The Timor Conspiracy (ITV, 10.40 p.m., Tuesday)
South Park (Sky One, 10 p.m., Monday)
Solved And Unsolved (RTE 1, 8 p.m., Tuesday)
The Late Late Show (RTE 1, 9.30 p.m., Fridays)
His friend cradled his head, but the dying youth knew the score. He could see the blood soaking his white shirt. Like ink on blotting paper, it spread as you watched. Watching a massacre - a real massacre - on TV can, let's admit it, be comparably absorbing. But for all except the most desensitised, it is also depressing, debasing and despair-inducing. It made the point though. Off camera, dozens of other people were dying from bullet wounds. Those merely injured - shot in an arm or a leg - would be bayoneted to death later. Either that or they could have their heads crushed with concrete blocks.
The Timor Conspiracy is an updated version of John Pilger's 1994 documentary Death of a Nation. Pilger is unfashionable now, his old-style socialist certainties regularly derided as "pilgering". And it's not just the traditional right who mock Pilger these times. With the new Labour parties accepting that the grand ideological battles of the 20th century are over, Pilger is considered to be an anachronism - a dinosaur from the Jurassic period of lefty journalism. Despite his emitting the occasional whiff of condescension and sanctimoniousness, we should treasure him. So, he's a polemicist - but against the spin, lies and PR of contemporary politics and media, he gives hope.
Thanks principally to Pilger, the story of East Timor is quite well known. In brief, for those who've forgotten: East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, is a tiny country surrounded by the Indonesian archipelago. In 1975 it was invaded by Indonesia and since then, reliable estimates suggest that 200,000 people, one-third of its population, have been murdered in a genocidal bloodbath. Pilger contends - and supplies extensive proof - that Britain, the US and Australia have colluded in arming, supporting and covering-up for the Indonesian government (led until last year by military dictator, Gen Suharto). And oh, by the way, there are huge oil and gas reserves in the sea-bed off East Timor.
It's a story which is essentially a late-20th-century variation on 19th-century imperialism. A poor people, sitting on top of valuable resources, are deemed to be expendable. The colluding big powers, having armed the Indonesians, turn a blind eye when those arms are used for genocide. Sure, it's the filthy end of capitalism - not that former commie countries were averse to campaigns of mass murder. Nor should a little country like Ireland be too self-righteous: our record in decimating Native American populations and in the service of the British Empire is pretty grim. But because it is in the interests of Western capitalism that East Timor be absorbed as quickly as possible, this barbarism has been under-reported.
Particularly sick is the current British government's "ethical foreign policy". Orwell would have appreciated that guff. Pilger spoke to Derek Fatchett, minister of state in Britain's Foreign Office and to the former Tory defence minister Alan Clark. Fatchett dissembled shamelessly; Clark was more forthcoming. As a vegetarian, concerned about the ways in which animals are slaughtered, might his concern not extend to the ways in which humans "albeit foreigners" are killed? "Quite curiously, no," he snapped back immediately. You could almost hear our hard-case marketeers cackling. None of your do-gooder nonsense wanted here. Funny how "vegetarian" used to indicate what people ate rather than the status of their brains.
Anyway, Pilger revisited the rogues' gallery involved in supporting Indonesia. Henry Kissinger (that notable Nobel peace prize laureate), Margaret Thatcher, David Owen, John Major, Robin Cook, Gough Whitlam (former Australian prime minister), Richard Nixon and his White House successors were indicted. He spoke to exiled East Timorese politicians and to Indonesia's former ambassador to the UN, a bloke called Wisnumurti. Old Wis said that it was really all a smear campaign against his country. "That's politics, you know," he said. Sure Wis, that's politics alright - you can't trust anyone, can you?
When Death of a Nation was screened almost five years ago, an ITV helpline received more than 4,000 calls a minute immediately after transmission. This nailed the lie that few people are interested in news from far away. Anyway, The Timor Conspiracy, though it contained little enough that was new, was the year's best television so far. Personal lives and compassion fatigue may quickly drain it of its power - but watching people murdered does leave its mark. The grand ideological battles may well be over, but bullies continue to chase the world's riches with the ruthlessness they always have.
It's just that the euphemisms and the lies become ever more sophisticated. Gone is the imperial moralising and sense of mission about "bringing civilisation and law 'n' order to savages". Gone too are vulgarisms about "wogs" and "gooks" and "spics". This is the age of the smoothies - the media politicians. It's East Timor now (though there has been encouraging news this week) but there'll be more exploitable places with expendable people in the next century. Whether or not television reporters like Pilger will be there to record these stories is another matter.
In contrast, South Park, the cult cartoon for teenagers and twentysomethings (and increasingly for adults too), dispenses with euphemisms in favour of vulgarisms. It features four child characters: Kyle, Kenny, Cartman and Stan. They live in the town of the title, which nestles in the Colorado Rockies. Episodes have titles such as Cartman Gets an Anal Probe; A Pig Makes Love to an Elephant; Merry Christmas Charlie Manson!; and Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut. Very pleasant, eh? It certainly puts the likes of The Huckleberry Hound Show, Tom and Jerry and even The Simpsons in their place.
