The Human Body (BBC 1, Wednesday) The Saturday Show (RTE 1) Beg To Differ (Channel 4, Monday) Joyce: The Journey Home (RTE 1, Tuesday)
`It's wrinkled like a walnut and has the consistency of a mushroom," said Robert Winston, describing the human brain he was holding in his hand. With billions of wrinkled, mushroomy walnuts engrossed by the human manoeuvring of leathery spheres, there wasn't much alternative to football on TV this week. Still, there was The Human Body: Brain Power, a garish but sometimes captivating eulogy to the human brain, described, by Winston's human brain, albeit with rather too much self-satisfaction, as "the most complicated object in the known universe".
To illustrate the brain's astounding complexity, Winston used simple analogies: car engines, termite mounds and New York city. He didn't remark on the irony of his complex walnut selecting simple images to explain itself. But then, science doesn't really like irony, does it? Winston prefers the Amazing Facts approach - a method guaranteed to impress the impressionable but, when used to excess, to leave the weary feeling like they've been mugged by yet more hype and PR.
Consider the Amazing Facts aspect of the Winston method. He asked us to imagine a city the size of New York in which every inhabitant has 10,000 pieces of string, each of which is tied to another inhabitant. Now increase the city tenfold and you get a Winston model for the neuronal networks of the average human brain. Well, OK. But trying to picture, say, 100 million people (10 New Yorks) each holding 10,000 pieces of string tied to other people is rather stringing it out. Most brains can't do it. Therefore, this model of the brain is rather too complicated for the brain itself.
And that, it seems, is a central aim of the Amazing Facts approach. It's designed, like that old chestnut about more stars than grains of sand on all the world's beaches, to produce more awe than explanation. No wonder, then, that Winston decided to get totally drunk. Now that we can understand. He did it to show how "the cocktail of chemicals that is the brain are so finely balanced that they can be easily altered". Clearly, Winston altered his own cocktail of chemicals to an alarming degree in order to produce that moustache. What was he thinking?
Still, Winston's enthusiasm, which makes him seem like Groucho Marx doing a Magnus Pike impression, can be commendable when it's not smugly seeking to produce awe. He explained how the cerebellum stores practised movements such as cycling, piano-playing or football skills. He didn't explain how Brazilian cerebella seem capable of storing such elaborate football skills. Then again, Winston is not Jimmy Hill because as all football fans know, there's only one Jimmy Hill, no matter how similar humanity's wrinkled walnuts (use your imagination!) are supposed to be.
It was when considering human individuality that Winston introduced the concept of consciousness. Describing consciousness - our ability to be aware of our own thoughts and feelings - as "the greatest of the brain's qualities", he said that, unlike other aspects of the mind, consciousness is not located in a specific site. Rather, it is a function of the whole brain, a product which demonstrates that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Now, he was sucking diesel and entering football pundit territory. Like the neurons in the brain or the individual termites in a termite mound, it is the acting, interacting and reacting in teams, which produce the awesome complexities. Individual skill allied to the varied passing game - in twos, threes, dozens or billions - can produce the kind of art which includes music, literature, painting and Brazilian football. But then, we sort of knew that, didn't we?
Beyond that - the ability to be conscious of being conscious of being conscious - Winston didn't go. Recognising the concept of infinite consciousness, he consciously decided to put a word upon it: soul. Others may have preferred words like "self" or "spirit" because, as Winston pointed out when considering language and human society, wrinkled walnuts have an insatiable desire to be "number one". In such a context, language has connotations often appropriated by the desire to dominate. In itself, "soul" is a fine word but organised religions have too often used it for the darker, "number one" projects of dark, megalomaniac minds.
Visually designed to stimulate the optic nerve - as television, by definition, does anyway - The Human Body was at least realistic in admitting that much of the brain's functioning remains a mystery. Our century's scientific advances have been genuinely awe-inspiring but we're still pretty ignorant about the wrinkled walnut. One thing though: its memory likes games and stories. We saw Dominic O'Brien, who can memorise thousands of numbers, explain his technique: 1000799, for instance, is "Dudley Moore meets James Bond for an icecream". What a clever walnut, eh? Now try
The fare was rather less cerebral on The Saturday Show. Bibi Baskin, whose number appeared to be up a few years back, returned to interview Tony Booth, Daniel O'Donnell, Lionel Blair and a clairvoyant named Una. If Una can really see into the future, then her neurons are firing in an even more interesting way than Ronaldo's. Tony's neurons, after a life of altering his cocktail of chemicals, were, not surprisingly, firing simultaneously in as many directions as the Cameroon football team. Lionel's produced an extraordinary staccato of smiles across his face and Daniel's . . . well now.
