Despite the reported demise of the lad fad, television hyped the phenomenon's ingredients more than ever in 1998. Football, babes and even blue TV were conspicuously pervasive this year. It's called dumbing down but it's primarily about cashing in, as the rivalry for ratings, in a growing jungle of a market, shapes TV schedules around such racy staples of the advertising industry.
In Ireland, the arrival of TV3, which seduced a number of TnaG's babes with promises of greater exposure, was, nominally, the television event of the year. However, the impact of the new, independent channel has been limited. Much more a business venture than a cultural one, it looks like a provincial version of Sky TV. It did, in fairness, perform adequately, if embarrassingly pushily, when it finally got its chance to broadcast to a mass audience with the rescheduled Yugoslavia v Ireland football match.
But away Irish international football matches aside, it has not been a serious threat to RTE. Too few home-produced programmes and too much news lite keep its costs down - TV3 is essentially television for its owners, not television for viewers. Indeed, football apart, its biggest splash has been its egregious weatherman, Martin King. Wacky and big-time cominatcha, King's performances have prompted RTE to seek warm fronts in the shape of weather babes in the new year. A depression sits over the Met Office.
The overall TV trend to increase viewers' temperatures, however, was more evident on British channels. Blue TV - soft porn, really - was perhaps the most protruding aspect of television in 1998. With such programmes as Naked, British Sex, Anatomy of Desire, Glamour Girlz, and a Witness special on nudists, TV didn't just dumb down; it stripped off. Perhaps it was having an allergic reaction to the glut of costume dramas earlier in the decade. Anyway, one episode of Anatomy showed a masochist having his scrotum inflated with injected water. God be with The Waltons.
Another alarming growth was in "reallife" TV: docu-soaps, secret-camera shows and daytime talk shows. Ostensibly focusing on "ordinary people", they are therefore cheap to produce and generally get good ratings. There have been a number of excellent docu-soaps (The Joy, The House, Hotel, Rogue Males) in recent years. But ethics appear to be slipping in the genre as "reality" is often compromised for ratings. The secret-camera (mostly crime and car crashes) and daytime talk shows are ultracheap and ultra-hypocritical. Presenting their shows as cautionary, public-service TV, schlock-meisters such as Jerry Springer aim full-square at prurience.
Still, even sex and schlock can't match soap when it comes to viewing figures. Old reliables such as Coronation Street, Eastenders, Fair City, Brookside and even Glenroe continue to hold addicts in thrall. (Vile newcomers like the Australian Breakers are just babe-soaps.) Fair City went rather wild with its death of Helen episode (the Celine Dion music really was a tear-jerker too far.) but it has established itself as generally vibrant and relevant. It does, though, ludicrously overstretch plot lines (the rapist doctor effort, for instance) and has been slipping significantly in the past few months.
In the bigger world of TV drama, Amongst Women, curiously screened on RTE in the less than prime-time months of May and June, was, though a somewhat sanitised version of the John McGahern novel, among the pick of 1998's crop. Mind you, such Premiership drama was followed by the dreadful duo of Falling For a Dancer and Kings in Grass Castles. These also got prime-time slots on RTE 1 on Sunday nights. It may have been a plot to make Glenroe appear like masterpiece theatre.
Then there was the American import, Ally McBeal. A winner of Golden Globe awards for Best Comedy and Best Actress (Calista Flockhart in the title role), its narcissism made even Friends appear like the Vincent de Paul Society. There were clever aspects to it. But these were smothered by a kind of obscene fluffiness, in which poor little Ally, a Harvard-educated lawyer with Bambi eyes and skimpy skirts, felt more abused than a famine victim. Smug, syrupy and saccharine, it brought self-indulgence to a new low.
HOWEVER, documentaries held up well throughout the year. John Bowman's John Charles McQuaid was among the home-produced highlights. Likewise Alan Gilsenan's The Green Fields of France and Margaret Ward's Sown in Tears and Blood, both screened among a blizzard of programmes to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the first World War. Irene McCormick's Lives Without Wives, about a group of Monaghan bachelors, was splendid too. Bucolic without being sentimental, it gave real people room to breathe. Ally McBeal it wasn't. Eamon de Buitlear's Wild Islands was excellent of its genre and Big Science was worth the gamble, whatever about the money.
In Britain, 42up (now switched to BBC) remains incomparable. Every seven years a group of subjects present themselves to the cameras in an exercise of "real life" TV which will stand as a media/history/social artefact for centuries. The Cold War (also on RTE), The American Dream and In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great were sweeping, big-scale documentary series. Though not without bias, the first two were remarkable for the footage collated; the third for its efforts to reclaim a human from a legend. The Human Body, a multimedia extravaganza of biology, was equally memorable.
But the big picture is not all bright. The babes, the blue TV, the ubiquitous football (and since Rupert Murdoch ran away with the ball, the rash of football-related programmes which the terrestrial channels have had to churn out) are really only symptomatic. There is more choice than ever before, but the choice of programmes cannot proportionately keep pace with the choice of channels.
Technology and marketing are driving the medium now (prepare to be megablasted by guff about digital TV), and content - worthwhile content - is becoming almost more of a by-product than a primary product: the benefits and drawbacks of market forces. Little wonder that the ads and the programmes are increasingly alike.
