Cutting Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Ballyseedy (RTE 1, Wednesday)
Equinox (Channel 4, Monday)
Full Circle (BBC 1, Sunday)
Ever since Rupert Murdoch ran off with the football, terrestrial telly has found it difficult to score at sport. New tactics and approaches have been invented, the latest of which involved an unsubtle combination of soccer and sex. Cutting Edge: Footballers' Wives included expected jokes about the lads' "tackles" and about them "playing away" but too often it was as cruel and malevolent as a Feyenoord team exiting from the Champions League.
Profiling the wives of former Nottingham Forest, now Watford striker, Jason Lee; former Wimbledon, now Bolton Wanderers striker, Dean Holdsworth and Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper, Ian Walker, the documentary couldn't resist sneering. Mind you, Ann Lee, Sam Holdsworth and Suzi Walker left themselves as open as the Barnsley defence. But Cutting Edge's opportunism was more reminiscent of Malcolm MacDonald's barging than Jimmy Greaves's artful finishing.
It was clear that the programme-makers wanted to play the two Premiership women in the orthodox media positions of footballers' wives: tight jeans, blonde manes, Hello! magazine homes or, in other words, vulgar and thick. Mrs Holdsworth, when she wasn't tending to her horses, made an embarrassing attempt to become a pop star. Mrs Walker drooled over a mock-Georgian mansion. In contrast, brunette Mrs Lee, whose husband's career has slid from "the Prem" to Division Two, exuded resignation: "Footballers will shag anything," she said.
Not that Jason, who, Forest fans will tell you "couldn't score in a brothel", was caught offside in the sexual sense. But Dean was. In fact, Deano was caught playing away and the tabloids ran a full match report under the headline of "£5 million soccer star cheats with nude model". Sam showed him the red card and Deano, who makes about £750,000 a year, moved out . . . temporarily.
Suzi, a former "glamour model" has her own cable TV show. Hi Ya With Suzi Walker! was put together with the help of Suzi's agent, David Hahn, a man who made the soccer wives seem thoroughly Einsteinian by comparison. "She looks good, she looks the part, she's got a lovely figure," he said, before adding the sentence of the night. "Blue-eyed blondes always go down well in television." Easy, David, easy . . .
Still, life is not always easy for Suzi. Because of Christmas football, she can't go out on New Year's Eve or sneak away to the Caribbean. She told us of these horrors as the cameras followed her shopping for designer kit. Ann too has problems. "I hate football, I've always hated football," she says. "It's not a nice life." This sounded rather strange because in the next breath, Ann told us that had she not met Jason, she'd probably be "dead or in jail or whatever".
It was hard not to think that Ann found second division football - not football itself - the equivalent of death or jail. Frank Skinner and David Baddiel have mercilessly pilloried Jason's disastrous performances for Nottingham Forest. "Jason was more famous for his haircut than he was for his football", said Ann and you could feel her disapproval of not just Skinner and Baddiel, but also of her hubby. Jason, who drew unnecessary attention to himself by sporting a kind of rasta-beehive creation, has since shaved his skull.
Suzi Walker recounted stories of "strange women straddling Ian" in nightclubs and of girls sending him pictures of themselves in their underwear, including directions to their houses. "Ian Walker is so horny," gushed a young blonde fan. Cut to Ian's wife in skin-tight denim and BMW convertible. Then another cut to a hypocritical tabloid sleaze-hound sympathising with soccer wives whose husbands' infidelities make page one stories. "It must be awful to undergo a love bust in front of the world," he said. "Very painful."
Throughout this Cutting Edge there was an attempt to portray the women as spoiled, new money vulgarians. Certainly, there were elements of this condition on view. But whether or not the performances were any more distasteful than those of spoiled, old money women, is another matter. There was a snobbery about this documentary which was, in itself, as vulgar as any of the people it was satirising. Sure, Sam and Suzi seemed rather smug and Ann appeared neurotic. But serving them up as laughing stock to constipated, taste-vigilantes smacked of Vinny Jones-style brutality.
RTE TOO raked over some old brutalities this week. Pat Butler narrated and presented a dramadocumentary which reconstructed a couple of the bloodiest incidents of the Irish Civil War. Ballyseedy (which sounds like Ballykissangel for grown-ups) was indeed a black day for the Free State Army. According to Butler, the Free Staters, in reprisals for a republican trapmine which blew six men to pieces, murdered 17 prisoners (eight at Ballyseedy) by tying them around bombs.
