Love is Not Enough: the Journey to Adoption (BBC 1 Tuesday)
Straight to Video (Network 2 Wednesday)
True Lives: Julie's Journey (RTE 1 Tuesday)
Sins of the Flesh (BBC 1 Sunday)
Public Service Broadcasting. Say it out loud. The words have a ring of genteel antiquity, like something you visit out of duty on a Sunday and then spend all week trying to forget. What are we being asked to do about PSB at the moment? Pay more for it. Proper order, too. We pay more for everything else these days, other than human kindness and the odd hug.
But: Big Questions About The Nation lurk somewhere in the dreary if worthy debates about PSB and Irish broadcasting. The sense that we have to capitalise the questions makes it likely we won't get them right. PSB has become a bureaucrat's label for dull television, as well as a competitor's excuse for trash TV. There's hardly any good excuse for that.
The point of a PSB series on adoption is to alert us to the real snags and human hurt in this awful process, while keeping us visually/emotionally/intellectually entertained. BBC 1 nearly got it right on Tuesday in Love Is Not Enough: the Journey to Adoption. But the obsolescence of the PSB mindset tripped them up.
Let's talk about adoption. Only 200 babies are put up for adoption in Britain every year. Better to keep them with their mammies and daddies, you might argue. Well, quite. Except that crisis pregnancy, teen pregnancy and single parent poverty rates in Britain are practically stratospheric: no one measures the fertile to see if they could parent well. Older children in need of foster care can't find parents; if a child has a disability too, he or she is destined for a luckless life. Meanwhile, delayed childbearing and resulting infertility appear to make more people childless than ever before.
The story ran like this: four couples are followed over some 18 months, each representing what the programme makers must have considered a different strand in British life. In the posh corner are Sarah and Mark, the couple from Kent, already parents to Josh, who was adopted from Romania. The absence of a bilateral agreement with the authorities there mean a second adoption would oblige them to practically move their family over for the considerable time it takes. They're trying China instead, which for various reasons means accepting a child with special needs.
Sarah just manages to clear away last night's wine bottle and ash-tray before she and Mark sit at the kitchen table going through a list of disabilities with the social worker. Babies in China are often scrapped when they don't measure up, which makes characteristics from being female to having a glue ear enough to have you rejected.
Would they accept a child who is blind in one or both eyes, autistic, or whatever? A potentially good scene is ruined by being full of PSB. The programme-makers want us to consider how tough it is to be disabled, while noting possible sub-texts about viewing children as commodities. But being smart viewers, we'd already got there.
Enter working class couple Tony and Linda, whose added plus of being from Leeds means the BBC is really getting out and about. Linda quotes people such as "our Mandy", which is the kind of phrase I've heard some people mimic before chuckling at their own wit. You might know the type.
Linda is a great mammy. She cares for Tony's three older children, lots of pets and anyone in need of loving. She wants a baby she and Tony can bring up together, but more fertility treatment is beyond the couple's financial and emotional capacity. However, just as we think the adoption people can't possibly say no to her, we learn that as a child, she was in foster care, having been taken there when she was found to be fully looking after her own brother and sister from the age of eight. Poor Linda. Poor Tony too.
We had enough facts, feelings and issues to consider at this point. But being riddled with PSB overkill, the programme makers couldn't call a halt.
More couples appear, with ever-more nuanced personal situations and accents. Hey, we're only viewers, not trainee anthropologists in need of a fix. What we (I) really wanted to know was did they get babies, and if not, how did they feel. But PSB's insistence on lengthy even-handedness across so much knowledge means I can't tell you, and probably won't find out for another month.
Straight to Video is a similar case of PSB in need of a makeover. First, let's record a qualified hurray to anyone who helps get new writing and new directors on the small screen, and another one to RTE for returning to comedy programming, which went wrong in the past, as everyone keeps on reminding them. I don't find it surprising that RTE can't always get comedy right. Most stand-ups don't either.
The series' conceit is that characters are making their own video for various purposes. Sometimes this works. This week, wobbly shots predictably, unnecessarily, ensued, along with faked self-consciousness, which amounts to a contradiction in terms. That set the tone for lines in need of editing (yes, I know who's talking), actors in need of direction and a team in serious need of up-to-the-minute wit.
