Questions and Answers RTE 1, Monday
Network 2, Tuesday
Telly Bingo,
RTE 1, Tuesday International Football, Star TV, Wednesday
Is Eoghan Harris a Brad Pitt fan? Brad's latest movie, Fight Club, sees our hero fighting the corruption and complacency of modern consumer culture by blowing up franchised coffee bars. On Questions and Answers this week, in the course of a debate on the refugee/asylum-seeker/economic immigrant issue (this column is nothing if not impartial) Harris invoked James Connolly in criticising the apathy of a younger generation which prefers talking about good coffee to engaging with meaningful politics. Warm beverages, it seems, are the contested ground under the new political dispensation. The politically committed will nail their colours to the mast by drinking half-strength, watery Maxwell House.
The juxtaposition of Ireland's greatest revolutionary socialist and today's low-fat, mocha frappacino generation may seem absurd, but it was the first time in months that anyone on Questions and Answers had actually said something startling. That's a pretty remarkable record for (almost) live TV, and reflects the stultifying nature of most media debate in this country. Harris succeeded where others have failed, in finding a colourful metaphor for his argument, but if he wanted to find out why an increasing number of people find politics irrelevant, he could have taken a look around him.
Questions and Answers is a grand old warhorse which has served the Irish public well over the years, but its predictable format and over-familiar faces may well be a symptom of why young folk get their kicks from caffeine instead of politics. And there's not much sign of new thinking around on ways to make serious, issue-driven programming more interesting and relevant to a younger audience. The news this week that the axe is poised over the neck of Later with Finlay and Gallagher on Network 2 prompts one to consider the function of RTE's junior channel since its revamp a couple of years ago.
The suspicion is that RTE's meagre resources are increasingly being funnelled into worthy but rather dull programmes on the one hand, and largely imported trash for younger audiences on the other. Those of us in the middle, caught between wrinkly baby boomers and shiny Celtic cubs, get less and less of a look in. In truth, LwFaG was never the most scintillating show on television, but the "budgetary reasons" advanced for its impending demise ring a little hollow: it's pure coincidence, apparently, that the programme has been coming under attack in recent weeks for the undeclared conflicts of interests of its spin-doctoring co-hosts.
Finlay and Gallagher isn't the only show facing the chop: the arts review programme, Later with John Kelly, is also under threat. This writer has his own conflict of interest to declare here, having partaken of the hang sangwidges and offered his tuppence-worth of cheap opinions on Kelly's show, but it's not the less-than-lucrative fee which causes me to wonder at the treatment of Kelly, one of the few bona fide stars to emerge on RTE in recent years (albeit, and tellingly, having honed his craft and proved his worth at BBC Northern Ireland and Today FM). Like many RTE programmes, Kelly's show bears more than a passing resemblance to a British equivalent, the BBC's Late Review, and its format of pundits sitting around discussing books, films, exhibitions and the like is hardly Earth-shattering. But at least it offers an opportunity for critical comment - far too much arts coverage on television, and in the media in general, is camouflaged PR puffery, masquerading as sensitive interviews or in-depth profiles.
THE trajectory of the Later strand on Network 2 is interesting. Both programmes were initially developed as part of a three-show package for mid-week, late-night slots on Network 2. The third show in the package, Later with Clare McKeon, has since been reborn as clare, and moved to a more prime-time slot (while Kelly has gone to the bizarre time, for a review show, of Friday evenings).
This week's clare was typical, devoted to the riveting subject of people who take their clothes off for money. An artists' model, a topless dancer, a male stripper and the proprietor of a naturist guesthouse all bared their souls - and an amiable bunch of souls they were. The premise of clare is that we will be fascinated by the bizarre lifestyles and experiences of the guests, but the truth is that any guest would have a hard time out-bizarring Ms McKeon herself, surely one of the most chilling creations of the modern Irish media.
There was a time (a very bad time) a few years ago when, in a flush of enthusiasm for so-called post-modernism, misguided people took to using their fingers to indicate ironic quote marks around what they were saying. These people clearly thought this absurd affectation made them look sophisticated, or even "sophisticated". Happily, the wiggly fingers have gone the same way as most other 1980s phenomena by now.
For Clare McKeon, though, the affectation has never died. In fact, she has raised it to new levels of awfulness. It helps that she's blessed with the sort of fingers that ET might have considered excessive. Whenever she's asking a question, up they go to each side of her head, giving the impression of a demented crayfish in a fright wig. Her guests this week remained remarkably composed in the face of this distressing sight: one of the more attractive characteristics of our island race is our reluctance to share our most personal experiences with a bunch of strangers we don't know. Of course, this reticence (or, as Clare would say, "reticence") doesn't fit very well with McKeon's mission to become Ireland's Ricki Lake. There was something deeply slimy about the way she tried to introduce the subject of one guest's sexual orientation in the closing seconds, and something admirable about the way she was simply ignored.
