RT╔ News - (Tuesday)
Winds of Change - (RT╔1 Monday)
The Office - (BBC2 Monday)
Slave Nation - (C4 Wednesday)
RT╔ has had this self-promotional ad running over the past few months in which various faces of the station are shown standing tall across the land. Isn't it great we're here, they're saying. You'd be lost without us. Maybe for the summer months they could have shown them packing their suitcases and gazing over the beaches of Marbella. And, yes, in one respect, we are lost without them.
RT╔ isn't alone in thinning out the schedules over these barren summer months filled largely with made-for-TV movies and repeats - but does everything have to go at the same time? The news coverage at the moment is an embarrassment. TV3 has hardly been a leader in current affairs and could only cut back by scrapping its news altogether. By dropping Prime Time to one Thursday night a week, then, RT╔ has effectively left the Irish viewer hamstrung. The main evening news is largely an extended headline. If a story breaks, we've to wait until Prime Time lumbers in and adds a little flesh to the story - if they cover it at all. In the meantime, if you want to find out more, read the newspaper or listen to the radio.
There is another option. On Tuesday night, two Irish stories led the news both at home and in the UK: the withdrawal of the IRA's decommissioning proposals and the arrest of three Irishmen in Colombia. On RT╔, it was soundbites and press conference footage.
There was nobody in studio to extrapolate on the IRA's decision and nobody live by satellite to answer a few awkward questions. On BBC2, though, Newsnight's Mark Urban revealed the backgrounds of the men in Colombia, before Sinn Fein's Mitchell McLaughlin was given an ineffective grilling from Kirsty Wark. On Channel 4 News that evening, a full 15 minutes was given over to these two stories, including a live interview with Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey.
To find out what was happening in our own country, it became necessary to watch the television from somebody else's. Maybe RT╔ gave the story better treatment on the Six-One News (I didn't see it), but that's no use to those relying on the Nine O'Clock News as a primary source of television news. If all these RT╔ people come back onto my screen in the autumn with tans, I'll throw the remote control at the screen.
At a time when there is so little current affairs on Irish television, George Lee's Winds of Change promised to be a welcome, intelligent, relevant series on the future state of the world economy. Maybe it could have been - if Lee didn't seem so pleased to be swanning around Europe with various economic gurus that he appeared to forget there were questions to be asked, and instead adopted their euphemistic, economic gobbledegook. Apart from the clichΘs ("So far, Ireland has done well in surfing the technological wave in a global sea of change.") there was the disappointment in seeing the normally probing Lee accepting the economists' reading so easily. On Monday night, he met US economist Gail Fosler in Paris, and if he had sat on her knee and asked for a gottle of geer he couldn't have looked more like a ventriloquist's dummy. At one point he used the phrase, "people who are re-structured out of their jobs". The word, George, is "sacked".
Judging by George's heavy coat and the grey skies over the Eiffel Tower, this was made sometime last winter, which would explain the rampant optimism of the programme. Microsoft European Operations MD Kevin Dillon, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Fosler, Lee; everybody was simply delighted with how well things were going. Sure, there'll be a little "re-structuring" here and there and we'll have to make the rules up as we go along, but if we just tread carefully everything's going to be hunky-dory.
Granted it was made before the latest job losses but there wasn't a chastening voice to be heard; only Bertie denouncing the doomsayers as he delivered a "sure, we're only a small country doing great things" conference speech. Fosler, meanwhile, was allowed a free run on the development of globalisation, in which "individual, multinational, government and non-governmental organisation" increasingly come together in mutually beneficial co-operation to ensure economic growth. Let's see her try that line in a Filipino sweatshop. "There are no easy answers," concluded Lee, of the road ahead. But how could there be when there are so few hard questions asked?
HOWEVER barren the schedules have been, at least The Office has bloomed. This is another of the mock docu-soaps which have provided much of the best comedy of late, maybe because they cut closer to the bone than the standard sitcom set-up of big punchlines and exaggerated performances. With The Office, set in the utterly convincing premises of a stationery company, every character is instantly recognisable, the politics sharply observed and the jokes allowed plenty of room to breathe. Only boss's lackey and military obsessive Garreth, played by Mackenzie Crook, is hammed up. But to see scrawny, skeletal Crook, his eyes so sunken they're but a distant memory, is to witness a living, breathing cartoon - and there's nothing you can do to avoid that.
At its core is Ricky Gervais's achingly well-observed office manager David Brent, deep in a Napoleon complex ("I'm taking these guys into battle. Am I supposed to do my own stapling?"). He is believable down to every tic and mannerism: the way he constantly shifs the knot on his tie, fixes his jacket, talks to the camera rather than the employees, laughs at his own jokes, the smarmy half-smile, his habit of finishing other people's sentences so an idea seems like his. Like all the great comedy characters, of course, he loses every round.
On Monday night, the staff headed to Chasers nightclub ("Hooch for a pound and Wonderbras get in for free"). Brent was less than successful with ladies.
"He couldn't pull in a brothel," someone jibed.
"I could. And I have." Believe me when I tell you there was more pathos in that line than it might suggest.
Watch it and see how many of your own work colleagues you can spot.
And when you go looking for yourself, at least be honest about it.
Chrissy the Egg Person could have walked on to the set of The Office and nobody would have batted an eyelid. Chrissy was a very real manager in a very surreal setting of the Egg-bank call centre visited by Darcus Howe in Slave Nation and he had a nice line in motivation. "You are all individuals," he told the staff, "that's very important. But you must also make money for Egg. Is that clear? Say, yes Chrissy". Yes Chrissy. "Any questions? No? Good. We'll move on . . ." But you can never move on from Darcus. He is like a persistent child, always asking why, why, why, even when he already knows the answer.
IN this series, he takes aim at those areas of modern life which appear to leave us free, but which he believes are only elevated forms of slavery. He is a convincing, entertaining commentator, unveiling his thesis not through gentle massaging, but by taking a pair of pliers and wet electrodes to it. His interrogation of Mike, a 16-hour a day worker, left the poor guy in tears. "I feel sorry for your son," Darcus told him over a game of bingo. "He deserves more from you. Why don't you give him some of those hours back?" After destroying Mike, he then took on a whole factory, which brings us back to the Egg plant (sorry). He became so tired of hearing the same things from the Egg People - as the Egg people called themselves - that the programme took to drowning their opinions out with music.
Very, very rude . . . but if you'd heard what they had to say. If you've seen the scene from The Life of Brian, in which Brian addresses the masses come to worship him, you'll understand. "You're all individuals," Brian tells them. "I'm not," says a lone voice from somewhere in the crowd.
Darcus visited at Christmas, when workers in the football-pitch sized call centre were dressed as snowmen and singing carols about meeting next year's targets. Egg person after Egg person told him how great it was, how passionate they felt about being an Egg Person in their Egg World. Darcus could only conclude that it was slavery, but at least on slave plantations, the people knew they were breaking their backs for the profit of others. In Egg, there were only compliant, ignorant, brainwashed, corporate slaves. "They dress them up. I think it's a kind of humiliation. They take away their individuality and replace it with an Egg personality." Easter must be hell.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
