Television soap gets in the eyes of Ireland's dozy hicks

THE scene, you might think, should be dripping with menace the bewilderment of the old man duped into picking up a tough and tarty girl gang the gang leader's coy, sly, psychopathic leer as she writhes around the front seat, murmuring suggestively to "grandad" that this could be "his lucky day" the knife, the pathetic struggle.

Then the shouts... "Is tha' your gaff? Is tha' your house... I'm talkin' to YOU, wrinkly arse".

"Ye'll enjoy this," she sneers, as she delves into his trouser pockets. "Bitch," spits the old man, pinioned back on the seat, as she daubs him with lipstick.

Yes, you lucky non-viewers are doubtless thinking, this sure as hell must have been oozing menace ... except that, by now, my 11 year old daughter was laughing so hard she fell off the couch. Think fast. Should I turf her on to the streets for such crass insensitivity or just be grateful that her critical faculties had alerted her instantly to the poorly acted, badly scripted, inept piece of play acting that it was?

On the other side of the couch, the nine year old had stiffened a bit and was showing a greater reluctance than usual to go to bed. At which point, it dawned on me that the last time we watched Glenroe together, a girl was raped. Suddenly, there was real menace in the room all right, but it was emanating from me. I wanted to put my boot through the television.

As the theme music diddly-ayed through the credits, it was not yet nine o'clock. This, after all, was a rural soap opera going out at peak family viewing time (and repeated for good measure at an even earlier time on Thursdays), watched by over a million people every week. As I patted the nine year old and considered a po-faced lecture along the lines of "Yes, the presentation was laughably rotten but the issue is NO laughing matter" for her older sister, the anger dissipated and I felt beyond weary.

Was I turning into a Kildare version of "Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells", a fringe member of the Irish Family League, a Tipper Gore for the 90s, a Mary Whitehouse for the new century? And what did it matter anyway, if I was? Something surely was awry here and maybe, for once, it wasn't me. For, lately, every waking moment seems to see me and my children skating around ever more sensitive topics spewed up by television drama producers. I seem to be spending more and bigger chunks of precious time explaining ... endlessly explaining.

Forget television for a moment. Just this year alone, I have been forced to explain and interpret a series of real tragedies to my children the slaughter of the Dunblane infants the abduction, rape and unimaginable deaths of little girls in Belgium the torture and occasional murder of old people in Ireland, in rural areas just like ours the daylight killing of a mother in her car only a few miles from where we live. (Veronica Guerin's record as a rare and outstanding journalist was lost on children who saw the news pictures. To them, she was something much closer to home a little boy's mother.)

These events are of too great a magnitude to airbrush away children hear snippets, they glimpse footage and photographs, they talk among themselves. The issues are real, important and must he addressed, if only to reassure.

While all this is going on, parents everywhere are locked into that great dichotomy of child rearing that yearning to give children the sense of a safe, warm world, against the imperative of equipping them to deal with the dangers we know to be out here. So we try, just as the chairman of the RTE Authority, Prof Farrel Corcoran, recently advised, to be deliberate and selective" with our children's television viewing.

We may bumble along and make idiots of ourselves a hundred times a day to be sure, but it's fair to say that most of us would deliberately not select themes of rape, violence and twisted sexuality with which to entertain or educate our children there's plenty of that in the real world for them and us to cope with. Then, after all that deliberateness and selectiveness, we get mugged by, of all things, Glenroe.

SO WHAT'S going on? When Glenroe's producers and script writers assemble to discuss story lines, what is it that most exercises them the size of the audience or its nature? It seems like someone just decided at some stage that he was broadcasting to a bunch of dozy hicks out here who needed nothing as much as a sharp dose of "reality". He probably uses the word "sanitised" a lot and justifies everything with an exasperated "You've got to reflect real life, for chrissake".

And up to a point, I agree with him. But there is a world of a difference between real life tragedy and the amateurish exploitation of that tragedy by soap opera producers. And even where the production is competent and sensitive, is there not a code somewhere that states these issues are best aired after 9 p.m., at a time when most adults can be deliberate and selective just for pleasure?

But maybe I flatter him. Perhaps the answer is simpler. Is he so bereft of ideas and creativity that this is the best he can come up with? Has he just taken a shine to other people's soap operas and decided to tag along? God knows, there is quite a choice Home and Away (rape, abortion, a light touch of lesbianism "Mummy, what does `gay' mean"?) Fair City (relentless philandering, abortion, bisexuality "Do you mean, Mummy, that he only thinks he's gay?") Brookside (child rape, wife abuse, patricide).

With all that stuff escaping before the 9 p.m. watershed, why should our man in RTE have to knock himself out to be original, appealing and sensitive and all at the same time? Of course, all these themes are legitimate topics for airing and, yes, since you ask, I know there's an "off" button on the set. But surely there are lots of adults out there (and not only parents) who would like to press the "on" button in the early evening without being confronted by adulterous, wife beating cretins, unwanted pregnancies, brutalised children and issues as complex as bisexuality?

To be fair, these arguments are not just applicable to television. A few weeks ago we took the children to Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cheered by excellent reviews, buckets of popcorn and a sense that here at least we could relax into good, child centred entertainment that would require no interpreting, we sat back to enjoy. What we forgot, fatally, was the story line a tall, scary churchman crazed with lust for a sensuous gypsy girl.

"Mummy, why is that priest so angry with that woman Mugged again.