The Rose Of Tralee (RTE 1, Monday and Tuesday)
Big Brother (Channel 4, Sunday to Friday)
Townlands (RTE 1, Wednesday; rpt. Thursday)
Less than half an hour after Marty Whelan signed-off from Monday night's Rose Of Tralee, Tom attempted to seduce Melanie on Big Brother. Though both scenes were cringe-inducing, the contrast between the superficialities in Tralee and the intimacies in east London was striking. Mind you both discourses - if that word is applicable to the guff of Marty, the Roses, Tom and Melanie - told us much about artifice and hypocrisy as minted by television.
To zap from the stridently old-fashioned to the stridently new-fangled was almost to board a time-machine. Tralee, as ever, was broadcasting designer-wholesomeness; London was broadcasting designer-grittiness. One was a world in which young women were paired with male "escorts"; the other a game-show lab in which young women and young men could surf the hormonal tide to satisfy their own desires for fame and the public's appetite for prurience.
The shows have, of course, similarities as well as differences. Both are contests. Both primarily involve telegenic twentysomethings. Both have presenters who transmit their employers' desired tones and do the links: Marty Whelan and Davinia McCall - Bland and Brash - a bleating middle-aged man and a bullish young woman. If Whelan is meant to represent a kind of convivial if diluted patriarchy, then McCall, like the rest of TV's current crop of screamingly confident young women, is another of feminism's Frankenstein monsters.
Marty's platitudes are irritating but Davinia's projection is insufferable. Well, that's showbusiness, I suppose. But the artifices surrounding the contestants are another matter. By and large, at least in the bigger contexts, the Big Brother group and the Roses live in similar worlds - globalisation increasingly ensures that. They share the same popular cultures, buy similar products and compete for position in similar economies. How is it then - in the name of truth - that the two should be like chalk and cheese, one so schmaltzy, the other so sleazy?
The simple answer, of course, is money. Both are serious ratings successes and, as such, not to be dismissed. In this age of hybrid TV genres (Big Brother is, after all, a mildly interactive, multimedia game-show docu-soap, seeking to be sanctified by the contributions of serious psychologists), it is tempting to speculate just how the Roses and the escorts would get along locked into a building for a few months. We could, I'm sure, expect to see some right leprechauns and banshees then. Likewise, how might the members of the BB group come across if interviewed by Marty Whelan at his most patronising and vapidly affable?
Truth is, they would probably do fine. Lesbian Anna, for instance, Irish and a former novice nun, could feign appropriately doe-eyed coquettishness, strum her guitar and round it all off with a dollop of Blarney baloney. Melanie might appear vivacious instead of manipulatively flirty and self-obsessed. Even the now-departed airhead hippy, Sada, could probably pass off dippy self-absorption as a form of cosmopolitan sophistication. "Nasty" Nick, whose gameplan would surely be to wangle a gig as escort of the weak, might well win the prize for escort of the week.
What it all adds up to, in spite of "the truth in her eyes ever-shining" is that The Rose of Tralee tells you practically nothing about its contestants. Pure as the driven snow, they all love their families, their jobs and their ancestral homelands. Fair enough, some have showbiz talents and some have not but none of them is presented as a real person. Rather, they are made to behave as cut-outs capable of fitting a pre-ordained stereotype of sentimental and hypocritical mush.
In contrast, Big Brother promises raw reality and close-to-the-bone truth. It does deliver aspects of these, but the housemates' knowledge that they are being watched by TV cameras is a contaminant. As children playing in the gaze of their parents behave differently to unwatched children, so too with adults. It is telling that whenever a contestant is evicted, Davinia McCall bellows that she is going to find out "the truth" about life in the house. Yet life in the house is promoted as delivering the unadorned truth.
Then there's the Big Brother aspect of The Rose of Tralee. The Roses are "observed" throughout the week of the festival. Such social Peeping Tommery adds a Valley of the Squinting Windows authenticity, no doubt. But the fly-on-the-wall documentary to be made here is in observing the observers, listening to their remarks and generally exposing the provincial deliberations which are cast not as creepy intrusions, but as legitimate probes to reach the truth about the contestants.
So, the Big Brother contestants cannot but remain conscious of replicating some imagined ideal of winning behaviour and the Roses are spied upon in the raw, if you'll excuse the phrase. This is the problem with any medium - it mediates and in doing so it changes the parameters of reality. It cannot avoid doing this but it could have the decency to acknowledge the fact. Fat chance: these ostensibly conflicting genres, albeit both using many similar TV conventions, are pure broadcasting cash crops.
