Warriors, Saturday/Sunday, BBC1
To Russia with Love, TV3, Sunday
Agenda, TV3, Sunday
Small Potatoes, Tuesday, Channel 4
How Do You Want Me? BBC2, Wednesday
This was the best of weeks and the worst of weeks for public service television. Not surprisingly, the good news came from across the Irish Sea, where the BBC's mini-series, Warriors, was a superb affirmation of public service values. The bad news, as usual, came from Donnybrook, where RTE's death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts continues. The contrast couldn't be more stark.
Actually, it doesn't happen very often that a programme on any channel comes along which reminds you how powerful TV drama can be. But Warriors, Peter Kosminsky's harrowing, brilliant two-parter about British peacekeepers in Bosnia, showed us again that popular prime-time drama can touch parts that no other form can reach. The popular, prime-time element is important: it takes a real commitment to public service values to commission and produce an expensive drama on a subject as grim as this, then schedule it on the main channel over two weekend nights. Because Warriors was no easy, sentimental tearjerker; ostensibly an anti-war drama in a familiar mould, it invites us all to consider our own culpability in the moral vacuum created by the collapse of Yugoslavia by turning the genre on its head, showing us men whose lives are ruined by the fact that they are forbidden to fight. It also forces us to reconsider the awful cynicism and hypocrisy which can underlie such fine-sounding phrases as "humanitarian aid" and "neutrality".
Set in western Herzegovina during the three-way Croat-Muslim-Serb war of 1992/1993, Warriors's title is bleakly ironic: it refers to the armoured personnel carriers in which the soldiers went about their business; it also points up the horrible absurdity of the job they were sent to do. Prevented by their UN mandate from intervening in the conflict, these highly-trained, superbly-equipped warriors watch helplessly as villages are burned, families are slaughtered and flabby, murderous thugs laugh in their faces. Under the terms of the mandate, the troops could only evacuate the injured; women and children who were unhurt were left to be slaughtered.
We're familiar with these facts from media coverage at the time, and the fine documentary series The Death of Yugoslavia covered many of the same issues, but television drama has the power to bring the emotional impact of these events into our homes in a way factual programming can never do. Kosminsky has made some of the most memorable and controversial programmes of the last 20 years, including Shoot to Kill and The Falklands War: The Untold Story. What was particularly impressive about Warriors was the way it functioned both as angry polemic and gripping drama. Brilliant, gut-wrenching television.
Two home-produced programmes in one day - something is finally stirring at TV3, it seems. With its unending diet of American gloop and tired British re-runs, the commercial channel has come in for its fair (and deserved) share of criticism since its launch last year, so it's only right and proper that any such signs of life should be welcomed. Agenda is a daytime current affairs show of the sort familiar from British channels, and it will be interesting to see if Irish audiences will take to the notion of tuning into this kind of thing at noon on a Sunday (they can always catch up with the repeat later in the evening). Host David McWilliams is an economist, although you wouldn't know it from his chirpy demeanour and relative youth, and the show will clearly have an emphasis on business matters. Indeed, there was a touch too much chumminess in the last part of the programme, where McWilliams and a TCD economist (his former lecturer, it appeared) seemed to be involved in a mutual love-in on the subject of Ireland's need for an educated labour force.
Agenda had some of the clunkiness you'd expect from any maiden outing, especially on a channel as devoted to cheap imports as TV3, but there's a promising sense of ambition there, and in McWilliams it has a refreshingly opinionated presenter. Eamon Dunphy has proved in radio that it's possible to cover current affairs in a different way from RTE, and to make a success of it. It would be a cause for celebration if TV3 were to do the same thing for television. One wonders, though, whether it's possible to find an audience in that unpromising Sunday slot.
TV3's 20/20 slot on Sunday evenings has been an odd grab-bag of short Irish documentaries and bought-in American reports, but last Sunday's offering, To Russia With Love, was a little more substantial than usual, telling the story of the efforts of a group of Irish women to improve conditions in a Russian orphanage. We've seen this kind of subject matter on TV plenty of times before, but Louise Wadley's film had a good eye for the little extraneous details which bring these stories to life, and was blessed with a natural star in its central character, Dubliner Debbie Deegan. You wouldn't want to get into a fight with Debbie, a Panzer tank of a woman with a taste for designer clothes and extravagant hairdos, but she sure gets things done, and the chronicle of her efforts to adopt a couple of the most damaged children from the orphanage made for an hour of touching, entertaining television.
