The South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday)
Vile Bodies (Channel 4, Monday)
Newsnight (BBC 2, Tuesday & Wednesday)
Escobar's Own Goal (Channel 4, Thursday)
Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Naked and glistening, Ron Athey had steel clips clasped over his nipples. The serrated clips looked like shrunken rat-traps with piano-wire attached. As the wire was pulled taut - fleshrendingly taut - an on-stage narrator wailed: "Hallelujah . . . I've been washed in the Holy Ghost. Hallelujah!" In a week annually condemned for its gory imagery of the suffering Christ, Athey's performance showed that some contemporary "art" is every bit as repulsive as the most grisly, mediaeval Christian iconography.
Ron Athey was one of four performance artists featured on The South Bank Show: Body Art. "Tonight we look at artists whose work involves blood, flesh and pain," said Melvyn Bragg at the outset. Before Bragg's introduction, a continuity announcer had warned that "squeamish" viewers might find the programme "upsetting". You didn't need the sensitivity of an effete aesthete to be disgusted by the depravity on view. Athey's, as it turned out, was merely a warm-up gig for the ghastly gore-fest which followed.
Using their own flesh as a canvas, these artists, Bragg said, were "challenging good taste by exploring and exploiting the energy in bad taste". Punk art? Another of the four, Orlan ("Saint Orlan" according to herself) is a Frenchwoman who films herself undergoing plastic surgery to reshape her face in unexpected ways. Orlan, of course, doesn't allow her aesthetic to be corrupted by any decadent, bourgeois, namby-pamby nonsense like an anaesthetic. Flesh-sculpting, she reckons, should be felt as well as seen. Then there was Franko B.
Franko is a former Chelsea School of Art student who gets into the buff, paints himself white and pours blood over his head. Then he opens a vein and bleeds all over the stage. Charming, eh? Fakir Musafar, from San Francisco, has a bone through his nose and hugely distended nipples. He has treated himself as a "human bonsai", successively reducing his waist to make himself look like an hour-glass in a three-piece suit. Like Ron Athey, Fakir's favourite stunt is the Sioux initiation torture made notorious in A Man Called Horse.
With sticks attached to meathooks thrust through his pectoral muscles, out-of-his-tree Fakir had himself strung up to savour an out-of-body experience. He believes Western culture is "too obsessed by trying to minimise sensation". So, we saw film of tribal African people carving designs on young men "as a test of the human spirit". Knives gouged out rashers of human meat as the unfortunate initiates were held down by their elaborately carved elders. Ah, tradition - perhaps you can't beat it, but clearly, you can carve it.
It wasn't just tribal Africans and performance artists who featured in Body Art. Aware that arts programmes need to establish populist relevance, Daniel Wiles's film also spoke to a group of London-based 20-somethings about the current fad for body-piercing. One of the interviewees - an Irishwoman with a strong Dublin accent - enthused about the "serious endorphin rush and sense of achievement" she experiences by having metal skewered through her flesh. Those Tory MP indiscretions using plastic bags, flex, nooses, electric fires and oranges seemed like a behind-the-bikeshed grope by comparison.
Explaining that "little girls of six and seven get their ears pierced for First Communion in Ireland", the Dubliner showed us her pierced tongue, its little silver stud like a tiny, indestructible gob-stopper. She told us that she has also "four genital piercings" before raving about the extreme erotic delights of a vertical incision in her clitoral region. Her pin-cushion colleagues laughed the smug laugh of a group which believes it has sussed-out knowledge and pleasures beyond the range of the common herd.
Perhaps they have. But what it's got to do with art is another matter. Given that Athey and Musafar (an adopted name) were brought up as a strict Pentecostalist and Lutheran respectively and that Franko B and Orlan have deep troubles about their Catholic upbringings, the performances seemed like demented DIY therapy sessions - auto-exorcisms really. Arguments were made about the relationship between suffering and ecstasy but, for all that, these artists looked and sounded like very sick puppies indeed.
The following evening, Channel 4 screened Vile Bodies: The Dead. This concerned itself with photographs of dead bodies - more art, you understand. Andreas Serrano, an American photographer who trawls morgues, puts his pictures on billboards and sells them. His favourite is the perfect, contrasting accessory for three ducks above the mantlepiece: it's titled Hacked To Death. It would all make you yearn for the gentle, almost cuddly crucifixion imagery of the Holy Weeks of our childhood.
