Questions and Answers (RTE 1, Monday) Let's Talk (BBC 1, Monday) Crossing Borders (UTV, Tuesday) True Lives: A Great Hatred (Channel 4, Thursday) Home Truths (BBC1, Thursday) Dream Team (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Monday night's Questions And Answers has set itself up as the parish hall for the presidential hustings. No bouncers needed as yet.
Dana was penned off for her own safety last Monday night, having being worried by a dog the previous week on the radio. Deputising, in loco fundamentalis, as it were, was Mr Sean Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus, who wore his Irish dancing medal and exhibited no signs of having been held by the ankle and dipped in a river of soft, flowing pastels by conscientious media handlers.
S.D.B.R. Loftus produced an ineloquent little coup de theatre when he ripped the cover and several pages from the Whitaker Report as a means of demonstrating his feelings about its as yet unimplemented proposals. As the Eurovision woman says, sure, aren't we all tired of intolerance masquerading as liberalism.
In the week when the prince of pastel, Tony Blair, shook hands with Adams and television failed to record the event (can we even believe that it happened?), the airwaves were crackling with talking heads and spying cameras. Television could only record the Troubles. It is setting out to define the peace by dissolving our intolerances through analysis and talk. Lots of talk.
Thus the Q And A spat between Derek Nally and Mary McAleese was interesting less for its impact on campaigning than for its message about the ever-evolving semiotics in the situation.
Brandishing the little bottle of smoke as if it were a grenade, Derek Nally announced that Mary M. had apparently told somebody who told somebody else who leaked it that she (Mary M.) would only get involved in Northern Irish politics if there was an electoral pact between Sinn Fein and the SDLP. Nally paused. There was no gasp of shock.
"What would be wrong with that?" said John Bowman. Then something which would have been unimaginable a few years ago happened. The audience applauded.
Here in the beerily self-satisfied South we are more fluid about these things, of course. The following evening, David Dunseith presided over a cross-community chin-wag on the topically titled Let's Talk. The tone was very Northern - that is, both communities were quite cross.
Mr Dunseith, exhibiting a dishevelled demeanour and gruff manner, stoked the whole thing along brusquely, marching into the audience as determinedly and provocatively as an Orange parade.
Just as well. Northern attitudes change at the same pace as coastal erosion. Long-playing records were flipped over. The happy clappy tendency was dismissed, its simplicity scorned. The usual codes and signals were pressed into use but held up for the fripperies they really are.
"You said six counties. Very well then."
"You are going to call him Mr Faul from Dungannon are you, not Father Faul?"
"I tell you my name, you know my background - but that's the way."
Free State, 26 counties, Derry, Londonderry, Mainland. With the introduction of certain words into the discourse, a percentage of the Let's Talk assembly just switched off. It was good to see people under one roof talking about their future, but notable that nationalists felt comfortable about the future in modern, mythical, Celtic Tiger Ireland, while unionists evoked images of surpliced padres coming and swishing through their houses on dawn raids.
The televisual peace process shall be all about chatter and intracommunity navel-gazing. If we admire our own cultures long enough, we will soon accommodate the idea that we are generously diverse enough to embrace somebody else's culture.
JOHN Dunlop cruised the totems of our southern pop culture, from Gaelic football to Riverdance, on Crossing Borders. Here in the 26 counties/Irish Republic we admire ourselves and our totems and our Celtic Tiger so passionately that it was startling to see Dunlop padding about fretfully like an astronaut on new terrain.
"What was it like to play on the Donegal team that won the All-Ireland championship?" he asked Martin McHugh.
"It meant an awful lot to me, my family, my club, my parish, the region and my county as a whole," said Martin McHugh.
And John Dunlop crooked an eyebrow. Parish?
Mr Dunlop turned a beady eye towards Riverdance. "A performance staged by neighbours . . . "
IF the process of understanding is just beginning in Ireland it's not yet finished in Scotland. True Lives €1, Monday) looked at the business of religious friction in Scotland. There is seemingly no way of examining religious disharmony in Scotland without genuflection to the one true god, football.
