From `paddydom' to punk from a whisper to a scream (RTE 1, Tuesday)
(BBC 1, Saturday; repeated Monday)
Nation Building (RTE 1, Thursday)
Showbands were a hybrid of big bands and ceili bands, said Niall Stokes. The ultimate in showband cuisine was "a prawn cocktail and a steak", said Jim Sheridan. Twisting that particular knife still further, Jim recalled how showband musicians used to apply Tanfastic bottled suntan to their hands, wrists, necks and faces. (Must have been seriously browned off, eh?) Showband music was the enemy, said Bono. "Showbands were crap," said Bob Geldof. "Musically, they were a death."
It's all true. Showbands were dreadful. In fact, they were almost as vile as boy bands. The scourging of the showbands could be heard on this week's opening episode of from a whisper to a scream, a six-part series on the past 40 years of Irish popular music. Snappy in technique and nostalgic in mood, the series itself bobs along like a catchy pop tune. Like all such tunes, it should have a wide appeal. Only time, of course, will tell whether its judgments date well or badly.
Documentary footage of a schoolmarmish woman tutoring a classroom of twenty-something buckos in dancehall etiquette was beyond even The Ballroom of Romance. It looked like a scene from The Twilight Zone. So strapping that you could almost sense the testosterone through the telly, the poor lads just gazed back like bewildered bulls as they were instructed in how to ask a woman to dance. An overseeing priest butted-in to add that "a little bow" wouldn't be out of place. Unless such a custom was native to the community, it would have been as out of place as Mr Darcy at a ceili.
It all seemed cruel, controlling and patronising rather than civilising. Perhaps it was well-intentioned. Anyway, whatever the motivation behind such rude impositions of a borrowed etiquette, it's little wonder that almost all the popular music was borrowed too. So the showbands were really cardboard imitations of other countries' pop cultures. Van Morrison, who started out with The Manhattans (very Belfast, eh?), recalled that they used to do "comedy, top 10 and jazz". He didn't praise it but he seemed to understand why. Bob Geldof was more damning about it all. Showbands, he felt, were just "typical paddydom". Accurate but unduly accusing, it was a typical Geldof assessment. In a poor country, emerging from repressive political colonisation and gripped by an intensely inhibiting religious substitute, the abject "paddydom" might have been understood a little better. Times were hard, Bob, and sometimes a lack of self-confidence is more attractive than a surplus of it, if you can imagine that. Still, the 1960s arrived and with Sean Lemass, Telefis Eireann, The Beatles and the rest of the wonders of the age, Irish popular music began to change too.
These were the cusp years when the showbands and the emerging beat and rhythm and blues groups reflected two different Irelands. We saw Brendan Bowyer doing his Elvis-in-the-sauna routine and we saw Taste and Skid Row too. As the showbands waned, Irish popular musicians, as Niall Stokes put it, were "plugging into a deeper well and a primal power". They were indeed, but only because they were developing the self-confidence to do so. We also saw the extraordinary Rory Gallagher.
"There was something incredibly authentic about Gallagher," said Pat McCabe. The irony of "incredibly authentic" notwithstanding, there was. There really was. Unlike most successful pop musicians (and a lot of classical ones too) there was nothing of the poseur about Rory Gallagher. In order to appear like czars of cool, too many millionaire musicians seem to deem it necessary to present themselves as bona fide bohemians. Success in pop almost inevitably produces that kind of tension but Gallagher was the real deal.
Many of Irish music's big names were assembled for this first episode. It's ironic too that some of the biggest of these big names are, literally, such small names. Bono and Edge appeared. Though cool and cutting edge 20 or more years ago, in that brief gap between the punks and the wannabe new romantics, these single, four-letter names have dated now. Sure, they're nowhere nearly as naff as Tanfastic. However, yet again, you'd be left wondering what's in a name.
Anyway, quite a strong debut gig for this series. Seeing Frank Hall and John Lennon, and Phil Lynott and Rory Gallagher again and then remembering that they've all since gone to the great gig in the sky, put it in perspective. Since the waning of the showbands, even allowing for the ludicrous hubris which is part of popular music, there have been some genuinely talented Irish acts. And sure, there was the naffness of paddydom about the showbands. But is the more globalised naffness of contemporary boy bands not even sadder? Clearly, progress in time isn't always synonymous with greater sophistication.
Bouncers, to many people, are synonymous with unsophistication. In fact, they often seem so starved of sophistication that they crave it, believing that shades, suits and rictus expressions somehow bestow it. Muscle, which is an unlikely BBC effort, followed a browned-off British bouncer and a browned-off British ex-cop to Los Angeles. There the pair attended a course on "CP work". As in the military and the police, the work done by private sector bruisers almost chokes on its own jargon. CP stands for "close protection".