The week's running story was, of course, the Northern talks and the hope that no more people will be hacked to death in the name of politics. As a case-study in how agendas can become normalised by artless TV, this was classic. Certainly, David Trimble found himself in a bind because of rabble-rousing elements in unionism and his position was difficult. So, in a politically-understandable attempt to transfer the heat from himself to the Irish Government, he insisted that the deal was, for him, unacceptably green.
As a negotiating tactic this was standard, if somewhat perilous stuff. But a succession of TV interviewers, Jeremy Paxman included, largely ignored the obvious tactical dimension to Trimble's line, preferring instead to treat it only in terms of content and not context. The result was that spokespersons for the Irish Government were pressed to defend themselves against charges of being too greedy, when a greater truth, obvious to most people, was that Trimble was, or at least felt himself to be, under too much pressure from more trenchant and sinister forces than Dublin.
So, on Newsnight, questions which really ought to have been asked of those hardline unionists (inside and outside the talks), who were making Trimble's position extremely difficult, were put to the Irish side only. Inevitably, this rather crude and partisan line gave people in Britain the impression that the Irish Government - almost exclusively - was being excessively belligerent. Thus, the agenda of recalcitrant unionism was treated as though it were primarily the fault of the Irish Government.
Doubtless, many unionists believe this to be the case. But the media, by definition, ought to be more circumspect in running with political lines. Even if it genuinely seemed to some observers that the Irish Government was being too aggressive, only the blind could possibly accuse them of being the primary, destructive elements in the flux. Like the British government, the UUP, the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the loyalist fringe parties and the others in the talks, they were, at least, trying to cut a deal.
Mind you, it wasn't only on BBC that reaction to the UUP's objections seemed more concerned with news dramatics than logic. On RTE's Six-One News (Tuesday), Brian Dobson put it to David Andrews that "the Mitchell document was now a dead letter". Andrews didn't quite hear this properly first time. But, when he did, the look of disbelief on his face told a tale. Yes, news is about concrete, unambiguous, declarative statements and information. But a bit of savvy over political posturing wouldn't go astray either.
This week's hybrid soccer documentary - a genre increasingly popular since Rupert Murdoch ran away with the football - was a genuine Premiership effort. Escobar's Own Goal, recalling the murder of Colombian international Andres Escobar a few days after he conceded an own goal against the gringos of the US in the 1994 World Cup, blended politics, sport and sociology.
In the 80-murders-a-week streets of Colombia's cocaine capital, Medellin, reporter Richard Sanders established the context of Escobar's killing. Splicing soccer action (including repeated showings of that fatal o.g.) with Colombian TV news coverage of the murder and reports from the barrios, Sanders evoked a sense of a society not just condemned by the outside world but abandoned by it too. According to Colombian TV, the killer shouted "goal" after each of the 12 shots pumped into Escobar. Perhaps this was more TV news dramatics but, whatever the truth, the sense of murder as sport was appalling.
Cocaine corrupts the entire country. After a qualifying game against Ecuador for this year's World Cup finals, the scorer of Colombia's late and crucial winner dedicated his goal to two leading "narcos", who are at present in jail. "It would be like Jimmy Greaves scoring a goal for England at Wembley and dedicating it to the Kray Twins," said Sanders. Death threats to managers, coaches and players are a common occurrence in Colombia, where drug barons gamble heavily on matches.
Along the way, Sanders spoke to members of Escobar's family and to soccer stars such as former Newcastle striker Faustino Asprilla and Colombian goalkeeper Rene Higuita, famous for his Wembley scorpion kick and for a stretch in prison. Admirably researched and presented, it might, perhaps, at 55 minutes, have been a trifle long. But that is just a minor criticism of a documentary which skillfully used one very high-profile murder to explain the brutalisation and lawlessness of an entire country. It was, unlike much of this week's crude TV coverage of the North talks, concerned about context and subtleties.
Leargas looked at our own law, which, even more than the media, claims to be indispensable to democracy, yet, ironically, regulates itself along feudally hierarchical lines. At least Paul Larkin's film addressed the image of barristers, who are regularly characterised as arrogant and gold-digging. It also detailed some of the traditions - "dining" and "devilling" and the rig-outs - which many people see as being less concerned with seeking and delivering justice than with maintaining a self-perpetuating elite.
As ever though - and Larkin does not shirk issues - the tone of journalism in focusing on the law was softly, softly. This is understandable, given the power of the law and the willingness of some lawyers to use that power to the full. Apparently the King's Inns motto is: "We don't wish to change". A conservative manifesto, this might be fair enough - or, at least, the urge might be understandable. But the wishes of the larger society, which pays lawyers' wages, surely count for something. Contempt of court is one thing; contempt for the public would be a more serious matter altogether. I suppose it's a question of context.