The sense of menace which exists between Celtic and Rangers fans in Glasgow (and Belfast) is traditionally explained away by means of its religious context. There is a religious element to it but the pure hatred which distinguishes the rivalry between advocates of Leeds United and Manchester United or Feyenoord and Ajax places it into its modern context. Religion is no longer at the heart of it.
In fairness to True Lives, the camera pulled back from the easy score with the football fans and panned across the backyards of people's minds. Hauntingly shot, the images flipped over slowly, like a photo album of the intolerant.
Families posed for the camera in their orange sashes. Grown men and women explained calmly the way they think about other traditions. It needed no commentary. One woman explained that if her infant daughter grew up and married a Catholic in a Catholic church she would go to the wedding dinner afterwards but not to the church.
Her flat certainty worried us more than a terraceful of baying halfwits ever could .
A variation on the bigot theme saw Simon Sebag Montefiore excavating a black seam of anti-Semitism central to the core history of Sinn Fein in A Great Hatred on Wednesday. Late last century, Montefiore's grandparents had fled Lithuania and settled in Limerick. Not long afterwards they were forced to move on again. The 1904 pogrom still scars that city's history and stains more than a few reputations.
Montefiore identified republicanism as a culprit, the dullard wing of the green nationalists having stirred up anti-Semitism for easy profit. Sinn Fein got a rough ride. The Catholic church, whose flying-squad priests inspired the pogrom, came out smelling only marginally better.
Montefiore's patient archaeology brought to light a series of antiquated old survivors from the war era whose prejudices were more than intact. He ran his finger along the vein of anti-Semitism running through Sinn Fein from its birth until after the second World War, from the Limerick pogrom to Arthur Griffith and on, producing convincing evidence of Sinn Fein collusion with Germans on their raids of Belfast.
A Great Hatred was nourishing television and historically valuable, but what it told us about the green socialism of the present generation of Sinn Fein was less certain and the big pay-off - assertions about the putatively sectarian nature of some far-off, 32-county green state - seemed less assured. It was no revelation that republicanism in the past has regarded the enemy of its enemy as its friend, but the patient removal of a skeleton from the green cupboard was a splendid clarification of some murky business.
SINN Fein, in the form of Gerry Adams, featured also on the most gently revealing programme of the week, Home Truths (BBC 1) on Wednesday. Coming at a subject from a tangent often lends the clearest views, and in Home Truths past pupils and educators spoke about the influence of the Christian Brothers in the North.
Those of us who have heard the shuffle of the black dresses and the smack of hard leather on soft hands felt an instant familiarity.
Home Truths was a conversation which so many Irish men have, swapping Christian Brothers stories. Everybody tells the same yarns about the Christian Brothers - the decent ones, the psychos and the sickos.
Except, of course, Protestant men. They don't swap those stories. And as the programme wound on, the understated influence of the Christian Brothers and, by extension (if you are a unionist), Catholicism, on Irish nationalist consciousness became clearer.
Gerry Adams was cited by one contributor, Malachi Docherty: "The whole manner of the man is Christian Brothers . . . the way he'll preface his remarks in Gaelic . . . the way he'll stand up and say: `Somebody open a window at the back there, it's a bit stuffy in here.' "
There was an echo of Yeats and whether those words of his sent out certain men the English shot. No firm conclusions but lots to think about. It was that sort of week.
Back to terra firma. Finally a word of gentle commendation for Sky One's Dream Team (Sky 1 Tuesday), the first television programme to come to terms with the fact that actors can't play football and footballers can't act. This week, through the miracle of modern editing, fictional Harchester United played Chelsea in the Cup and Roberto di Matteo scored.
The action was every bit as real as when Chelsea played Leicester City in the FA Cup last year: in fact, the action was identical except that the Leicester jerseys had been tinted purple and given a new sponsor's logo. This week young Irish hopeful Conor McCarthy arrived at the club. From what we saw, he looks good enough to play for Ireland in Brussels next month.