Ireland AM - TV3, weekdays
Breakfast BBC1 - BBC1, weekdays
Stressed Out - C4
Sunday To The Ends of the Earth - C4, Sunday
Superhuman - BBC1, Sundays
True Lives: Talking to the Dead - RTE, Tuesday
Of course we know that only sad dropouts watch Oprah, Ricki, Judge Judy and the like. When mentioning the relative merits of two breakfast TV programmes to a media journalist recently I saw ill-concealed pity in her eyes. She doesn't know that my family are such an erudite bunch that on rising and dressing they immediately start to play chess, translate 17th-century Polish poetry or revise Nicomachean Ethics, leaving me to make the tea and gawp at Emma Buckley's wardrobe of boots in TV3's Ire- land AM.
Relentless cheeriness is pretty hard to take, so it must be even harder to dish out, especially at 7 a.m. in Dublin 24 amid a murky autumn. Mark, Emma and Alan - who manages to read the weather forecasts and dole out the celebrity gossip tidbits with a permanent air of secretive glee - thus provide a useful social service, even if the content of the show is less than rigorously filtered. If you want that sort of thing then switch over to BBC1. Their recently revamped Breakfast show has an air of calm authority, due mainly to the female co-anchor, Sophie Raworth, and the business supremo, Tanya Beckett, who is glossy and no-nonsense, with a definite whisper of dominatrix about her.
Daytime television has long been regarded as a wasteland. Advertisers aren't going to pay prime rates for daytime hours, and anyway, it's only housewives and children who are watching, goes the conventional wisdom. Yet, as regular readers of this newspaper should be aware, women have overturned society and are now (like Tanya on BBC1) dominating men and driving the social and economic agendas. So why can't they get decent television?
And even if women aren't the majority of viewers, should shift workers, teleworkers who are based in their homes, the unemployed, the elderly, and everybody else at home be treated with contempt? The reverse theory is that in fact they are the lucky ones, enjoying vintage Ealing comedies and The Den while nocturnal viewers have to suffer through Who Wants to be a Millionaire and made-for-TV movies about dysfunctional families.
The "war" between men and women was the subject of Kilroy on BBC1 on Monday, straight after the breakfast programme, in an edition tantalisingly titled "I've given up on men". It was all very predictable but rather fascinating.
One woman, a single mother in her mid 30s who looked as though she should have no trouble attracting a mate, admitted that "a good man" to her was almost automatically defined as "someone else's man" because he would be somebody "with a family, a job, working on a pension plan". Nothing concentrates the mind away from moonlight and roses like single parenthood.
Ever thought you had the job from hell? Perhaps you would care to swap places with the 46 customer service officers at Leeds Council's one-stop shop, which aims to deal with all the problems and queries of social service recipients in the area. Stressed Out was timely viewing in a week when an Irish study from the mental health monitoring group GROW found that one in three Irish workers complains of stress caused by their employment, and a surprising 60 per cent of visits to GPs are triggered by stress.
The 46 CSOs (Customer Service Officers) in Leeds had a drained look about them; their ashtray overfloweth. One estimated that, whereas the office had been set up to deal with 300 people a day, they were dealing with 600 - 700.
Another CSO had already been off work for three months with stress when filming for Stressed Out began. The film-makers were perhaps a little heavy-handed in their downbeat mood, with everything in the first part tinged blue and the workers telling their stories in what appeared to be a stores cupboard. But perhaps that is the only leisure space they have. The programme followed a stress reduction programme introduced by management - which had mixed results, with one middle manager deciding the best way to handle her stress was to get the hell out of that thankless job.
This was part of Channel 4's "stress season", being run under the label of "stop.gohome". But mobile phones, nagging spouses, demanding bosses all paled into manageable grey beside To The Ends of the Earth the following night. The story of the 1998 Sydney Hobart yacht race was riveting even if the only boat you have ever sailed is in the bathtub. Nearly two years ago, right after Christmas, phenomenal weather conditions coalesced to turn a patch of water off the coast of south-eastern Australia into the ninth circle of hell. Twelve boats in the famous and fashionable race - notable, as one old fisherman observed, for attracting "blokes with more balls than brains" - were caught in the very eye of the storm. Hundred foot waves picked state-of-the-art yachts up and tossed them with careless viciousness back into the whirlpool. Terror seems an understatement to describe what these men experienced. Six of them perished, including one skipper who, very understandably, had a heart attack. Suddenly the Leeds One Stop centre looked a very desirable place to be.
