Girls will be girls

TV Review: The ad for The Afternoon Show features its three female presenters, gambolling about town, arm in arm, to music quite similar to that of Sex and the City. A bus goes by, and there they are on the side of it. Just like in Sex and the City. Then you watch The Afternoon Show. It's Sex and the Inanity.

Having watched a few days of RTÉ1's new daytime magazine programme, I've begun to understand just what is the biggest issue on the minds of Irish women today. It is how to get the salon look without having to go to the salon. It's an issue that could swing elections.

The Afternoon Show splutters along on a fuel of soaps, showbiz, food, pets, sex polls, diets and what to do when your husband ups and leaves you.

Apparently, these are the things that interest women. Obviously, they are also interested in it being delivered through a patronising gabble of contrived sisterhood. I am not a woman myself, but I have good friends who are. One of them told me during the week that if this is supposed to reflect Irish womanhood, she'd like to hand in her passport. I'm not qualified to comment on whether this programme appeals to women, but as a human being it makes me want to throw the television out the window.

It is presented by Anna Nolan, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh and Sheana Keane, who mix forced jollity with eager earnestness to the point that the barriers between the two break down. Everything is met with an exaggerated reaction.

"Coffee over a long period of time is like having stress over a long period of time," commented Keane on Wednesday. "Which is pretty frightening." Keane is easily spooked. "Toxins. That's very frightening." The show begins with a chat on the topics of the day. ITV does a programme, Loose Women, in which an all-female panel chats away for an hour and The Afternoon Show wishes desperately to replicate its girls-at-lunch banter.

Instead, it comes out as forced. They seem contractually obliged to tell each other how funny they are. It is messy. One of them will be interviewing a guest, and then the other two will suddenly drop in from behind them, to the confusion of both guest and camera.

Nolan's television career started on Big Brother, where she succeeded in showing herself to be a thoughtful, articulate woman. Here she appears to have anaesthetised her intellect. On Wednesday, the three talked about the football match with all the garbled fervour of college girls trying to impress their jock boyfriends. "If Robbie Keane scores tonight . . ." Nolan glanced at her notes, "he will hold the record of highest goal scorer in Ireland!" Then Sheana Keane chipped in. "Back of the net!" They beamed with self-congratulation. Frightening.

They got rid of Open House for this. That programme was a little old-fashioned and sedate, perhaps, but when you tuned in expecting to cringe, it regularly left your skin untroubled. It had confidence and a musty panache. It understood its audience. The Afternoon Show is by women for women but manages to look like it's been made for women by men.

THE BIG BITE, which precedes The Afternoon Show, is not nearly as bad, but it could be better still. It is presented by David McWilliams, a commentator whose breezy nature smuggles with it his ambitions to be a heavyweight.

Here, he has moved from the backwater of TV3 Sunday mornings, where his topical discussion show, Agenda, used to be, and into the slow river of early afternoons on RTÉ1.

It is once again a topical discussion programme, but more focused. It features a group of people, but does not, as might have been feared, push him into mimicking Robert Kilroy-Silk, who made his reputation at the BBC by bounding through a studio audience fishing outrage from every corner.

Instead, McWilliams acts as umpire during either a discussion or an argument. This means it always has the potential to run away from him.

Wednesday's first debate was a polarised one on radical Islam and within minutes he was engaged in a futile attempt to rein in the voices. Pretty quickly he was like a man chasing leaves in a gale.

It was discussion with much promise. When two Muslim men defended the slaying of Ken Bigley, McWilliams refused to meet their rationale with theatrical disgust, as some hosts might. But with eight on the panel he had to try his hardest to work his way through them methodically and it quickly collapsed as interruptions came regularly. "We've got plenty of time," McWilliams kept pleading as the voices clattered into one another. Yet, it got to the end far too quickly.

The programme is 50 minutes long, but is intent on getting two topics in each day so that it becomes a crush of hurried opinions when it could do with more room to breathe.

It was followed by a discussion on drugs in sport, featuring seven people given only 15 minutes on a complicated subject.

Again, he dutifully made his way through everyone in turn. Thankfully, there is no phone-in, but it does ask viewers to send in their comments. One scrolled across the screen: "Betty finds the programme very interesting." Thank God for that.

Nevertheless, The Big Bite has an intelligence and ambition beyond the hysteria of many of these types of daytime programmes. If it allows itself to slow down, to pace itself and to give a very capable host the time to tease out a topic, it could yet prove a worthy coffee-break companion.

WITH AGENDA GONE, TV3 has rolled out The Political Party. This is the station's sole home-grown addition to its schedules - removing a Sunday political discussion show in favour of a Sunday political discussion show.

Perhaps imagination just costs too much.

It is presented by Ursula Halligan, who is not yet softened up by the format and presents like she's giving a report. She faces the camera with forthright eyebrows and bobbing head. As a political correspondent, she is somewhat of an insider and her chumminess let her down this week. Her first guest was Willie O'Dea. "Corporal O'Dea, I salute you." And she did.

It was a response to an Enda Kenny jibe about O'Dea and Halligan found the new minister's cheesy retorts hilarious.

"He's about as exciting as the speaking clock!" said O'Dea.

"Ha, ha, ha." "He has as much bite as a rubber duck!" "Heh, heh, heh." He's the Minister for Comedy.

The Political Party features George Bush and Kofi Annan in the opening montage, but this week, at least, it was very much a local affair, raking over the damp embers of the reshuffle. It will break no moulds. Halligan signs off with the line, "The Political Party. Your kind of party." Let's not get carried away.

BOB GELDOF MADE two programmes for Channel 4 this week, on marriage and on fatherhood. To paraphrase Fight Club: he is humanity's raging bile duct.

On Monday night's Geldof on Marriage he piled his landslide voice upon the topic. He is hunched, like he's burdened himself with the world's problems for long enough, but still has many miles to go. His own failed marriage and its tragic consequences obviously torture him. When he asks the "why" of anything, it isn't in the spirit of casual inquisition but with a howl of anguish.

He was a belligerent interviewer, shouting down people, telling them they were wrong when he thought so, sometimes not even looking at them as they answered. It made for good visuals, helping to counteract the gloom smothering the topic.

Why is the institution of marriage disintegrating? Why? Oh Christ, why? He interrogated Alain de Botton and Germaine Greer, among others. Because we live in a soap-opera culture, they said. A rights culture, a consumer culture. We are "consumers of the soul". It sounds to me like they're living in a blame culture.

We have, it was argued, confused freedom with personal choice, become obsessed with the "self-esteem movement", that you must love yourself no matter what the circumstances. Have we lost the capacity to love one another, Geldof asked, his universe teetering on the edge of collapse.

Labour MP Alan Milburn, who gave up a cabinet seat for one at his family's dinner table, tried to talk him down, insisting that people arelooking for more from life than consumer disposables. No they're not, insisted Geldof.

Yes they are, insisted Milburn. NO! growled Geldof.

His fingernails were dirty, his hair matted. You wanted to take him in and give him a bath and a hot meal.