Full Frontal in Flip Flops, UTV, Tuesday, 10.40 p.m.
Vice, UTV, Monday, 9.30 p.m.
Paradise Island, RTE 1, Monday, 8 p.m.
A Year 'Til Sunday, RTE 1, Tuesday, 9.30 p.m.
Pobal agus Plearaca, RTE 1, Thursday, €1, 7.30 p.m.
Irish Journeys, BBC2, Saturday, 7.30 p.m.
The solemn bride was middle-aged, tall, slim, tanned, brassy blonde and nude but for a wedding veil and white garter. Her grinning groom was 50-ish, portly, balding and nude but for a black dickybow. The newlyweds walked hand-in-hand with the dignity of the elaborately clothed as they made their way from their caravan to their wedding reception in a British naturist resort, where 100 of their guests were gathered in wobbly nakedness. We saw the couple blessed and toasted by the vicar, who was also nude but for a low-slung money pouch.
These images from Full Frontal in Flip Flops would have been merely ridiculous but for the fact that the bride had recently lost a breast to cancer. Even full frontal nudity has become so mundane on TV that you could imagine the programme-makers wriggling with pleasure at this bitter twist: a nude wedding and a mutilated bride to boot.
We were warned, long before the woman removed her clothes, and when we finally saw what a woman with one breast looks like, and how the scar had healed to a slightly rounded area of soft skin without a nipple, it was not as terrifying as we might have feared. And it probably did a lot of good, considering that some breast cancer patients are afraid even to look at themselves in the mirror after they have had this surgery. In an otherwise utterly frivolous piece of titillation, the woman's courage and self-acceptance - and her husband's love for her - shone through.
There is very little that British TV censors these days, yet there are still some taboos. Amid the myriad and, ultimately rather boring, nakedness of men, women, young children, fat people, thin people, tall people and people shaped like beach balls in Full Frontal, there was one image which the programme-makers considered too threatening to be shown. A beautiful, nude young girl, who was interviewed while sitting with her nude parents' in their caravan, had her body digitally distorted by those blurred squares which programme-makers use to disguise confessed criminals and anonymous sources.
It says something about where we are today, concerning our sexuality, that the only image regarded as obscene enough to censor is innocence. The actual obscenities are paedophilia and rape of teenage girls, but in Full Frontal it was the girl's nakedness that had obscenity projected upon it by the threat of paedophilia and rape - so long underground, and now media obsessions. The idea that distortion was necessary because a pervert might use the Full Frontal image of the girl for some sick purpose was not mentioned by the narrator; it didn't have to be.
ON the other hand, the rape of a grown woman is regarded as perfectly acceptable fare. In a week when a viewer survey by the UK Broadcasting Commission expressed concern about gratuitous sex and violence, Vice arrived with perfect timing. The first episode was preceded by a warning that disturbing material would be shown from the outset, although few viewers could have anticipated how quick that would be. Vice's first image was of pornographic sexual violence. The camera zoomed in on one large, round, black-rimmed Modigliani eye pooled with tears. The eye was so glassy and brimming that it did not seem quite real, until the camera began to pull back to expose the woman's entire, anguished face and, then, the forced rhythmic motion of her shoulders as she was raped from behind. "See, you can do it when you want to," said the rapist, a pinstriped type in a bad blonde wig, as he brusquely fastened his flies. To some people, this is seen as entertainment. To others, this is seen as permission, which is worth remembering considering the growing incidence of rape in this State. How do you get away with graphically raping and murdering women on TV? You make them prostitutes. And to get over the moral dilemma that raises - prostitutes are human beings no more deserving of rape and murder than anyone else, after all - you emotionally manipulate the viewer into feeling sorry for the prostitute. We learned that the rape victim, Nicky, was raped by her pimp, for whom she had refused to "work" since he forced her to abort her baby nearly at term. Two scenes later, we meet another attractive prostitute. The scene after that, she is murdered. We learn that she is the middle-class mother of two who has been working to support her unemployed husband. We see her children cowering on the stairs of their home as the police tell the husband that his wife is dead. Soon Nicky too has been murdered by her pimp, while the pimp's daughter hides in the bathroom. All this sexual violence serves one thing: the need for a Crackertype vehicle for Ken Stott, a good actor with an appealing, "working class" face. He is dumpy, anti-establishment and angst-ridden, much like Robbie Coltrane in Cracker, but without Coltrane's hint of madness. It would have been too obvious to make Stott a psychologist like Coltrane's character, so instead he is head of a vice squad and his beautiful girlfriend (or, at least, she looks like she'll become his girlfriend before long) is a psychiatrist.
