Under The Sun (BBC 2, Tuesday)
The Word On The Street (Channel 4, Monday)
One Hundred Years Of Pioneers (RTE 1, Sunday)
The Eurovision Song Contest (RTE 1 & BBC 1, Saturday)
Nick is the social secretary of the University of Iowa's Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. Aptly named, Nick nicks knickers. "Whooo, whooo, whooo - wayta go," hollered his audience of Pi Kappa Alpha wannabees as noisy Nick threw knickers on the ground, reciting combinations of Greek letters to identify the sororiety houses of the knickers' original owners. "Alpha Chi Omega," bragged Nick. "Whooo, whooo, whooo," roared the morons. "Kappa Kappa Gamma." ("Whooo, whooo, whooo.") "Delta Beta Psi . . . "
Under The Sun: Rush turned its cameras on the rituals of recruitment week for the university's masonic-style secret societies. It was a truly extraordinary film. The females were like Stepford Prom Queens - big hair, big teeth, big bank accounts (it costs about $11,000 on top of normal fees to join these cliques). The males were just big - hunks of iron-pumped, prime American beef. They seemed to have the intellectual and emotional development of a Big Mac. But this was a scary film too: the "Greek System" is at the heart of the American class system and the wannabees were "rushing" to "learn leadership qualities".
As well they might. All but two American presidents since 1825 have belonged to frat houses. We were told that 85 per cent of "corporate leaders" and Supreme Court judges, in addition to 80 per cent of elected politicians, have belonged to these types of outfits. (Ah ha - the answer to the riddle of Dan Quayle!). Two hundred years in operation, the Greek System is sometimes described as "the power behind the superpower". The sheer crassness and vulgarity of it all was, as the Stepford babes would squeak, "ossum, truly ossum". Clearly, with this sort of leadership, NATO is even more dangerous that we may have suspected. Rush-week for the university's 19 fraternity and 13 sororiety societies begins with "Hi! Nice To Meet You Day". Look, if you missed the programme, you can imagine this codswallop for yourself. "Hi! Nice To Meet You Day" me backside. During this opening salvo of social slop, we met Amy Jones, a 19year-old daughter of an accountant. She was "hot" to "learn leadership". We saw Amy invited into the Alpha Chi Omega house, where all the members had to walk with their hands behind their backs and kneel in the presence of the wannabees. Conversation had to avoid the "Three Bs" - boys, banks and booze.
Anyway, after "Hi! Nice To Meet You Day" came "The First Cut". Apparently the prime criterion for survival of "The First Cut" is "academic achievement". Don't even think about it. Next comes the smarmathon of "Welcome Back Day" before the tension builds to "The Second Cut". Amy was still in for seven houses - the maximum possible is nine - on "Welcome Back Day". But "The Second Cut" saw her rejected by all her favourite choices. By the penultimate "RSVP Day", she was banking on one - Kappa Kappa Gamma.
Not that any of the nonsense seems to make an iota of difference. All of the outfits were pretty well equally repulsive. Tiffany Grimes (yes, that is her name) a big wig in the sororiety system, briefed the wannabees as they waited anxiously for the verdicts. "I'm so proud of all you guys. This is so exciting for you," squealed Tiffany. All the "guys" seeking sororiety house places had paraded in their finery - mostly seriously expensive little black numbers - on the final "Preference Night". For them, as for the jocks seeking frat house places, selection could mean "a passport for life".
The prats of Pi Kappa Alpha (knickernicker Nick's outfit) selected 19 new members. The new lads were well pleased, realising that the transition from frat-prat to fat-cat was now almost assured. Pi Kappa Alpha owns its own fire engine (don't ask "why?") and to celebrate its infusion of new blood, the society drove around the campus, fire-bell ringing and the 19 latest boors (known as Pikes) bellowing, of course, "Whooo, whooo, whooo". And they were going to . . . whisper it . . . "drink beer". Wow! Hard cases, all right. As an exhibition of the vulgarity of the privileged, this was thoroughly verminous. It was so because chances are that most of them will prosper through these masonic-style connections.
Of course all societies - our own included - have their secret passwords, dodgy handshakes, snobbery-based clubs, connections and old-school ties. But this open celebration of an assumed right-to-rule in a society that bellows so much about its great democracy was disgusting. For the record, Amy Jones was inducted into Kappa Kappa Gamma. Four months later she left the University of Iowa to live with her boyfriend in Des Moines. She stayed in the sororiety society, however. Forget education - Amy and the rest of them in the Greek System know how to get ahead. They want to be leaders on the back of connections. Meritocracy, how are are ya? What's it all about, Alpha? In a word: pull!
BETTER by far for the blood pressure was Channel 4's Starsky And Hutch Night. It was a cheap way to fill a British bank holiday's evening schedules. But it was genuinely funny, too. The centrepiece of the retrospective was The Word On The Street, an appropriate title, given the celebration of mean city streets which characterised so many 1970s US cop operas. Con men, pimps, fences and all sorts of dodgy dudes gave crime shows of the time a kind of grey layer between the traditional black and white of cops and criminals. It was all ludicrously sentimentalised, of course. But, at times, it was fun.
