Omnibus (BBC 1, Monday), (Channel 4, Monday)
The Big Stew (RTE 1, Monday)
Obsessions (RTE 1, Tuesday)
United's Cup? (ITV, Tuesday)
Champions League Final (Network 2, ITV, Wednesday)
He was, I suppose, the ultimate lounge lizard. Louche, leering and legendarily lubricated by martinis, he always looked as relaxed as a dishcloth. Over the decade of the 1950s, his albums outsold Frank Sinatra's. Women showered him with room keys and phone numbers. At the peak of his career, he was making $15 million a year. As a crooner, carouser and comedian, Dean Martin was as cool as a cat. He could even act in decent Hollywood films. He had it all . . . but, dear friends, never forget this: he played golf!
In fact, he didn't just play golf - he seemed to live to play golf. Now, in itself, golf is a serious sport. It requires skill, strength, subtlety and yes, cool under pressure. But really, golf is to cool what the Eurovision Song Contest is to music. Even if it could rid itself of the rig-outs, the guff and the sad snobbishness, golf would remain uncool for a decontamination period of decades. Omnibus: Dino, a generally cool, if, in spots, suspiciously eulogising profile, couldn't de-uncool-ise golf. It was the fly in the perfectly-shaken martini that was Dean Martin - the killer bogey at the 18th.
Born in 1917, the son of an immigrant hairdresser in Steubenville, Ohio, Martin grew to epitomise a kind of post second World War American glamour. On stage, he was the Sultan of Smooth, regularly surrounded by simpering, decorative, pre-feminism babes (though they were probably known as "dames", "chicks" or even - for the lower-rent gigs - "broads" back then). He used to do a double act with the horrifically egregious Jerry Lewis. It became the toast of Atlantic City's castrated cabaret of the period. Lewis was the thrust but Martin was the talent.
Looking back at black and white footage from those Atlantic City gigs, it was impossible to understand how so much of contemporary public opinion had thought Lewis to be the star. A kind of American Norman Wisdom, he was undeniably giving his performances plenty of welly. But ambition is not synonymous with ability (a most inconvenient truth for today's "because I'm worth it" generation, of course) and Martin's understated approach made the contrast between the pair extra stark.
The understatement was the real hard work though. Martin cleverly allowed his audience to believe that he didn't really give a toss - but even his Dino the Wino act was just that. Slowing his movements, affecting a subtle slur and allowing his eyelids to droop, he played the relaxed drunk: Dean Martini! In reality, the drink in his hand for such performances was usually apple-juice on ice - or "on the rocks" in the golf-clubby, martini, cabaret culture of the time. "On the rocks", eh? Up the yard!
Still, golf and guff aside, talent did out. Because he "hated" the movies he made with Lewis, Martin left to "play Las Vegas" (i.e. perform in Las Vegas) and to feature in serious Hollywood movies alongside the likes of Marlon Brando. Even when The Beatles and Bob Dylan drove the martini smoothies into the rough, Martin could respond. He became a mega television star in 1960s America, his The Dean Martin Show regularly attracting 50 million punters.
Mind you, one clip from the series showed you why sensible women at the time were becoming bullish. Singing that leering, old Maurice Chevalier smarm-song about "little girls getting bigger every day", Dino sat in the middle of a studio floor. As the camera panned back, dozens of clockwork, little-girl dolls toddled towards him like Chuckies in frills. Uh, uh! Dodgy semiotics, don't you think? So much for the Swinging Sixties.
Anyway, Omnibus showed that Martin was not the drink-sodden night owl of popular mythology. Even in the heyday of the Sinatra/Martin/Sammy Davis Rat Pack, Sinatra was the hard liver. Our smoothie usually went to bed around 10 p.m. . . . to be up early to play golf! An enigma, even to his wife Jeanne, whom he left after 23 years before returning midway through the back nine, Dean Martin remained inscrutable. He died on Christmas Day 1995. We never did find out why he so believed he could cruise a fairway to heaven. It would be nice to believe that Mr Cool overstated his addiction to golf as much as he overstated his addiction to alcohol. Nice, but foolish, I'm afraid.
AS rough as Dean Martin was smooth, Equinox: Storm In A D-Cup focused on siliconbreast implants. And did it focus: shots of operations to implant and remove the gelatinous, white balloons were not for the squeamish. If there was a Page 3 aspect to this one, it was a page from some "Graphic Manual of Revolting Surgical Procedures". Think Pamela Anderson; think local victualler; think Butcherwatch . . . and you're getting a sanitised version of the picture.
That'll do. The meeting of fleshy breasts and steely scalpels was quite horrific but there was a genuinely intriguing aspect to the gore-fest: instead of causing breast cancer, implants, it was argued, may help to prevent it. There was much talk of "junk science" forcing huge payments to be dished out to women with implants and a strong case was certainly made against the emotive irrationalism regularly used by lobby groups to combat science nowadays.