Another big week for Navan men, with Pierce Brosnan all over the airwaves, plugging the new Bond movie, Dylan Moran amiably shuffling his way through How Do You Want Me?, and Tommy Tiernan getting into the stride of his sitcom, Small Potatoes. In truth, Tiernan's programme is the least impressive of the three, with its cheesy production values and very uneven script. As the aimless video store worker, Tiernan has a certain wistful charm, but that's not enough to carry the show.
The idea of a slacker sitcom clearly appeals to the current regime at Channel 4 - the channel's Friday night offering, Spaced, which recently finished its first series, occupies similar terrain to Small Potatoes - but slackerdom itself seems like a fairly dated concept these days (it was pretty trite to begin with), and the sitcom format, complete with grating laughter track, bad sets and worse lighting, is a huge turn-off, especially when shot in the increasingly annoying wobblycam which infests so many programmes these days. The sooner programme-makers rediscover the joys of the camera tripod, the better. But the real bottom line with Small Potatoes is that Richard Pinto and Sharat Sardana's scripts just don't cut the mustard.
In contrast, How Do You Want Me? is getting better and better. The premise is not that different from Small Potatoes - aimless young Irishman among the Brits - but the devil is in the quirky detail. After so many years of watching movies and TV series about Englishmen coming to Ireland to be amused/appalled/murdered by the colourful local populace, it's refreshing to see the tables turned, with urbane, quizzical Dylan Moran adrift in the bizarre world of rural England. On the surface, How Do You Want Me? looks at first like a familiar, conservative form of generic British television drama, a la Ballykissangel, but it's more subversive than that, playing adeptly with classic comic themes of embarrassment and confusion, and managing to be very funny without actually having any real gags. This week's episode had the hapless Moran straying nearer than usual into stand-up territory, showing his credentials as the worst teacher in the world when trying to explain photography to the local yokels.
Small Potatoes may not be much good, but then that's true of most first-time sitcoms. The chance to fail at something, then try something new, is part of the process of making television - except, it seems, in RTE. The current series The Irish Empire surely missed an opportunity in ignoring the boatloads of Irish comedians who have left these shores in the 1990s. It has been suggested many times that Montrose must be full of red faces at not picking up on talents such as Tiernan, Moran, Graham Linehan (no relation), Arthur Mathews et al, but one wonders if that's really the case - just think how much trouble they might have caused. In any case, as they check their handsome royalties and tot up their residuals, the current generation of Irish writers and actors must be thanking their lucky stars that they never got their calls returned by RTE.
Our national broadcaster takes great pleasure in informing us ad nauseam that it is "supporting the arts", but hot on the heels of last week's decision to axe Later with John Kelly comes word that it is considering dropping Cursai Ealaine, thus shredding its television arts coverage in one fell swoop. In typical Montrose fashion, the Cursai Ealaine team were told last week that their show was a goner, only to be informed a few days later that it was "under review". Who'd want a career in Irish television? Meanwhile, the books programme Imprint has had its budgets slashed and its series shortened compared to last year.
No programme has an automatic right to stay on the air, and any broadcaster should be continually reviewing, changing and improving its output. But it's quite clear that the current cuts have absolutely nothing to do with programming strategy or long-term planning. The rumour mill in RTE has it that the station has run into severe financial difficulties for the second time in 12 months, and that the administration is searching desperately for areas to cut. Because of its bizarre and top-heavy structure, the only place where cuts are possible is in the so-called core activity, programme-making, where talented, creative, productive people (most of them on contract) are let go so that the permanent, pensionable middle management can stay. The people of this country pay a licence fee, in theory to fund a public service broadcaster, in reality to finance a swollen, superannuated and unproductive bureaucracy. Supporting the arts? Maybe there are some comedians in RTE, after all.