Looking back at such formulaic TV - mostly formulated by Aaron Spelling - its corniness has inevitably increased. For Starsky and Hutch (Dave Starsky and Ken Hutchinson, in case you're a sad, pub-quiz freak) Huggy Bear, a medallioned, black, jivey pimp - descended from the blaxploitation movies of the early 70s - was a key dude. Arguments were raised to claim that he was even as crucial to the series' success as Starsky's red (with flash white stripe) Ford Torino. It's a close call, but such elevation of Huggy Bear smacks of 1990s PC-inspired revisionism. The car was the thing.
The two lads used to leap in and out through windows, run across the bonnet (for no good reason, of course) and burn tyre rubber even reversing the car into a tight parking spot. And they hugged each other. This was male bonding a decade before Iron John and his untamed executives took to the woods to dress up in wolf-skins. Indeed, so huggy were Dave and Ken that some outraged American critics of the period dubbed them "prime time homos". How quaint - prime time homos! Mind you, given Dave's belted beige cardigan with upturned Presley collar, people were always going to talk.
And then there was the eating. If the car was stopped between spurts of burning rubber and bonnet-gymnastics, Starsky and Hutch dined inside. Presumably this was to indicate the notion that cool crime-busters can never relax. Perhaps it was also to push the delights of junk food. Whatever the reason, the pair would munch away on pizzas, burgers and "dogs"; never finishing anything, of course, before rubber-burning time would arrive. Then, usually on a tip-off from Huggy, they'd screech into action to keep America great.
But it wasn't all simple fun. The series has left a legacy of saddos in its wake. We saw a few obsessives, among them Steve Hanson, a "Starsky and Hutch memorabilia collector". Steve has a big shed full of kitsch dedicated to the show. He even has a six-inch-high Starsky doll complete with belted beige cardigan. He cradled it like a mother would a sleeping infant. Other saddos have painted their cars in the red and white livery. Even Hutch (David Soul), who seems to be quite a gentle sort of bloke, was moved to give advice. "Get a life," he said. Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) just shook his head.
But Steve is not to be discouraged. He has all the stats too. "In the four series, there were 255 arrests in total," he said. Right, Steve - get a life, you madman! Still, at least he was there when Starsky and Hutch was in its prime. Gail Porter, who seems to be the current rent-a-TV-blonde, was also consulted. A twentysomething, who recently bared her bum for the cover of a lads' mag - what could she remember about a 1970s cop show? Getting a life is one thing - but inhabiting other people's memories, like a psychic cuckoo, is the push equivalent of the fratprats' pull.
The rest of Starsky and Hutch Night included their pilot movie and a couple of eh, "classic" episodes. In one of these, Hutch was forcibly turned into a heroin (sorry, "horse") junkie. Real French Connection stuff, it was considered too graphic by the BBC when it was first released. The finale to the celebration saw Starsky, Hutch, Huggy and Captain Dobey reunited in London. They all agreed that they had come together "to bring closure" to the gig. The guff was a pity but the overlaid jazz-funk theme music was evocative and rather more sophisticated than the whooo, whooo, whoooing of the 1990s.
Equally evocative of a culture which has all but passed was One Hundred Years Of Pioneers. Really, watching this was like watching 1950s Ireland transplanted to the present. About 40,000 teetotallers pitched up in Croke Park last Sunday to celebrate their own sobriety. Aonghus McAnally was compere for the day and his first act was to introduce Sweet Heart Of Jesus, sung by Ronan Tynan and Niamh Murray. Sweet heart of Jesus, indeed - but the resilience of the Catholic Ireland that's now under siege was, in its own way, poignant.
The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, we learned, was founded by Fr James Cullen in Dublin's St Francis Xavier's church in 1898. In the light - or darkness - of recent Church scandals, the mass mass celebrated by Archbishop Desmond Connell, was like a requiem for a disappearing Ireland. McAnally tried to inject a sense of jovial celebration to the day but, in truth, he went too far. "And a special round of applause for Niamh for wearing a little guna like that on a freezing day in Croke Park," he said. The punters clapped wearily. But this guff of fior- Gael bonhomie was not acceptable.
Mind you, when Ronan Tynan sang You'll Never Walk Alone, there must have been, for GAA extremists, a sense of defilement of Croke Park. McAnally encouraged the 40,000 to sing along. But if he had any notion of a Kop of Pioneers, he was seriously let down. Most just sat motionless and seemed either bored or utterly unaware of the irony of that song in that location. It was, by and large, a grey attendance. Few young people were present and the decision to parade pioneer teenagers across the pitch merely emphasised their scarcity.
Footage from June, 1959, when the organisation celebrated its 60th anniversary, with a turnout of 60,000 of the then estimated half a million Irish pioneers, further emphasised its decline. The cynical might observe that such jubilee gatherings are essentially occasions for people to celebrate their indulgence in abstinence. Perhaps. But this year's gathering had a sense of finality about it. In the last year of this century, the tribe of the Catholic sober came together to celebrate. But most of them must have known that this was as much a wake as a celebration.
Finally, the Eurovision Song Con- test. Like Starsky and Hutch and the Pioneers, it has probably had its day. This year's gig from Israel was utterly appalling and not even worth making jokes about. Running since 1956, it may well limp on until its 50th anniversary, but at this stage it can't be taken either seriously or even as a vehicle for light comedy. Winning it is generally a passport to oblivion, so Ireland's poor showing means nothing for the performers. The decent thing to do would be to put it and us out of our annual misery. That, at least, is the vote of this non-member of the Dublin jury . . .