Milo O'Shea made a welcome visit to this week's scenario where Des Keogh played a pre-second World War IRA man-turned-hit-man who makes a comeback because his daughter has become a single parent after her husband leaves her, and he needs cash. Even two such senior players couldn't rescue the lines or the plot. A few good gags hit the ground running, before fading badly in the final straight. Otherwise, shots of children knowing video camera technology better than people over 35 are too trite to make anyone laugh.
Long single-shot sequences shouldn't have obliged the actors to slow their pace too, but did. People in Tramore, Co Waterford spoke with Dublin accents, perhaps because local patois has not yet differentiated into spick and gouger. The actual chronology was impossible given the characters' age - a 1930s IRA member who went on to target greyhounds in the 1950s must be at least in his 80s now. I wouldn't mention it except that the attempt to push so many social and historical hot points had to be sharp to work.
Ultimately, it is costlier to produce cheap television badly than to give decent budgets in the first place and spend enough time and human resources getting things right. E took the decision to proceed. Perhaps it did not. So talented a writer and director would have done better with the right back up. Caution breeds caution. This show has safe written all over it.
Alan Gilsenan's signature interest in memory and personal memorabilia made Julie's Journey a surprisingly challenging profile of a writer's imagination, and how it is formed. For anyone who hasn't seen her on television or read her books, Julie Parsons is a successful thriller writer who used to produce Gay Byrne's radio shows, among others. She's warm, talented, intelligent and I know her, so I declare interest.
Parsons's long experience in radio and television was potentially a disadvantage. Gilsenan's work is about getting under people's skin: Parsons's professional persona as a former TV producer could easily have deflected him from that task. She knew what questions to ask, and how to ask them. She even knew how to film and produce them, too.
Parsons's was a highly personal and difficult journey back to New Zealand, where her father had disappeared when she was a child. Home movie clips and family photos told the story of her parents, a beautiful couple who genuinely had it all. Her mum looked like a film star, and her doctor dad was handsome enough to notice even after all this time. The pair left Ireland, started to have lots of babies, as they both wished, and then took on work in idyllic Samoa.
One day, Parsons's father travelled out to sea in a boat bound for a place three days' journey away. He never arrived. No body was found, no trace of piracy or subterfuge. The mystery didn't stop.
Parsons told us what happened next. The family returned to New Zealand, where property rights were such that her mother didn't have a share in their house. She had to wait there for seven years until she could declare him legally dead. The family returned to Ireland when Julie was 12. This was her first trip back since then.
Parsons knew well what viewers needed. She snooped determinedly around her childhood garden, at first giving detail of how things had changed in a perfectly professional way. We got taste, colour and atmosphere. Julie spoke to old family friends about her dad, and finally managed to get inside her childhood home which she recalled in minute detail.
Then, she got personal. No tears, nothing sentimental. The power of her memories colliding with the present didn't need cheap tricks to dress them up. She affirmed again with his friends how her dad had loved babies.
Perhaps she needed to. Later she told us that "the thought he might be alive and he might not have come to look for us is unbearable".
Nothing is worse than not knowing: odds were he had died. The majesty of this madefor-media story, however, was how Gilsenan explored writerly instincts about place and memory in terms recalling Joseph Conrad.
They looked at the glorious natural skin of New Zealand which welcomed, beckoned, made you want to be there. Underneath, an unexplained hostility seeped through the surface, scarring a sensitive child who always wondered if a shark ate her daddy, if he was ever, ever coming home.
Finally, perky PSB. Emma Freud, more familiar as the Nigella Lawson of contemporary culture presentation, looked at sex and religion in the latest programme of Sins of The Flesh. Marrying sex and religion is a rather obvious PSB tactic, allowing cameras to swoon over lusty medieval church painting and extraordinary sexual laws.
Celibacy fascinated the programme-makers. Freud (a relative of the great bearded one) noted that like the sacrament of marriage, celibacy was a relatively new concept in Christian history, being only 900 years old. She asked a young nun and priest how they felt about giving up a sex life, which they answered rather well. Trouble was they spoke with Irish accents - PSB stereotypes don't give the rest of us a break.
mruane@irish-times.ie