The lads were interested in becoming "BGs" providing CP to "principals". Translated, this means that they wanted to become bodyguards for wealthy people who either feared attack or feared that they wouldn't seem important enough if they didn't seem to fear attack. Instructors on the course spoke about "the close protection industry". Though doubtless, many wealthy and prominent people rightly fear attack, it was hard not to think that at least part of the close protection industry is really a protection racket feeding on deluded egos. Protect the paranoia and the suckers will come . . .
An instructor brought the two lads on a tour of some of the roughest areas of Los Angeles, where, he said: "the AK47 is the weapon of choice". Certainly, it looked grim, with drunks and drug addicts sprawled about on the sidewalks of Watts. Indeed, the hopelessness of it all was reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto. It was genuinely shocking. Then the instructor introduced more jargon. Telling his clearly uncomfortable pupils that killing is so routine in some areas, he explained that usually these are "NHI" events.
The wannabe BGs were perplexed. "NHI," said the LA guy, "means `no humans involved'." The term, he said, is accepted police and CP industry jargon for when one drug dealer kills another. You can deplore the fact but still understand how it has come about. But where does it end? How about non-dealing drug addicts? Deciding who is human and who is not is a deadly, dangerous form of thinking. Wasn't something like that at the core of the evil that produced the Warsaw ghetto and worse?
Anyway, the British blokes were rather freaked by it all. Then it was time for them to get in some gun-practice. They were brought to an outdoor range and to an indoor place with computer simulations of shootouts. "Nice head shot," said an instructor, as one of the lads blasted a virtual thug through the brain. Shouldn't "nice" and "head-shot" in the same sentence be alarming? Granted, the virtual target was non-human but the graphics were so convincing that it was a very human-like non-human. The step up to the real thing, as it is for airline pilots who train on simulators, was considerably lessened.
The course was "very professional" according to the lads. No doubt it was. It was also very disturbing. Being shown in the week in which one six-year-old was shot by another in an American school, you'd have to wonder how much worse it has to get before gun-worship dies in the US. Muscle was comic in terms of the macho posing and the codology lingo. But it was salutary and rather frightening in so many other ways. Sometimes dark truths protrude through ostensible TV schlock.
This week's fourth episode of Nation Building was titled On the Land. Naturally it addressed the imported architectural styles which have so angered many taste vigilantes. Of course, many of these styles have been and continue to be inappropriate. They are to the Irish landscape what showbands were to Irish music: cultural cardboard. But there are often unbecoming condescensions and hypocrisies on the parts of the vigilantes too.
Cottage-living, for instance, is usually less idyllic in reality than it is when seen from a big house, whether Anglo-Irish or the Aras an Uachtarain of de Valera. Prof Fred Aalen of TCD implicitly recognised this when he agreed that in spite of the dubious aesthetic involved, the new houses were, in practical terms, advances on those which preceded them. It's a sensitive matter, of course, and the programme was right in suggesting that "restoring links between traditional and contemporary approaches" is the best way forward.
In being neither pompous nor philistine on the question of appropriate rural architecture, Nation Building was refreshing. The deep themes of isolation, poverty and colonisation and their links to the "paddydom" styles were stressed. Now, in an Ireland with more money and confidence and fewer excuses for making mistakes, appropriate styles may develop. Mind you, if the new styles are to be as grossly inappropriate as the names of so many new housing estates, we're in trouble. Compared to these names, the showbands were musically Mozartian.
To date, this has been the most important Irish TV series this year. It is, perhaps, excessively elaborate in captioning and music. But hey, there are architects all over it, so that's hardly surprising. Whether or not it will have any lasting effects is another matter. There are powerful forces ranged against more considered approaches to planning and building. Still, nobody involved in building will have a right to plead ignorance after this one. Good stuff.
Finally, if the archaeologists and architects of Nation Building can provide us with considered ideas, why should we continue to suffer so much rubbish from advertisers? Have you seen the latest effort for Six-Nations rugby? Full of guff about Cuchulainn and "rewriting history", it is a sheer embarrassment. It's not just the rugby people who are at fault here. The GAA has advertised itself with equally idiotic "mythological" nonsense. The trend began on Sky, when sports promos for the most mundane events were inflated to apocalyptic proportions.
While hyperbole is legitimate, far from generating a sense of the monumental, this latest rugby ad risks making the sport seem like a cheap, Naseem Hamed-like, tabloid joke. Rewriting history? C'mon lads, get a grip - it's a rugby match. It's the ad, not history, which really needs rewriting. The loudness of these new sports ads is every bit as vacuous as, and much more patronising than, the most abject showband carry-on. They should be kicked to touch before the whole competition becomes a complete laughing stock.