What the human body can and cannot do under attack is the general theme of Superhuman, Prof Robert Winston's current medico series on Sunday nights on BBC 1. This is a superb programme. The first episode dealt with severe trauma such as that inflicted in road accidents, and current thinking on how to deal with it - for example, that it might be better to be non-interventionist after some types of severe accident and let the body's natural resources do their stuff. The second programme was about transplanting body parts, such as hands - the Frankenstein end of science that makes some people - unfortunately including some recipients - decidedly uncomfortable.
Last Sunday's episode focused on repair, again with an emphasis on what could occur naturally. Hearts, brains and spinal chords were discussed, raising the possibility that genes which produce blood vessels could be introduced into cardiac patients as DIY replacement kits. To provide balance, two case histories were shown, one which has had some success with the technique, but another in which the patient had died.
No matter what medical science can do, it is still in the ha'penny place besides Parent Nature. Baby Tommy Palmer had a stroke, brought on by a particularly bad virus, when he was five months old. Brain scan photographs showed the considerable area of damage in his brain. The possibility his parents faced was of a child who could not move or talk. And yet, Tommy's brain just started to recover of its own accord. Now, a year later, he is quite normal and shows no signs of the trauma which would left an older person incapacitated for life.
Physical incapacity was the fate of Penny Roberts. She is an English nurse whose hobby was skydiving. She had performed 350 jumps before the one that broke her neck in Florida five years ago. Penny's story is that she seems to be recovering movement . . . could her spinal cord be knitting, ever so slowly? And if so, why? Perhaps as stunning as the notion that, one day, a broken neck and severed spinal cord need not mean life in a wheelchair was the last part of Penny's story: she's still skydiving, although strapped to an able-bodied colleague.
The personal stories, the breathtaking research, the graphics, and of course the personality of Winston, himself a groundbreaking scientist with his "test tube babies" 20 years ago, all add up to a powerful mixture.
Death was the fear which hovered around the edges of the above programmes (maybe not Ireland AM!). A more immediate relationship with the Grim Reaper has been discerned in the Irish as a race, and is examined in a book by Pat Sheeran and Nina Witoszek, the basis for a film in the True Lives series on RTE 1.
The Power Productions film attempted to cover a lot of territory in an hour, indicating its parentage and leaving a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with some segments about which there was obviously so much more to be said. For example, what was Pat Sheeran referring to when he spoke of the "erotic display" to which the corpse gave licence? Perhaps this puzzlement is just a sign of the reviewer's sheltered life.
The tradition of the wake, naturally enough, got a fair amount of time, with some footage of a neatly dressed corpse sleeping his eternal kip in one corner of a small sitting room while the living guests vied to tell funny stories. The more contemporary fashion for a member of the congregation to stand up and talk about the deceased was mentioned in passing, without going into the recent controversy over whether or not this is suitable. The "ownership" of the death rites by churches was one theme, with Dr Edward Daly's decision some years ago that no paramilitary symbolism should be allowed inside the church for funerals of fallen members cited as an example of the difficulties that sectarian displays can cause for a Christian and presumably peace-loving church.
Breandan O Madagain, one of the talking heads and apparently a keening expert, did a lovely turn himself of the Caoin, the now extinct art of wailing for the dead. The banshee and the keening woman were depicted as counterparts, the one coming to warn of death, the other to help the spirit pass over and give some comfort to the living. The ongoing importance of the death rituals was asserted; now that we all have cars and it is, theoretically, easier to get around, there is no reason not to go hundreds of kilometres to removals and funerals. Especially to those of us not reared in this culture, the great respect for the suffering of the bereaved and the simple power of the words "I'm sorry for your trouble" are everyday symbols of what Pat Sheeran thinks is the "obsessive hold the dead have on the living in this country". Thought-provoking fare for Halloween night.
RTE's new media/"culcha" show, The Blizzard of Odd, premiered on Thursday night with anchorperson Colin Murphy. Is it easier to watch than its name is to say? We'll talk about that next week.