TV Review: Sky News Ireland arrived on Monday with a smirk. Why, you wondered, has Gráinne Seoige got that sly smile? Why does she look as if she knows something really good is about to happen, but isn't going to tell us what? It certainly couldn't be the "Sky News Ireland Exclusive" that led its first bulletin.
That story related to a fixed-fee system for contractors on major public works and had your attention drifting by the third syllable. It heralded the newcomer's arrival with not so much a trumpeted fanfare as the squeak of a deflating balloon.
The rest of it, however, has been as eager to catch your attention as might be expected. Reporters often interact with the news, so that if one of them were to deliver a piece while swinging from a trapeze it would hardly cause you to blink. Seoige sits, stands, sits, as if she can't quite find a comfortable position. The weather presenter, Lisa Burke, delivered the weather report from a Dublin rooftop, telling us how lovely it is in the city and, look, there's the Liffey. Hers is a brief residency on the capital's skyline, and the forecasts will in future be broadcast from London, where Burke will no doubt be telling us how wonderful the London Eye is and how we really should try and catch a show.
Sky News Ireland was predictably vain and self-publicising. Eibhlín Ní Chonghaile's piece on President Bush's stay at Dromoland Castle involved her swooping in by helicopter and hovering just above parody. This is the bed the president will sleep in, she told us. Then she slid on to it, stretched out a little, and stopped just short of slipping off her shoes and releasing her hair from its clasp.
The piece ended with a look at the helicopter, emblazoned with Sky News logos, as it turned and disappeared. It was a lingering, gratuitous look, like a man ostentatiously watching his girlfriend's backside as she walks away. But featuring the helicopter was about more than simply popping out for milk in the Ferrari. It was also about Sky News ingratiating itself with the natives by sweeping in over the Cliffs of Moher and drooling over the scenery of Co Clare.
Yet its strength so far has come from its not being Irish. It has dipped into the resources of the international Sky News so that it could go live to correspondents in Baghdad and Glasgow. It has also given added value to reports, so that the Luas system could be compared to a similar one in Nottingham and the India correspondent could do a piece on a smoking ban there while perched on a bar stool in an Irish pub.
When it's an English reporter sipping on the Guinness, though, it leaves a bitter taste of tokenism, and all week it has been uncertain of what the balance should be between local and international news. Without veteran reporters it struggles to be authoritative, as has been the case for TV3, from whom several of the journalists have been poached. In fact, Sky News Ireland is pretty close to how TV3 news might be if the latter had the budget.
Not that stretching the conventions of television news automatically erodes authority. Viewers of Channel 4 News will have long ago got used to the sight of Jon Snow's legs stretching high, and of reporters hamming it up a little; but it remains a broadcast of solid integrity. RTÉ News, however, remains quite unmoved by such gaudy distractions. Brian Dobson's knees remain unfamiliar and Anne Doyle does not go wandering about the studio. Reporters report. Weather forecasters forecast. The set is restrained, as if time has reduced the colours to a pale blue. There is always a little joking between the newscasters and sports reporter on the Six-One News, but they always pull themselves together before it gets out of hand.
With Prime Time Investigates, though, RTÉ continues to emphasise the importance of straightforward but rigorous journalism. Keelin Shanley's report on the care of those with intellectual disabilities was a devastating hour of television. To witness the life of the O'Connor parents, whose son Stephen often suffers violent outbursts, or the O'Hara family, with four of its five boys autistic, was to have these people's quite overwhelming difficulties lodged in both your memory and your gut. The psychological pressure was evident in the number of the parents who had contemplated suicide and their overall frustration was clear in the number taking the Government to the High Court. The report was about people looking not for praise for what they do, but simply for help in doing it. Each had tremendous courage; obvious even before it was thrown into sharp relief against the cowardice of the State, which has been grudging in its assistance for so long and so publicly.
In this series, Prime Time has not revealed too many things that were not already known to us. There has been newspaper and radio coverage of planning perversities and the mistreatment of immigrant workers, as there has been of the problems faced by carers for the intellectually disabled. But television makes these things real in a way that no other medium can. Prime Time Investigates has both understood and harnessed this, bringing these problems into our living rooms with force, so that the impact is no longer vague and abstract, but all too stark.
Manchán Magan is continuing his tour of the new EU states in Europe: The New Frontier, and he always carries a hint of unpredictability. This week he became the first Irish person in some years to visit Budapest and not come home with the keys to a new apartment.
He gives the impression of the journey being a somewhat haphazard one, taking him where the river flows or where boats drop him, but beneath it all there is obviously careful planning. And while the series is ostensibly about examining the realities behind the EU social model - a topic that might send many viewers slumping towards the remote control - he has been most interested in the people, meaning that there has been warmth alongside the erudition.
Magan presents in an expressive, passionate style that is reminiscent of the old Open University presenters. He sometimes relies on exaggeration, such as when he told us that "the enlarged Europe is now a melting pot of cultures and languages the like of which has not been seen since the building of the Tower of Babel". But that kind of thing can be overlooked, because this is an otherwise thoughtful and sharp travelogue from within those borders that now link with ours.
I Am Not An Animal is a new animation series and will be either like steel wool on your brain or ointment to your mind. Its art is cut-and-paste, similar to abrasive, jittery Flash animation on computers. Its script is similarly jagged. Voiced by, among others, Steve Coogan and Julia Davis, and written by Peter Baynham, it features a group of talking animals who don't realise that they are trapped in a vivisection lab. They spend their time in vacuous discourse over dinner, belittling each other by throwing in such phrases as "sub-Altmanesque" and debating the correct pronunciation of "Ralph Fiennes". They are wooed to their deaths through a door marked London, which they believe to be a nirvana of sophistication.
A group of psychopathic animal rights activists has now released them and they are journeying to the real London. The most entertaining character is a mad bunny, voiced by Arthur Mathews, who parrots the blather of call-centre workers. It is an obvious satire on the media set and is aimed at such a narrow audience that it would fall after only one series if that audience didn't consist largely of people who make television programmes for a living.
Finally, on Wednesday night, we were treated to the inaugural Eurovision Song Contest semi-final, and it was such a sickly treat that it threatened to spoil the appetite for the real thing. This was a distillation of Eurovision's patented naffness,camp, and complete disregard for the constraints of irony. It began with the Finnish entry singing a pop song about the satanic tango and continued with the Lithuanian entry putting back its country's cultural progress by several decades. It was all so thoroughly enjoyable that perhaps in future the format might be inverted, so that finalists should instead be required to qualify for the semi-final.
