp at Mosney, Co Meath. Situated between Gormanston army camp and the seaside village of Laytown, Mosney holiday camp always seemed like a hybrid of its neighbours. In its heyday - when Billy Butlin owned it - it used to have a suggestion of being a kind of Sodom by the Sea. The matrons of Ireland would hiss condemnation but that made it all the more attractive: it was 300 acres of Godless Britain nestling in Holy Ireland. Hence its popularity.
Narrated by former redcoat, Mike Murphy, the best aspect of this affectionate look-back-in-wistfulness was its old footage. The Catholic Standard, the Drogheda Independent and the Irish Catholic may have denounced the early Butlin's, but in pre-PlayStation times, it was a wonderland for children. Of course, its Hi-De-Hi aspects - the patronising, the quasi-militarism and the competitions (Lovely Ankles, Lovely Hair, Lovely Family, Lovely Mother, Lovely Child, Lovely Girls, Lovely Bald Spot, Miss Che Che: Lovely Fat Woman) - seem barbarously naff now.
But punters loved it all, at the time. Mind you, it's a long time ago now as the advertisement entreating people to "Go Gay At Butlin's" reminded us. The irony of this, of course, is that most single teenagers and adults wanted to go to Butlin's to get the chance to go heterosexual. The documentary also followed the progress - from audition through work to the end of the season - of Kilkenny redcoat, Lorraine Owens. With boundless enthusiasm, she worked through a routine of gigs, many of which seemed to come from another age.
Then there was the woman who likes to be first to book in every year. With extraordinary dedication, she's been going to Mosney every year for decades and still loves it. Her average day there consists of getting up, having breakfast, playing slot machines, going to the camp's Dan Lowry's bar, having an afternoon rest, back out to play the slots again and onto Dan Lowry's bar until the small hours of the morning. More holiday gulag, than holiday camp - year after year after year - her idea of fun sounded like an addiction or a "Holiday in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Thoroughly bizarre!
And so it went. Old timers recalled the long summers they spent working at Mosney. Now, far from being any kind of Sodom by the Sea, it is an anachronism, a fading reminder of gentler, simpler times. Butlin's pulled out of Ireland in 1982 and businessman Phelim McCloskey bought the camp for £1 million. He's made a financial success of the place and it continues - even in the age of EuroDisney - to have a magic for children. A musing documentary this - and fair enough - but before it bade us "goodnight campers" it might have mentioned the savage, drunken brawling which became a feature in the 1970s. "Go Berserk At Butlin's" was the spirit of the time.
GOOD stuff this week too from the resurgent Prime Time. In an edition titled Safe as Houses, it reported on the lack of safety measures on most Irish building sites. A feature of many employers' attitudes seemed to be their insistence on blaming employees for not taking sufficient care. Yes, this is part of the story, where male notions of macho and cool continue to view some safety procedures as namby-pamby, sissy, old nonsense. But it is a small part.
Employers seldom have much difficulty in laying-down schedules and profit-centred rules on sites. Employee discretion does not feature when there's money to be made. So, it was disgraceful to attempt to shift so much of the responsibility for site-safety onto the workers. Last year, 15 men were killed in building industry accidents. Between July 20th and August 8th of this year, five more died - two of them buried alive by an unshored trench which collapsed.
This was not a spectacular Prime Time. But it was much more worthwhile than the standard, same-old-talking-heads-in-studio boredom which is a staple of the series. The Health and Safety Authority blames employees for about one-fifth of fatal building accidents. As the Tiger's goldrush and building boom continue, employers making fortunes need to be held to account. Their usual court fines - even for breaches which lead to death - are a few hundred pounds. Now that's degrading to the memories and families of dead and injured workers. It's also morally, if not legally, criminal. Same as the Boys' Own titled Operation Desert Fox, really.