Faking It (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Sydney Live (RTE 1, Monday)
Talking Sydney (Network 2, Monday)
Modern Times: Suicidal (BBC2 Wednesday)
You eat asparagus as follows. Taking the blunt end between the thumb and index finger of your right hand, incline it towards your body at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. Then, incline your head towards the stalk at a similar angle, taking care not to drop the head too close to the napery. Open the mouth discreetly and nibble firmly, with a slight twist. Don't stare at the stalk.
Lisa, a northern lass from Castleford, spent a full month in London being groomed for such small elegances, courtesy of Channel 4's Faking It. Her mission was to pass as a member of the upper classes at a dinner party convened for such folk. A society columnist took her "ouht and abouht", explaining why she must lose her spontaneity because it was a dead giveaway she was common, while a speech coach battled for two hours daily to coax her broad northern vowels into a semblance of received pronunciation.
Lisa was styled, bleached, trimmed, manicured and made to walk with her shoulders down. Her house mother chastised her for wearing trainers to supper, even if it was a modest pasta at the kitchen table. Lisa grew miserable and homesick. The tutors despaired.
Dulling down is the key to passing as a toff if you're female. This useless piece of information helped explain why women such as Sarah Ferguson could never have continued in the British royal family, having regularly encouraged others to treat her toes as asparagus stalks. For viewers, it was a pleasant way to scorn the British class system and remind ourselves how lucky we are to be so egalitarian here. Not.
Dotted through this light confection were the unmistakeable signs of power and how to play for it. Centuries of ritual around behaviour create a template of exclusiveness through which even wealthy newcomers must squeeze.
The precise shade of bleach in your hair is enough to expose a vulgar background, while the very thought of sitting down to breakfast without a dab of make-up shows that your concern for others who must look at you is quite deficient. As ritual, it mimics theology, being littered with dogmas that make no obvious sense. But as an entree to how institutional power preserves its core elite, Faking It whiled away a pleasant transmission hour. (Lisa faked it successfully at the dinner party, then took the train back to Castleford as fast as she could).
Old-style Channel 4, of course, would have nobbled the class system head on.Yet, primed by Hello! culture, it has learned slowly - and sometimes depressingly dumbly - to recognise that, for some of its audience, class is the oldest and brightest celebrity, with a specially venal allure. The question of what society list a girl might make it onto reportedly worries certain people late at night: `A' for blue blood and global fame; `B' for ordinary wealth, top TV stars and ladies who lunch for charity; or `C', where you might actually have to meet Freddie Starr.
SONIA O'Sullivan is now eternally Arated, whatever happens when she runs the 10,000 metres today. Ireland's invisible achievements at the Sydney Olympics could be explained by the news that Minister Jim McDaid receives almost as much bad publicity for not funding an Irish drinking parlour in Sydney as for his failure to act on public consensus that we need better management and resources for sports or athletes who don't fall into the GAA/old school tie/weren't we great in Italia 1990 mould.
Even Tom McGurk's manly demeanour on Sydney Live barely contained the excitement on Monday morning as huge swathes of Irish people, plus a few British battalions, got ready to run Sonia's race. Dusty rosary beads and healing stones were dragged out of attics, atheists called on the spirit of the Earth, but Eamon Coughlan knew she wouldn't win gold. His judgment infuriated viewers sufficiently for them to ring in their complaints. "Begrudgery!" they asserted. Things were hotting up.
"No one was late for school this morning," students in her old school Cobh Community College gasped. A former teacher told how Sonia's adolescent determination was such that she insisted he drive through snow to a meet in Kerry, having already rung the Met Office to check the weather there. Smart girl.
Sonia nearly didn't make it, and then she nearly got gold. George Hamilton's "Moment Of Destiny" commentary touched on the tabloid at times in the way it manipulated viewers, though he never fully exploited audience fears that the Kenyans and Ethiopians would tactic her out. His voice hit panic stations as Sonia crowded in on Gabriella Szabo at the final bend, and when you watched her face, you thought of Atlanta and saw that she was thinking of it too - only to stop thinking until she got so close her face froze again and her legs had no more in them and Szabo flew across the finish line.
