The Rose of Tralee (RT╔1, Monday, Tuesday)
Greatest 100 Kids TV (Channel 4, Monday)
Celebrity: The Rise and Fall (Channel 4, Sunday)
New York Tumble (Network 2, Tuesday)
It Might seem odd to point this out, but RT╔'s high-brow arts review show is not titled Later with Marty Whelan. There is no late-night political debate show, Whelan. Saturday evenings have been free of the mix of light music and chat that could be The Marty Whelan Show. Nobody has commissioned Dilemmas with Marty Whelan.
Irish television is filled with people over-reaching themselves, whether it's radio presenters doing television or continuity announcers hosting chat-shows. They are rather like butchers who reckon they can make decent surgeons because the principle seems pretty much the same. There always seems to be someone happy to pass the scalpel. Marty Whelan hosts Open House, Fame and Fortune and, once a year, The Rose of Tralee. These are not shows requiring a presenter who gives the impression that, in a just world, he would be interviewing the Dalai Lama instead.
On British television this week, the current predilection towards nostalgic programmes for thirtysomethings with titles such as I Love Yesterday and The 100 Best Hairstyles of 1984 got completely out of control. We, meanwhile, had The Rose of Tralee, another misty-eyed, "did she really wear that?" throw-back to the distant television past, only it's remade every year. Some 750,000 people watch it, apparently. Given that it was on for a full seven hours over two days, though, you wonder how that figure isn't higher. It is like a mountain you need to get round before you find the safety of other programmes.
In Marty, it has a presenter who is out of time, but in the best place for it. He took to The Rose of Tralee with the relish of a cheese-lover approaching a particularly pungent brie. He wears the word compΦre like a fitted tuxedo. In everything he does, he ignores the fashion for cynicism, irony and kitsch and gets on with the job. He does not use members of the public as his stooge, instead allowing them to get on with the time-honoured Irish tradition of saying hello to everybody back home in Ballyporeen.
His now-you-see-it, now-you-don't hair is the talk of the nation, and depending on how the studio lights catch his scalp, it sometimes shimmers with all the glory of the aurora borealis. His moustache, a stalwart through so many changes in fashion, must have a portrait of itself hidden in the attic. He is a presenter who has paid his dues, found his niche and has made himself curiously indispensable, even if the shows he presents are not. Long live Marty. Let's hope his hair lasts the pace too.
On the subject of those nostalgia shows, this was the week when British television's interest in them went from being a passing fancy to a full-blown stalking. You couldn't turn on the telly without finding one of them staring back at you with an eagerness that suggested it might be wise to move away for a while until they get bored and go bother somebody else.
Whatever about TV's Best Ever Soap Moments on Thursday night, Wednesday's Going For The Burn - a look back at TV's wackiest keep-fit presenters - may have been aired purely to test the tolerance levels of the viewing public. If it hadn't meant getting off the sofa to do it, I would have thrown the telly out of the window.
100 Greatest Kids TV was three hours of classics, recalled by unknown comedians, television presenters you've never actually seen on the television and academics who could give a post-modern deconstruction of the weather forecast. It featured an American academic with hair like an old glue-brush and who gave away her interpretations like they were a job lot. The conclusions? Everybody was either gay or on drugs. Sesame Street: drugs. Bert and Ernie: gay. Jamie and His Magic Torch: drugs. Mr Benn, he literally came out of a closet every week: gay. Tinky-Winky, handbag, purple, triangle on his head: gay. Bagpuss; gay and on drugs. George the pink, effeminate hippo in Rainbow: screaming. OK, I'll concede that one.
Of course, nostalgia programmes will have completely devoured the schedules by early next 2002 and there will be nothing original left on television to get nostalgic about. The kids of the future will watch programmes with titles like I Remember Nothing. The comedy series TV To Go has a sketch about it, a pastiche in which talking heads reminisce about the nostalgia shows they used to watch as kids. "And there was always one northern comedian who nobody had ever heard of," says one. Cut to northern comedian nobody has ever heard of.
Keith Harris and Orville didn't make it into the Top 100, although they did turn up in Celebrity: The Rise and Fall, an utterly vacuous excuse for a programme - save for some scary anecdotes about those who long ago lost their grip on the bottom rung of celebrity. It got so bad for Keith Harris that, after his 1980s heyday, he could only get auditions by telling promoters that he was a Keith Harris and Orville tribute act. "Come along son, and we'll have a look at you," the promoters would say. Now, he makes his cash by playing to drunken students, putting dirty words in Orville's mouth to spice things up a little. It showed Orville sitting backstage on a chair while Harris ran on to open the show, a sadness in the green bird's big, black, unblinking eyes. I may, obviously, be reading a little too much into that.
For £2 a ticket, you can now see former pop star Jason Donovan perform in a Luton pub, although that's nothing compared with poor Don Estelle. The little guy from It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum sings his hit song Whispering Grass to an audience of two in a supermarket in Manchester. Whispering Grass, over and over. Given the standard of television at the moment, they should give that man his own show.
"He looks like a Bono," said Guggi, the artist, about his mate, in Gary Jermyn's New York Tumble. Bono did look like a Bono. In fact, he has seldom looked more like a Bono, strutting through Central Park with the preternaturally black hair, the blue shades, the creaking leather; spitting out profundities like old chewing gum. Bono, as you may have noticed, only speaks in profundities. "The park is a big love," say. Or, "We're Jamaicans who can't dance". They're not even the best examples. There were lots more, but by the time I'd figured out exactly what he meant and tried to write it down, Bono would be about three profundities further on and I'd feel cheated for having missed out.
In New York Tumble, we were told how the old gang was conquering New York. So that's where King Kong went wrong. Why climb the Empire State Building when a low-key installation of his own distinctive brand of abstract art would do? Friends should not interview friends and Gary Jermyn high-fived like he was an old friend of everybody's.
Two minutes couldn't go by without Guggi being invited to say how great Gavin Friday is. Or Gavin Friday being invited to say how great Guggi is. Or Bono being invited to say how great they both are. Jermyn was given the kind of access few journalists get, but I suspect it was only because Bono knew that he wasn't exactly going to be dealing with Ruby Wax.
The singer is giving away Christy Turlington when she marries actor Ed Burns later this year. "Has Christy changed your life?" Jermyn asked Burns, who was momentarily paralysed by the platitudinous question. At the opening of Guggi's exhibition, Michael Stipe was interviewed while wearing a particularly ridiculous afro wig. He really should have been asked about it, if only out of politeness. Ruby Wax would have yanked it off his head.
Everybody, but everybody, was invited to say how great Bono was, sometimes through the question, "How did you first meet Bono?", delivered in the hushed but excited tone of one referring to a living saint. Everyone agreed that he is, indeed, great.
I've paid £39.50 to see U2 in Slane today. If Bono doesn't walk across the surface of the Boyne, turn my water into a flagon of cider and then climax the show by ascending skywards in an apocalyptic torrent of flames, I'm asking for my money back.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