Anyone who saw the RTE Unwrapped behind-the-scenes look at this particular programme will be familiar with the way guests are manipulated into revealing intimate details about their lives. It will be an interesting comment on the future direction of Network 2 if this sordid little show is the only one of the three Later programmes to survive.
When Network 2 was originally set up, its brief was kept deliberately vague, but its reinvention as the kiddie channel of Den TV, Friends and Don't Feed the Gondolas is generally regarded as one of RTE's success stories of the 1990s, a success more of marketing and scheduling than of programming, perhaps, but a success just the same. Network 2 was always going to be (even) more reliant on imported programming than its sister channel, but it was an important part of the mix to launch the Later strand, along with a distinctively separate news style, and there has been some genuinely innovative material, like @last tv. If you start diluting that, what argument remains for keeping the channel in public ownership, except as a revenue stream for RTE?
In the meantime, RTE 1 kept flying the flag for the Good Ship Public Service, with strong programmes this week from the Leargas and Would You Believe teams (the WYB's probing, revealing interview with Bishop Pat Buckley was particularly good), and the launch of the impressively ambitious documentary series, The Irish Empire. But it's not all pointy heads - there's always Telly Bingo. Even if you've never seen this particular show, you must have heard its fabulous advertising jingle, the one that goes: "Telly Bingo Tuesday nights, Telly Bingo Tuesday nights, Telly Bingo Tuesday nights, Telly Bingo Tuesday nights . . . " Sheer genius, and it works - many's the Tuesday I've thought: "Oh, Telly Bingo's on tonight. Must remember not to watch it." This week, though, was different: finally catching up with the show, I found myself bewildered.
IT's one of the basic rules of TV game shows that the format should be clear, simple and explained at the start of each programme. In a spirit of admirable adventure, Telly Bingo tosses those rules aside. Who are these people, and what are they doing? Three teams appear to be competing for something or other. There's some kind of colour coding to the questions. The questions are very easy. There's a bingo game linked to National Lottery scratch cards. There's some other sort of a phone-in draw involving silver and black balls and a big round platter. These are the facts, but for the life of me I couldn't link them together in any coherent way.
Two of the three teams seemed to have showbiz aspirations - in other words, they thought they were funny. The other team was dull as dishwater, deadly serious, and had the whole thing won before the half-way point. As television, it had all the entertainment value of watching paint dry very slowly, and the decorative presenters seemed as cheesed off as I was that what is essentially a five-minute bingo game had been padded out very unimaginatively to a half-hour programme. The weird fascination of the other lottery show, Winning Streak, lies in seeing "ordinary people" (as Clare would say) melting under the TV lights and in Mike Murphy's seasoned professionalism; Telly Bingo has neither.
IRISH television executives probably wish that critics who bemoan the quality of their product would be forced to watch the dreck that passes for TV in most parts of the world. Irish audiences got an unexpected dose of the Turkish version of Sky Sports, Star TV, as the country's pubs adjusted their satellite dishes on Wednesday night. Purely in the interests of research for this column, I repaired to my own local, where the rather fuzzy Star reception gave added piquancy to The Match in Bursa - it felt like those old, pre-cable days, when the British channels came in two varieties - flurry or blizzard.
None of that old nonsense of pre-match predictions or analysis on Star - the Turkish equivalents of Giles and Dunphy were nowhere to be seen. Instead we got non-stop commercials right up until kick-off, and banner ads running across the bottom of the screen during breaks in play. Most of the commercials were remarkably similar to the Irish variety - slightly naff versions of last year's international styles, interspersed with familiar, generic ads for multinational brands like Panasonic and Coca-Cola. But the sheer, numbing repetition without respite was something else - one ad came up three times within less than 10 minutes.
The heaving pub paid little attention to what was happening on screen, until a jeans commercial in which the hero spent so much time taking off and folding his beloved trousers that his prospective sexual partner drove away, leaving him naked to hitch a lift from some leering, amorous truckers. Homosexual rape is not a common punchline in Irish jeans commercials, so this one created something of a stir among the (95 per cent male) pub clientele.
As is increasingly the case, the best thing on TV this week was a commercial. The new Nike spot is a millennial extravaganza which we'll all be sick of in a few weeks' time, but seeing it for the first time on Wednesday brought a lift to the spirits after the football results. A bleary-eyed reveller rises from his bed, looks around him at the debris of a New Year's Eve party, climbs into his jogging gear and goes for a run on the morning of January 1st. Where else this week could you have seen multiple car crashes, mass riots, looting and out-of-control cruise missiles - all in the space of 60 seconds? Now that's what I call television - but maybe I've been drinking too much coffee.