There the comparison ends, because Vice's scripts are inferior to the engrossing and enigmatic Cracker; to put it bluntly, Vice reveals upcoming developments from a mile away. With an exploitative drama like Vice, you are always asking yourself whether the draw is the sexual violence or the script. When a script is good, it's easier to justify being drawn in by sensationalistic sexual violence - hypocritical as that reasoning may be. In Vice, it's a fine line.
Four programmes - three on RTE and one on BBC - coincidentally explored facets of Irish identity and unintentionally illuminated each other. Paradise Island, €1, Monday), made by Jim Fahy, profiled a Clare-born Catholic priest, Father John Glynn, who has spent the past 30 years ministering to four million former cannibals on New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The impoverished natives are so fond of him that they have made him an honorary tribal chief. Father Glynn is loved equally by the local millionaires, one an MP who wants him to relinquish the priesthood to become governor of New Ireland. Father Glynn is still pondering the offer.
His mission has been to raise New Irelanders' self-esteem in order to help them keep their own cultural identity and resist exploitation. Father Glynn compares the threat to that inflicted on the "old" Irish by the British and while it is too late for the Irish language, it may not be too late for New Ireland, in his view. With this in mind, he encourages the New Irelanders to hold an annual cultural festival, which in their tradition involves spending all their wealth on entertaining their friends and families. Their complex matriarchies require that ancestors' names be invoked and celebrated for generations. Long after you are dead, people are killing and roasting pigs in your honour.
"This," Father Glynn says as a pig is skewered in his own honour, "is important."
The modern Irish equivalent of the two-pig feast where all wealth is spent on drinking, if not eating, is, of course, the All-Ireland. Pat Comer's brilliantly shot and edited documentary on the Galway senior hurling team's path to glory, A Year 'Til Sunday, €1, Tuesday) showed that the "new" Ireland boisterously holds onto culture, tradition and self-esteem through the GAA. Comer is a born film-maker, as well as a football player, and his film was a lesson in brevity and the light touch. Even a non-sporting person could not go away from this film without understanding the passion of the GAA, because Comer instinctively knows how to tell a story by showing it. He stands far enough back from his subjects to allow them to reveal all the fragile, human striving, discipline and self-belief that goes into winning an All-Ireland final.
The All-Ireland experience is, in the end, about being able to tell your grandchildren in 50 years time that you were there, like your grandfather before you. Like the New Irelanders of Papua New Guinea, the Irish, too, have a need to celebrate those who have gone before, while creating heroes which will nurture self-belief in generations to come. The most memorable image in the film was of a player bringing the Sam Maguire into the cottage of an elderly, Irish-speaking former player and placing it on his bed, where he lay half-naked and delighted, too bewildered to rise. THE Irish language as the dying mother of Irish culture was the issue in Pobal agus Plearaca. €1, Thursday). Bob Quinn, unconsciously echoing Father John Glynn, again expressed his belief that the Connemara Gaeltacht is nearing extinction. Like the covered wagons that heralded the extinction of the American Indians, the traffic from Galway to Spiddal is the sign that the Connemara Gaeltacht could soon be obliterated, he believes.
Taking the same approach as Father Glynn on his tropical island, a group in Rosmuc has organised an annual community celebration of the arts which they hope will revitalise the Irish language. The images of Gaeltacht men and women Irish dancing were about as convincing as the images of New Irelanders doing their tribal steps. How long will either last into the new millennium?
The "new" Republic of Ireland's youth are suffering from collective amnesia, said historian Pat Cooke in My Dark Fathers, the first instalment of Fergal Keane's three-part Irish Journeys. Keane is a poetic journalist capable of truly original insight, but unfortunately he stuck to a competent telling of familiar history. We were told that the suffering and commitment which freed this State is not appreciated by the "new Irish" who have refused to inherit the burdens of their forebears and want to be free. The young are "dropping the dark fathers", fellow Kerryman Brendan Kenneally told Keane, who himself grew up with his head full of "English villains and Irish heroes". Turning to his uncle, John B. Keane, for a history lesson, Keane listens to him tell of how, when she was only 19, his grandmother carried guns, taking such risks that the Black and Tans held a loaded gun to her head on at least one occasion. You can imagine that impressing them at the BBC.
Keane's programme was clearly made for "outsiders", rather than for viewers in the Republic. It seemed, in a way, to be a plea for understanding aimed at Northerners. You could imagine it going down well with public broadcasting stations in Boston, but one suspects that those close to the Troubles would have remained unimpressed by the amnesiac youth of 1999.