It appears that about 500,000 women (10,000 of them British - no figures for our own colleen-babes, I'm afraid) have sought compensation for having their breasts "augmented". No doubt, some of them have cases as strong as the constitutions of the surgeons who performed the operations. But 500,000? It does seem unlikely. Dr Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal Of Medicine, based at Harvard University in Boston, has been attacked by feminists for dismissing "junk science". As a result, there is a deep cleavage among the sisterhood.
Nothing was proven beyond doubt for either side of the argument but the weight of evidence did support Maria Angell and her supporters as soundly as a Wonderbra. Certainly, when you saw a vehemently anti-science woman such as Sally Kirkland, arguing for the benefits of placing her "healing dog" on a diseased arm, you had to concede that Marcia could have a point. But beyond all that was the question of why so many healthy women want their breasts altered. To the sound of The Beach Boys, bikinied California beach babes strutted their stuff. The camera focused repeatedly on rows of jiggling busts.
One plastic surgeon haughtily dismissed the notion that pressures on women to conform to media ideas of beauty were behind the craze for breast implants. It was always a rational, internal impulse that drove women to "want to feel good about themselves", he said. In its sweeping idiocy, this line of argument was pernicious. Clearly, some women could enhance their lives and senses of themselves by enhancing their busts. But a great number, their insecurities and vanities directly targeted by the media and the market, have been mug punters in search of a bigger cup size. Equinox might have stressed this truth more.
Anyway, from such cups and mugs onto The Big Stew. Presented by Tom Doorley, who has been around the quality end of the grub 'n' drink scene for a good while, it is among the most palatable cookery programmes in years. In county-set waxed jacket, woolies and wellies, Tom went shooting "for game" on an estate in Sligo. This crack always seems like a very one-sided game, but luckily, Tom and his pals, with 15 guns among them, "bagged" just one woodcock in eight hours of shooting. Even the pre-Christmas Everton strike force would do better than that.
There was then a gore-fest comparable to breast-implanting, when a hare was "jugged". Explaining that all the hare's blood - most of which collects in the animal's head - should be saved for "thickening gravy", the programme showed us some revolting kitchen knife-work as the hare was skinned and butchered. But Tom, though a bit booming in the voice, is not a bad old skin, himself. He doused the slivers of hare with a full bottle of port, clearly relishing the prospect of alcohol making the Dracula aspect of the meal less mind and stomach-churning.
After that came the dodgy stuff - the wine guff. Relaxing in a jacuzzi, modelled as a giant half-barrel, Tom read portentously from Madame Bollinger's treatise on champagne. He went on to sample similar sparkling wines, using phrases like "wonderfully behaved in the glass" and "classy nose". Now, this phraseology is verbal nitro-glycerine but he just managed to get away with using it by leaving open the possibility, albeit slim, that he was being disparagingly ironic. Wonderfully behaved in the jacuzzi, Doorley took a risk and his sense of fun saw him serve up that great rarity - a watchable cookery show. There was a rare sense of fun too about Obsessions: Something For The Weekend. Focusing on a young woman (Carrie Doran) and a young man (Kerry Fleming), it examined the lure of the weekend for these twentysomethings. Kerry is a hairdresser from Tralee. He collects miniatures of pure perfume and idolises Donna Karan and Gianni Versace. On this evidence, Paudi O Se's Kerry mightn't be the best bet for this year's All-Ireland. Even Ruud Gullit has never envisioned sexy football of this style and fragrance.
Carrie works in Dublin but travels home for weekends to Carlow. We saw Carlow nightlife in action. Put it this way: it wasn't quite Monte Carlo(w), but for Carrie, The Foundry nightclub is "where it all happens". The hormonal exuberance, extroversion and naivety of it all was extraordinary. How Carrie and Kerry will feel if they ever view this carry-on 10 or 20 years from now is another matter. Shot with an appropriate jerkiness, there was nonetheless an embarrassing sense of hype, self-importance and exploitation about this documentary. But the contemporary clubbing scene is like that, I suppose.
Finally - well, it is the end of the season - football. And what an end. ITV, hammered in recent seasons, like all the terrestrial channels, by Rupert Murdoch's Sky Sports, sought to pump up the emotion the night before Manchester United played Bayern Munich in the European Cup final. An unashamedly nostalgic rock 'n' goal fest, United's Cup? played pop tunes from the period when United last won the cup in 1968. Nights In White Satin accompanying those old glory nights in red shirts - it was mawkish and it worked a treat, even if Mary Hopkin singing Those Were The Days was a marginal offside decision.
The following night came the climax. Whether you're a Man U lover or hater - or even a tepid golf obsessive - the denouement in Barcelona's Nou Camp stadium was dramatic beyond description. There is a place in the world for the cool of Dean Martinis and there is a place too for the hysteria generated by two injury-time goals in the world's biggest football match of 1999. As a television spectacle, we may never quite see its like again. This was a treble that even the onstage Dino couldn't have believed. Drink in its drama because, for sheer kick, this was rare beyond belief.