Cutting Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Never Ending Stories (BBC 2, Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday)
The 1999 IFTA Awards (RTE 1 & BBC 1, Sunday)
The Turner Prize (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Less lounge lizard than barroom buffalo, Bill Challis, when he wasn't mauling them, was chatting-up every woman in sight. "This could be yer lucky day, dahlin' . . .. alright, sweetheart. . . where 'ave you been all my life" - that sort of stuff. The fact that boisterous Bill was showering such guff on women, who, like himself, had paid £250 for a weekend course in learning how to flirt was somehow, cruelly hilarious. The combo of his grinning motormouth and their mortified faces made for a kind of expressionist tableau from hell.
Even when it became clear that Bill's flirting technique was frightening the punters it didn't simply disgust, he kept at it: "'Ow are you, my lovely" (accompanied by an insanely jaunty wink) and so forth. Often, for emphasis, he'd include a lewd, extravagantly rolled, Cockney "corrrrr", of the sort Sid James used to do in Carry On films. Despite this bombardment of bonhomie, Bill didn't, of course, "pull" and was perplexed. After all, he was in a setting, where some women were even describing themselves as SINBADs: Single Income, No Boyfriend, Absolutely Desperate.
Clearly, none of the people featured in Cutting Edge: School for Seduction were quite that absolutely desperate. But they genuinely did want to learn how to flirt and have relationships more easily. The course director and pro-flirter was Peta Heskell, a plump blonde who advised the 32 (i.e. £8,000 worth of) wannabe flirters and flirtees on the importance of such matters as voice, eye contact, "mirroring", complimenting people, breathing patterns and personal space. Bill even directed his charm at Peta, doing a sort of demented De Fonz head-bobbing and jerky little fist-action in her direction. Even Peta froze at this.
The cameras followed four participants in particular: Brian (45), a golf-club greenkeeper; Lucy (38), who worked for a travel mag; Paul (28), a British Rail worker and Terrylee (age and occupation initially undisclosed). "The first questions to ask yourself," said Peta, are "who are you and what do you want?". Never mind that philosophers and psychologists have pondered the metaphysical and psychic implications of such questions into padded cells, the punters were expected to arrive at simple answers in a matter of moments.
Nobody - not even Bill - said anything as succinct as "I'm sad Bill and I want to get laid". But of course this was the primary suspicion all the participants had about the others having about themselves. Peta, obviously aware of this, tried to reassure them all that they shouldn't look at the course as a singles bar with lectures and role play. Nervous giggles indicated individual awarenesses of such a group consciousness. In such ventilation, however, it was obvious that there was regret mixed with relief. "It's just another unsuccessful way to meet people," said self-declared SINBAD, Lucy.
In fairness to the punters, most of them appeared to be quite civilised and sensitive people (forget the magnificent Bill, for a moment), infinitely more attractive than the smarmballs and sirens they sought to become. Of course, even that is a patronising remark, and that seemed to be the key to their difficulties: they were almost all too patronisable, not meek or effete exactly, just too easily dismissed in a grossly grasping and egomaniacal world. Fear of rejection, of making fools of themselves (and for the older ones, fear of loneliness) - the sort of traits that drunkenness obliterates for the flirter and magnifies for the flirtee - were very strong on the course.
Anyway, the singles singled-out for the cameras had their problems diagnosed. Greenkeeper Brian, a big bloke, had a high-pitched voice, which "didn't match". He was a sort of Mike Tyson with a boy-soprano pitch, and consequently his pitches to women freaked them out. Brian was sent to a speech-therapist. Lucy was too self-doubting and masked this by seeking the black humour in every situation. Paul seemed incapable of anger and cackled instead of laughed. Terrylee, we learned, was happily married and correctly judged herself to have "signed-up for the wrong course".
She was also, though fighting time, very good-looking and wanted to learn how to stop being sexually attacked, a fate which had befallen her three times. Peta might have told her to stop behaving like a vulnerable loner. At the end, it was revealed that Terrylee was a vet who worked in a wildlife park. Dissatisfied with the course, she decided that she would seek answers in the animal kingdom. This was mildly ironic, given that one of the exercises on the course encouraged the punters to think of an appropriate animal for themselves (mousey Paul found his lion within!) but Terrylee didn't participate.
Sending them out to bars in Chelsea, to try out their new voice, eye-contact, mirroring (a kind of mild mimicry), complimenting, breathing and personal space techniques, Peta told her students to "do whatever you have to do to get laid". Despite some furious flirting, none of them did. A few weeks later, however, Lionman Paul, "pulled" a woman named Tracey and went through a big box of condoms in three weeks before Tracey upped and left. Christ knows what happened to Bill, but it would be no surprise to hear he'd been arrested.
