The Booker Prize (Channel 4, Monday)
The National Television Awards (ITV, Tuesday)
20/20: Stolen Lives (TV3, Sunday)
Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
THE late Timothy Leary used to stress the importance of "set and setting" to people who were considering taking LSD. There were no guarantees but the chances of avoiding a bad trip could, he argued, be enhanced if intending trippers sought a situation in which they could feel safe, comfortable and unstressed. The sets and settings for two live, prize-giving ceremonies this week were revealing: neo-Oxbridge formality for the literary set and neo-Oscar glitz for the television set. Neither was a full-blown bad trip, but both had dodgy moments.
The 31st Booker Prize and Britain's fifth National Television Awards were respectively broadcast from London's Guildhall and Albert Hall. Melvyn Bragg presented the Booker and Trevor McDonald the TV awards. 'Nuff said. Mel was surrounded by oak-panelled gravitas, Trev by Busby Berkley-like ostentation. Even if neither set and setting afforded us a deep, LSD-like glimpse of the literary and televisual unconsciousnesses, they did reveal much about the personae, self-images and public tastes of both callings. It was a pity, really, that the sets and settings weren't reversed.
No matter where it is held, the Booker Prize ceremony inevitably faces a contradiction. Critics of the award maintain that it is essentially a marketing scam to shift often unreadable books. The illusion of gravitas, they contend, is part of the hypocrisy - marketing pretending that it's nothing quite so coarse or vulgar. They have a point. They had an even more forceful point when Mel announced the Guildhall menu. We didn't really need to know what the Booker guests were eating as they waited to hear which author had won. It was, I'm afraid, a case of Hello! magazine meets The Times Literary Supplement.
It would be unfair, of course, to deny the fiction-publishing industry a chance to flog its products. But there is something pharisaical in using a kind of decorum, which seeks to stress its own sense of its own integrity, as a marketing tool. Add such a set and setting to rumours that some major authors have "Booker entry" written into their contracts and the grubbiness of the publishing business, like that of all business, is put in sharper focus. The cheque for winning the Booker Prize may be only £20,000 - restraint in the amount of the prize-money suggesting that mere lucre is just a token within a greater glory.
But shrewd marketing has made the Booker (the Nobel excepted) the most coveted - and, because of its effect on sales, the most profitable - literary prize on this side of the Atlantic. Anyway, this year, in a move described as a "break with tradition", a panel of "ordinary readers" - as opposed to, presumably, "extraordinary" literary critics - had their say on the televised show. This tempering of traditional gravitas and preciousness was undoubtedly designed to give the 1999 Booker a more populist appeal. In ways it did, but the blood-sport of professional lit crit types squaring off against each other has its appeal too.
The five "ordinary readers" - among them library and telecom employees, a lawyer and a clinical psychologist - were assembled in Waterstone's Piccadilly store. It was telling that, while they agreed that J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace was a worthy winner, a number of them chose non-fiction books as their "best of the year". We would see evidence of a similarly growing preference for non-fiction programmes on the following evening's television awards. Time was when almost all autobiographical tales would be gilded as novels. Nowadays the label "nonfiction" enhances a book's commercial prospects.
There are, of course, numerous reasons for this: the growth of confessionalism, prompting people to write books with all the salacious detail included; non-fiction increasingly using the techniques of fiction; the fact that readers can and do dismiss fiction as less true because it's "just made up". Still, Mel seemed pleased that "the public and academic judgments were in tune" on choosing a winner. Mind you, five readers is a statistically indefensible sample on which to make such sweeping statements. But the verdict of the Waterstone's panel did, I suppose, give some indication.
The televising of The Booker Prize concluded with Mel speaking to Gerald Kaufman, the chairman of the judges. Ger recalled that the judges had read 129 novels to arrive at their shortlist and eventual winner. That, at an average of, say, 80,000 words a novel, is more than 10 million words of reading. You wouldn't want to be too busy with living if you were invited to be a Booker Prize judge. Anyway, maybe Colm Toibin, the sole Irish author on the final shortlist of six, shouldn't be too disappointed. Roddy Doyle won the Booker in 1993 and six years later his latest book, A Star Called Henry, has been absolutely savaged. It's a matter of taste, all right.
SWITCHING from Channel 4, an appropriately serious, minority channel for the Booker, to ITV, the grandad of commercial channels, The National Television Awards sought glitz not gravitas. It would be too easy, too blase and, ultimately, too contentious to characterise the contrast between these prizegiving gigs as high culture versus popular culture. But such are the broad, if not-quite-accurate outlines. For the TV awards, television was, of course, unlike literature, playing in its own medium. And make no mistake - it played!