The huge ratings for this year's Rose of Tralee are not easily explained. Few people under 60 will argue for long that it's not corny and patronising. The possibility - indeed the probability - now exists that its naffness, even acknowledged by the viewing public, is its strength. It may have already become a mega-cult, in the way that in the early 1990s the transcendently naff Come Dancing became, for many British undergraduates, the coolest, hippest show to watch on TV.
Of course, after a couple of seasons Come Dancing had to give way to such cerebral material as Teletubbies. But the Rose gig - being just an annual event - could last considerably longer. In a climate of increased vulgarity and debauchery across the television schedules, the images of the Roses as the last of the great white virgins has to have a certain appeal. Never mind that the Festival of Kerry is an excuse for Bacchanalian excess and debauchery. Its showpiece does the PR very nicely, thank you.
Still, if it is the case that the anachronism of the Rose gig has given it a kind of cult aura, it will not be possible to sustain it indefinitely. Parody, though it can shine brilliantly, can normally do so only for a while. The joke inevitably pales, wears thin and dies. On the other hand, if the show continues to be taken seriously and on its own terms, then it has actually landed in Tir na nOg and is beyond normal human comprehension.
Its defenders may well argue (and they would have a case - a dodgy case, but a case nonetheless) that it is just good, clean fun. Antiseptic, sterilised, sanitised - they could contend that it is the Domestos of the TV schedules, an antidote to a culture of sleaze. But its own hypocrisies fatally undermine this argument. Indeed, its very sanctimoniousness and smugness, including its giddy and corny pretence that anything even ultra-mildly risque is cosily shocking, undoes it. It is Daniel O'Donnell's tea-party on steroids.
As for Big Brother, well, the verdict is still coming in. Certainly it has provided the television event of summer 2000 but it may have peaked with the eviction of scheming Nick Bateman. It does appear as though the producers are increasingly keen to sexify it even further. Nick's replacement, Claire, wasn't there a wet day when she was telling millions of people about the cosmetic surgery on her breasts. Soon she was in bed - though both were clothed, mind - with the body-building pocket-hulk Craig.
No doubt, the show's very existence says much about the nature of privacy and the seemingly irresistible lure of fame in contemporary Britain. (It applies here too.) In one sense, it is the Rose of Tralee turned inside-out; in another, it is just variations on a theme. There will almost certainly be an Irish version, with attendant lucrative advertising revenue - technology and ideology combining to make an Irish Big Brother inevitable.
In media terms, it is clear that television is becoming as adept at using the Internet (the Rose gig was in cyberspace too) as newspapers became at using television about 40 years ago. Indeed, columns such as this are a part of the inter-media parasitic tradition. The tabloids have, of course, always cannibalised television even more (as television has always cannibalised the newspapers) and have deliberately blurred the lines between artifice and reality. Soap stars being headlined in the names of their characters is a prime example.
It may be that television, as Big Brother is doing, will increasingly show professionally edited, highlights packages of material that is running online. If so, notions of "reality" will be further compromised, where the Net will be referred to as "the real thing" - the primary resource. Great ironies may await. The day when some sassy young "IT professional" (i.e. a paid Nethead) steps up to talk to Marty in the Dome and walks away with the winner's tiara for her "naturalness" could be at hand. Not that it matters. Television can act the Big Brother all it likes but money remains the Big Daddy and fame its Big Mama spouse or, nowadays, partner.
Back in normal television land, Townlands forsook its usual, homely beat to focus on homeless people in Dublin. In particular, it focused on Aidan, Alan and Jimmy, three homeless men among the city's estimated population of 5,000 homeless people. Long shots, evocative music and still-lifes of hostel beds, decaying buildings and the cranes of the booming economy emphasised the depression of the subject.
It was not the first time and, even in a society where compassion is increasingly viewed as weakness, it won't be the last, that TV cameras focus on homelessness. But the anecdotes about overfed cretins, spitting, urinating and throwing lighted cigarettebutts on homeless people's blankets - with the people inside, mind - never fail to disgust. What do you say to an ignoramus who indulges in such behaviour? A few undercover (literally) coppers, or even the rumour of them, could stop almost all of the pissartists.
Guffawing as you urinated over a fit young buck with ambitions to become a superintendent mightn't be the wisest course of action. But it won't happen. Homeless people are all but excluded from the protection of the state and it is a difficult and growing problem. Official thinking remains determined not to make homelessness an attractive option and so the vicious cycle continues. This was quietly good work from a small series. It showed, without hectoring, that the gutter of new Dublin is treated as the Tiger's urinal. Domestos-free too.