The IRA mine had been placed in a field near Knocknagoshel. Designed to attract the attention of, among others, Paddy Pats O'Connor (a local man whose knowledge was being used against the IRA) it succeeded. The carnage, by all accounts, was horrific. Paddy Pats, for instance, was decapitated and his head found by a child. Incensed, the Free Staters decided to retaliate and they did so with a viciousness which, even by civil war standards, was barbarous.
Tying nine prisoners around a bomb and detonating it takes quite a well-developed sense of savagery. But, at Ballyseedy bridge, only eight of the nine died. One, Stephen Fuller, escaped and his testimony proved to be the most dramatic event in an, at times, gripping but ultimately over-long film. "They were told they would be blown up by a mine. One man - another Irishman - called them `Irish bastards'."
The reconstructions were, mercifully, unconvincing. But that should not detract from the thoroughness of the programme. This was a world of "safe houses" and "dugouts" and "Irregulars" - a world whose language is becoming alien in the Celtic Tiger. But it was also a world of extraordinarily dark passions and demonic mutilations. Reconstructed here, it was a world which blew up self-serving and dangerous myths about a lost decency in warfare.
It was, though, the "docu" part of the docu-drama which most impressed. An array of eyewitnesses, though most were mere children at the time, lent it an authenticity which otherwise would have been impossible. But there was too much repetition and the decision to reconstruct key scenes in black and white (like Schindler's List) was only partly justified. Of course, it helped the reconstructions to gel with real footage from the period. But colour would have made greater connections to the documentary interviews - the programme's strongest part.
Still, it was quite certain in naming names, even though the revelations were undercut, not made more shocking, by excessive melodrama. Butler concluded that responsibility for the murders could be traced all the way to Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy. Likewise, the programme claimed that the plan to use trap mines was authorised by Liam Lynch, the IRA's chief of staff. Mulcahy's writing on the back of a brown envelope pretty well proved the case against him.
In all, almost 30 people paid with their lives during the March 1923 carnage in Co Kerry. Local republican leader, Ger Leary, was captured and murdered by Free State Dublin Guards - after the war was over. And so the bitterness endures. You could see why the Civil War remains the most crucial fault-line in Irish politics. A normal Left-Right (or capital v labour) axis couldn't develop fully against such strong feeling and against a Catholic State. Ballyseedy, though it was covered up by the Free State victors - perhaps because it was so covered up - showed there was a tiger in this State long before the economy took off.
Yet another attempt to lure sports jocks back to terrestrial telly was made by Equinox. It reported on sports psychologists' current love-in with alpha waves, a form of brain activity more usually associated with transcendental meditation. The trick for sports people is to achieve a similar mental state, wherein failure becomes almost impossible. This state is known by the Star Trek type description of "The Zone".
There are, it seems, various entrances to The Zone. Before a pressurised round, golfer Sam Torrence sits on the toilet and makes every part of his anatomy go limp. Amateur golfers should note this. Some martial arts masters use the rather cooler technique of zen meditation during which they assure themselves that they will not lose. "Lose your conscious self. You'll do more if you think less," said a master.
But this was a ponderous programme. Like Ballyseedy, it was unnecessarily long and it lacked focus. Clearly, it was not made by people in The Zone. A shrink explained that the cerebellum, situated at the back of the brain, is the key to the invincible state. Apparently, the cerebellum is ideal for getting you oriented to one thing and minimising distractions. It is the brain's auto-pilot.
To soccer wives, The Zone probably sounds like the latest hot night-spot where strange women straddle their star husbands. But there was some sense - even if the science was less than convincing - in this documentary. Sometimes, sports people do seem to hit a vein of form wherein complex manoeuvres and awesome co-ordination appear like second nature. But whether or not alpha waves provide a full explanation is another matter. To the loo, Jason Lee. You have nothing to lose since Skinner and Baddiel did the job on you.
FINALLY, Full Circle - though it wasn't quite. Michael Palin, on his 245day journey around the Pacific Rim, couldn't quite get back to Diomede where he began. The weather was too rough for helicopters and boats, so there was a two-mile gap in his 50,000 mile odyssey. Still, as ever, Palin had enough relaxed charm to make his third series in this genre another success.
At one point he called into Tijuana, Mexico. Not on the taste vigilantes' hot list for architectural delights, Tijuana has at least one extraordinary home. Built in the shape of a naked woman (modelled on the builder's first wife) it is now occupied by the builder and his new wife. "The new wife doesn't like living inside the old wife," said Palin on voiceover. Indeed. If you think people trying to live their lives in The Zone are peculiar, you really should see this house.