The set, which might have been designed by Busby Berkley, with input from Cecil B. de Mille, was like Hollywood on acid. Perhaps they took Timothy Leary's advice too literally. A gigantic, silver-coloured replica of the award trophies towered above the stage. On both sides sweeping spiral staircases swept down to Trev's podium. You expected Fred Astaire to lead down a troupe of glittering chorus girls. Certainly, it would have been interesting to see the Booker Prize acknowledge, rather than, as it does, disguise, its own showbiz credentials, by using such a set.
No chance of that, of course. Instead we saw Trev introduce overdressed showbiz people, who, in turn, Oscar-style, introduced generally overdressed award-winners. This was spectacle to the Booker's cerebral. Like mood music in films or television programmes, you were, as you were with the Booker "ceremony", firmly prompted in how to feel and think "appropriately". You didn't need a few tabs of O'Leary's acid to see through the self-serving veneers constructed by both the literary and showbiz sets.
In its favour, the televised part of the Booker lasted just 45 minutes. The television awards gig allotted itself two long hours. In fairness, some fine programmes - Coronation Street, Goodnight Mister Tom, Parkin- son, for instance - won awards. But so too did Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Stars in Their Eyes and the Tesco Clubcard ad. The Booker programme had tried to suggest a Booker-winner by numbers (be foreign - i.e. non-British, write a historical novel that involves war, have a big theme - Holocaust or death and don't be too experimental). Corresponding advice to those who want to win a British TV award suggests that you should concentrate on sick animals or sick children.
Animal Hospital and Vets in Practice won awards, the latter pipping Children's Hospital in the Most Popular Documentary category. The logic, if that's what you can call it, of all such advice is that if you want to write a Booker winner, which is likely to be serialised on TV, then an historical account of the effects of war on children and animals is a good bet. You might consider Disgrace in Practice as a working title. You'd probably have as good a chance of becoming a millionaire as you would by appearing on Chris Tarrant's quiz hype-athon.
IN much more serious vein, 20/20 screened Louis Lentin's Stolen Lives: Our Boys' Stories. Following on from his own Dear Daughter and Mary Raftery's States of Fear, this one revisited Ireland's industrial schools. Again, it was a catalogue of physical, mental and sexual cruelty. We heard testimony from survivors of beatings, rape and forced fellatio "in the name of Christ". We heard, too, believable claims about how the "sacred seal" of confession was sometimes broken when boys discussed the horrors with priests. Given such stories, it's little wonder that non-fiction is outpacing fiction these days.
There were even suggestions that, on occasion, boys were beaten to death. And so it went . . . horror piled upon horror to the point where compassion fatigue syndrome has now become a serious impediment to a full understanding of what, in the name of Christ, went on in those places. Lentin interviewed Eamonn Murray, a former Christian Brothers postulant. Murray was intelligent and considered in describing what he called "the process" of initiation and induction which wannabe Brothers experienced.
He outlined a world in which young men like himself were encouraged to believe that they were called to serve a higher truth - God's truth - and to use whatever means they deemed necessary in such service. Clearly, boys plucked from their families as young as 12 or 13, could be made to feel that they were special, a regiment of ruthless Christian commandos, who were answerable only to their superiors within the order and to God himself. The process, as described, suggested parallels with the inductions and total conversions to fascism, which hallmarked Nazi self-delusion.
Most of the interviewees seemed broken, like concentration camp survivors. Indeed, unlike concentration camp survivors, they couldn't even account for their hellish existences on the grounds that they had been victims of an utterly ruthless war. Not surprisingly, the majority of the inmates of the industrial schools (some "schools" - huge numbers left unable to read or write!) have found it very difficult to form relationships or trust anybody. Lentin's documentary deserved a bigger audience than it is likely to have had on TV3. But at least TV3 screened a programme of relevance, wonderfully at odds with its usual schedule of lip gloss inanity.
FINALLY, Leargas. This week's edition focused on people who have chosen to educate their children at home. Correctly arguing that conventional schooling places an excessive emphasis on exams as a route to money and power, Mairead de Buitleir's interviewees perhaps over-stressed the "organic and natural" advantages of their own methods. Certainly, teachers and the State school system can damage children without even approaching the savagery of the industrial schools regime.
But Philip Larkin was right about parents too: they can also f**k you up, big-time. Still, even allowing that there are risks of parental claustrophobia in educating children at home, you'd have to wish those who've chosen to do so the best of luck. This was a comprehensive and valuable little film, which may well have caught the early stages of a trend likely to gather pace in the next century.
OH, finally, finally . . . the quote of the week on TV. Interviewed in 1987 and rescreened on Reeling In The Years, Charlie Haughey told us what he'd do if he won the then just-launched National Lottery. "I'd try to spend it for the greater good of a number of organisations, particularly sporting organisations," said Chas. "But I might keep a bit for myself." You couldn't make it up, could you? Fact hammers fiction again.