As ever, Daniel seemed suffused by nice neurons. His niceness has seen him postpone his next "tea-party" until the year 2000. He has fans, he explained, who would travel - even from abroad - to his tea parties if he were to hold them every month. But Daniel thinks that such devotion is too expensive for his fans, so he's going easy on the tea for a few years. Well, into every life, I suppose, must creep a little discipline. One day at a time, sweet Jesus, and all that. Is there, I wonder, a Betty Ford type outfit for tea-party groupies who just can't control themselves?
Do some fans end up mainlining Lyon's, Lipton's or Barry's? Perhaps there's a black market in Earl Grey for the hopeless cases. It all sounded amazing but, then again, tea-party addicts are no more bizarre than rock groupies. I mean, if you really believe that people should let it all hang out, then tea mania must be allowed to brew away to its heart's content. After all, a tea-bag, though it does contain the drugs caffeine and tannin, is not going to scramble the walnut like a £20 bag of smack.
Daniel revealed that he "is not as available as he was". Bibi remarked, enigmatically, that she was never aware that he was all that available in the first place. Make of that what you will, those of you with nasty little walnuts. Anyway, Daniel has "met somebody" and good luck to him. Maybe it's Ginger Spice. Now that would be a double act, one that all undead walnuts would really, really want to see. I can feel the neurons bristling at the prospect.
The Tony Booth interview, reasonably, if predictably, went over the ground about Tony Blair, Elsie Tanner and Alf Garnett. In fairness to Bibi, Tony didn't make it too easy for her, although it was clear that she completely misunderstood him about time being a great healer. "I take it your answer is `no'," she bellowed, when most of us took it that his answer was going to be "yes". It looked like she regarded her agenda of questions as being more important than establishing a rapport with her, albeit, difficult guest.
Summer TV on RTE is notoriously awful. The manufactured light-heartedness and contrived bonhomie are annually as depressing as the summer weather. In fairness, The Saturday Show was not among the worst of the genre and it was a first night. We have seen far worse but still, improvement is required. Perhaps the show could be less stridently elated and just let the mood emanate from the exchanges. It's not that heavy, dour interviews are needed. But Butlinsesque bonhomie is just too false to be entertaining. Going with the flow is more engaging.
AS English yobbos rioted in Marseille, Channel 4 screened the opening episode of a new six-part series about "Britain's underclass". This was the economic underclass, you understand, not the employed, moral underclass, with the means to travel to France to spoil the party. Anyway, homeless people and other subculture representatives explained the workings of their wrinkled walnuts. Much of it was sad and pitiful; the rest, with one exception, was just deadly boring.
The exception was the bloke with the wickedly satirical little walnut who decided that homeless people needed "a new brand image". So, he set up "Homeless 2000", spoke the relevant guff about branding, marketing and focus groups. His focus groups cited "aggression and lack of hygiene" as negatives attaching to the public perception of the homeless. Using a usual bag of PR tricks - balloons, street theatre, loud music - he called a press conference. Delightful mickey-taking.
Less delightful were the lessons in fellatio offered by male prostitute Juan Mace to suburban women. You don't need the details of this exercise (at least not in this space). Suffice to say that Juan used a plastic, pink penis and his demonstration techniques, while based on the pioneering methods of suburban, Tupperware parties of 30 or more years ago, were thorough. The programme concluded with an item on homeless people's burials in public graves. This was genuinely sad but the mix of items - vulgar and flippant - rather debased it all.
Finally, Joyce - The Journey Home. It was Bloomsday on Tuesday but this was the sole new programme in an RTE 1 evening devoted to the author of Ulysses. Made by Ian Graham, it focused on the restoration of Dublin's number 35 North Great George's Street, which now houses the James Joyce Cultural Centre. It included a David Norris reading, extracts from films of The Dead and A Painful Case and it had Carmencita Hederman too. As a simple documentary, it was fine - well-filmed and well-packaged. But as the only new offering for Bloomsday, it was rather insubstantial. Perhaps the day, if it has to be celebrated by people getting rigged out with boaters, striped blazers, canes and all the rest, ought to be done just every 10 years. Perhaps years ending in four (to mark 1904) would be best. Certainly, it seems now to have become rather tiresome - at least as an annual event. Still, football-fever; tea-party groupies; Homeless 2000; literary groupies - that wrinkled little walnut has to be able to laugh at what it gets people to do. Best to laugh with it.