Back in studio, McGurk and Coughlan told us this silver was worth its weight in gold. Cobh went mad, and the cameras took us to it. Then Sonia ran around the track with a Tricolour as her pashmina, knowing she'd won victory over her worst fears. Coughlan was getting worried and kept explaining that he hadn't had it in for Sonia when he said she wouldn't take a gold and how he was delira she'd won a silver. Even when Sonia herself came on, he took up precious air time to share his feelings with her.
Una O'Hagan's live interviews from Cobh for Six-One News warmly consolidated this day of national bonding. By the time Talking Sydney came on, viewers from Cork had relaxed enough to complain that RTE wasn't being fair to Szabo. Bill O'Herlihy tut-tutted. He was in such an ambient apresmatch mood that the time-delays in his interview with a morning-after Sonia hardly jarred. Coughlan was still winning air-time sharing his feelings, but Sonia smiled a bit perplexedly and nodded absolution.
As if she cared. Having her daughter Ciara in shot was a real bonus, with Sonia in so intimate a mood that she confided she'd been lucky Ciara had slept through the nights. Imagine competing in the Olympics with a still-waking-at-night baby in tandem: none of the panel picked it up.
On slim resources, RTE gave good coverage. Not that you want to lionise Sonia at the expense of all those athletes who are just as committed, despite being expected to achieve without proper Government support. But then forward planning was never high on a sports minister's list. Or a Taoiseach's. Bertie's most admired feature in Australia was, after all, the immigrant detention centres he visited on the St Patrick's Day trip. There's the Olympian-brotherhood-of-man spirit for you.
Winners make headlines. It's an unpleasant, unexpected paradox that, the closer the world gets through global communications and media systems, the fewer the types of humanity that appear in public view. If you don't think you fit in, or don't want to, all the other options can feel cold.
IN Modern Times, Bob and Lynda Humphreys's whirring old cine-films of family holidays caught their beautiful son Darren playing happily at the age of two. There was Darren with his blond head and dinky dungarees on the beach at St Ives, now blowing out his birthday candles, and then clowning for his daddy's camera on his way out to scouts.
Darren went to France on holidays with two friends when he was 19. He was a bit down, but didn't want to talk about it. Just before supper one evening, after a good day, they thought, he locked himself in a room and hanged himself by the neck. His friends took the lock off the door to reach him, but he was already dead.
Darren's case is not unique. The problem of young male suicide is growing so fast explanations can't keep up with it - and reports, however harrowing, aren't matched by strategic, targeted action in Britain or in Ireland. Suicide need not happen at the rate it does if potential victims are identified in advance, given medication, counselling and unconditional love. The question is, why not.
Men are uneasy with such feelings, experts say. They aren't encouraged to talk about their feelings or to indicate vulnerability in any way, and male corporate culture rewards the men who keep things to themselves. It is remarkable that such an old rule of behaviour has survived so long, even when it is patently damaging.
But depression itself is so stigmatised that sufferers are reluctant to seek help, and many feel so low anyway they don't believe life can be different. What they feel is not a case of the blues, but a lightening storm that burns their souls, making them dread waking up in the morning with one more day to survive. They think it is their fault, their weakness, their shame. So it must be hidden, and they must be isolated.
Michael is a Goth who was bullied at school, left at 15 and never held a job for long. Last year, he made a suicide attempt a month. This year, he makes one about every six weeks. He hates himself, and can't imagine himself as a person who is not depressed. Jamie was in and out of care, with his grandmother providing the only real family relationship in which he felt secure. When she died around Jamie's 14th birthday, he tore his room asunder. Now, he cuts himself to bits.
Darren's father Bob deals with his grief by going on line to one of some 100,000 suicide sites on the Net, many of which enable desperate young men and women to share their fears with strangers they will never see. Bob's favourite is called 1000 Deaths, named for the experience of families who have lost a member to suicide - the victim dies once, the family a thousand times.
Modern Times' contribution to public understanding was its survey of the many emerging e-counselling services being made available for young men who are considering suicide. The Samaritans already offer such a service; different support groups around Britain are getting their counsellors online too. Counsellors told us that young men find it much easier to open up on the Net rather than in person, encouraging them to believe cyber-counselling may become a major element of community care. Too late for Darren, but perhaps just in time to save someone else's beautiful boy.
mruane@irish-times.ie