MARK Lawson visited a soap opera karaoke bar in New York City this week. He was there on the final night of Never Ending Stories, a three-part study of soaps and their influence on the 20th century. "We're all living in a kind of soap opera karaoke," he concluded, citing the spillover effects of soap narrative techniques on practically all forms of television programmes, news and current affairs included. As usual, Lawson was right.
He analysed the "arcs" of soap opera storylines, in which characters are nudged centre stage, hold the dramatic high-points for a time and then fizzle out to be replaced by another character's arc. Pointing out that two of the biggest plotlines in soaps are murder and the subsequent trial, he argued that the arcs of the O.J. Simpson and Louise Woodward murder trials were presented as pure soap. Likewise (though it didn't involve murder - unless you count the bombing of Iraq as a diversionary tactic) the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story.
He spoke too about Maggie Thatcher's visit to Coronation Street's Rovers Return bar and about Tony Blair's intervention in the Deirdre Rachid yarn. These are clear indications of political heavyweights' recognition of the power of soap. And yet the form doesn't have a prestige to match its power. There remains a kind of stigma to soap-watching, even though its cross-fertilisation of other TV genres - detective, true crime and hospital series and even much factual, docu-soap programming - is undeniable. Soap is, concluded Lawson, again correctly, clearly the most potent form of 20th-century television.
It is so, not only because it is addictive, but because of its cost-effectiveness, especially in relation to other forms of TV drama. Accountants, who run television, like they run much of the rest of the world, love soap for its ability to deliver and hold huge audiences quite cheaply. Mind you, I was in America recently, where an adaptation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is The Big Thing in television at present. This is a development which is even more frightening than Bill Challis crashing a hen party.
But back to soaps. The great irony about them, which Lawson hinted at in the opening episode of Never Ending Stories, is that they provide a kind of vicarious community in a world in which community has been gravely weakened - especially by television. Tabloid obfuscation of the lines between real life and soap life adds to this nonsense, of course. But the future for soap opera may be less than rosy. Already, nichesoaps, rather than the traditional, catch-all sort, are making an impact. Thus the moral issues, sometimes effectively tackled by soaps, are being played out and resolved in increasingly narrow contexts.
"Invented to sell detergents, these dramas have become an ideological launderette, taking a nation's dirty washing," said Lawson. Well yes, they have but in contemporary Ireland, where the washbag is bloated with the soiled and grimy glad-rags of the establishment, we should expect something more radical. Surely a crooked bank-manager, for instance, or a criminal politician, or a bought union official, shouldn't be beyond Fair City? Such sleazeballs would certainly be a fair reflection of the society around us. Or how about a sexually-abused orphan? Don't hold your breath.
MEANWHILE, the Irish Film And Television Academy Awards were screened this week. It's easy - and legitimate - to dismiss this as another luvvies love-in, especially as the award trophy is yeuchhily called an "Aisling". But in its favour, it did, it must be admitted, get most of its awards right. Pee Flynn on The Late Late Show, Amongst Women and TG4's (then TnaG) Rotha Mor An tSaoil, were memorable and Tony Doyle's Mahon (in Amongst Women) was so compelling that it even excused him for appearing in the hideous Ballykissangel.
Presenter Marian Finucane stressed the "peer" aspects of these IFTA awards. Fair enough, even if "peer" can also mean incestuous, especially in a small country. Time was when the TV critics of the national press used to choose the Jacobs Award winners. That may, or may not, have been more desirable to the public - that is, if the public gives a toss either way. It was thought-provoking though that there was such outrage within some of the highest echelons of RTE when one of the station's budget-busting Eurovision Song Contests failed to win a Jacobs Award. The TV reviewers have never been asked their opinions since. Pure coincidence, no doubt.
FINALLY, another awards gig: The Turner Prize. Extracting the urine from this carry-on is too easy. A painter who uses elephant dung (are dung-artists a step up or a step down from piss-artists?) won last year and this year's favourite was Tracey Emin.
Emin stayed in bed for a week and exhibited the detritus, soiled underwear included, of this wonderfully seminal artistic experience. Perhaps it's philistine even to attempt to have a conception of what conceptual art ought to be about. You know - thinking, reasoning, pondering, that sort of traditional nonsense is so inhibiting really, isn't it?
Yeah, and looking too - how neanderthal! Why would anybody want merely to look at art when they can live it or even, freedom of freedoms, choose not to. Some art critics are apparently fearful that Emin may kill herself as an artistic act. This has been done before, of course, as a political act (remember the hunger strikers and those self-immolating Buddhist monks and Yukio Mishima?). But there is a line between politics and art, even if the lines of art itself have crumpled into the sad, shapelessness of an unmade bed. Mind you, Bill Challis flirting with Tracey Emin - now that would be worth seeing. Still, the fact that a black Steve McQueen won the Turner Prize, is, I suppose, pretty cool.