Still, despite revelling in its own swill, it can be clever - a kind of Beavis and Butthead mated with The Simpsons. This week's episode was titled Cow Days. It was loaded with deliciously vicious jokes about sacred cows and pointed lines about human attitudes to animals. There was surrealism too: someone stole the town's Sacred Cow Memorial Statue, causing the local cows to form a cult. Efforts to dissuade the cows from gathering to venerate the statue ended in the cows committing suicide sooner than return to do the bidding of humans. Work it out for yourself.
It was telling that this show, which because of its contrived iconoclasm (and multimedia marketing) has achieved cult status, should take the mick out of cults. Who are the cows, man? Then again, it may be that some young people confuse a cartoon of insult for one of irony. Who knows? The humour included Kenny thinking that he was Ming Lee, a Vietnamese prostitute. "Me so horny; me love you long time," Kenny/Ming said to an adult punter at a fairground. "Go away kid, you're grossing me out," came the reply. "Sucky, sucky," retorted Kenny/Ming. And so it went . . .
South Park has been a huge hit in the US and, by all accounts, it has a sizeable following here too. Cartman is known as "the fat kid"; Kyle, the Jewish kid, is the butt of most jokes; Stan vomits a lot and has a gay dog; Kenny is a poor kid who dies in every episode. The series, which grew out of a cartoon short in which Jesus and Santa get dug into each other over "the true spirit of Christmas", spawned one of the biggest-selling Christmas games in in the US, and Kenny dolls were much sought after in Dublin. Its Website has had between six and seven million hits.
As it's screened at 10 p.m., younger children are unlikely to be watching. Some theorists suggest that South Park's appeal is that it releases, albeit vicariously, the bold, say-anything child in adults. Perhaps. But given its hipness and coolness among students and teenagers, its appeal could be construed as quite the opposite: it releases the wannabe cool, knowing adult in young people. Whatever, the case - sick or slick - it's a TV phenomenon. It is also very 1990s America - Cartman's probe was conducted by an alien. For anyone who thinks cartoons mean Walt Disney and HannaBarbera, it's getting more and more alien in television land.
Back on RTE, the new 10-part crime series Solved and Unsolved is rather more conventional. The opening episode dealt with the murder of 41-year-old civil servant Marilyn Rynn at Christmas 1995. Using reconstructions and interviews with family members, friends and detectives, it was atmospherically engaging. But there was a detachment here too - as though the balance between focusing on the victim and focusing on the means by which her killer was caught, opted too much in favour of the latter.
Still, it was professionally produced, even if it was suspiciously PR-ish for the Garda Siochana. That, of course, is hardly its fault - almost all organisations are obsessed with their public image nowadays. We did, in fairness, hear testimonials about how pleasant and vibrant Marilyn Rynn had been. But perhaps because this crime was so recent, the stress placed on the facts that the victim's body was discovered wearing only a necklace and that she had been brutally sexually assaulted, sounded a little insensitive, prurient and objectifying.
The murderer was caught by detectives using DNA matching. However, this happened only because he volunteered to give detectives a semen sample. He had incorrectly assumed that the passage of time would have made linking him to the crime impossible. Well, OK, any cop is a fair cop in such circumstances. But the praise for the role of the DNA testing might have been better balanced by stressing more just how detectives found they had a sample to test in the first place. Next week looks at the unsolved mystery of Josephine "JoJo" Dullard.
Finally, some recent Late Late Show appearances. Well, the Pee Flynn exhibition of self-love has been more than adequately covered in the press. It wasn't, of course, just Pee's verbals which were offensive. The visuals took no prisoners either. What could he have been thinking of with that suit? Anyway, since Pee's performance, we've had a follow-up outrage out of the west. Ballinasloe boy Donal Scannell arrived as a representative of disaffected young adults.
Scannell, I gathered, is a DJ and the editor of a new volume of Irish short stories. That's fine, and his rant against Irish politics and politicians was, especially given current carry-on, timely. But his assertion that the past is of no relevance or concern to dynamic, young, I-got-up-off-my-arse merchants such as himself was typically vacuous. For better and for worse, the lives led by preceding generations have brought us to where we are today. That's just the way it is.
However, Scannell cast himself as thoroughly pioneering - a stand-alone, liberated, beacon of independence. Yes, ambition and self-confidence are commendable - but ordinary, tax-paying people (rich and poor alike) paid to give him a university education; to make possible the life he leads now. Clearly all that is taken for granted in club culture land. This young man has looked deep into his soul, found, if not recognised, the emptiness within, and is determined to share it with the rest of us. Even Gay Byrne, a master at letting people hang themselves, could hardly have anticipated this bloke's level of fatuity.