So Graham Norton, Channel 4, Sunday
The Saturday Show, RTE 1, Saturday
Edinburgh Nights, BBC 2, Tuesday
Critical Condition, Channel 4, Wednesday
Titanic, Channel 4, Monday
News, All channels
Does the world need a new Larry Grayson for the millennium? Channel 4 certainly seems to think so, and the man for the job (ooh, matron!) is comedian Graham Norton, whose eponymous chat show came to the end of its first run last weekend. Norton is in a long and honourable line of gay television presenters on British television, but this being the 1990s, he's Irish and allowed make reference to his sexuality. Otherwise, though, it's business as usual - double entendres galore, knicker jokes and plenty of harmless smut.
Last week's guests were veteran weatherman Ian McCaskill and the ineffable Kylie Minogue, who demonstrated how she'd taken a pool cue to discipline a pushy fan. It's all handled with some aplomb by Norton, for whom this moves a rung up the ladder after the middle-of-the-night softcore show Carnal Knowledge.
With a regular item which involves phoning sex chat lines around the world, and competitions to find out who is the most promiscuous person in the audience, So Graham Norton will probably be seen as a further example of dumbing down by those sensitive souls who think that poor old Ally McBeal is a symptom of the decline of Western culture. But trashy light entertainment has always been a vital part of any self-respecting television schedule, and Norton has an undeniable talent for it (nudge, nudge).
It's a long, long way from So Graham Norton to the Ovaltine Hour that is The Saturday Show. If archaeologists of the future should happen upon a tape of this programme, they will confidently set its date at circa 1980. After all, they'll point out, nobody could have designed a set like that in the 1990s, or had such guests.
RTE's attempt to fill the Saturday night prime time slot during what should be the trying-out time of the summer demonstrates just how difficult it's going to be for the station's planners in the post-Gaybo era, not just because of their criminal failure to develop new talent in front of the camera, but also due to the conservatism behind it.
Since throwing Sean Moncrieff in at the deep end without water wings for a Chris Evans-type show in this slot a couple of years ago, they've retreated to a format so conservative it would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. Apart from the first item with the impressive Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, last Saturday's show made Live at Three look like Eurotrash, with Tom O'Connor and Val Doonican reassuring us that they're still alive.
TV3 has been proclaiming its intention to sneak into the demographic gap which market research is supposed to show between Network 2's teenyboppers and RTE 1's geriatrics. What we've seen of the new channel's proposed schedule may not be particularly impressive so far, but the gaping hole is certainly there to be filled. Cosy chat shows just won't do any more.
Nobody said it's easy to do live television, though, even for the BBC. In Edinburgh Nights, the Beeb's live show from the Edinburgh Festival, the unfortunate Mark Lamarr sits uncomfortably on a huge, semi-circular couch and tries to tie the various strands of the festival together, without much success. Part of the difficulty is that an event like Edinburgh is by definition non-televisual (even if most of the participants want to end up on the box).
Lamarr is a talented comedian, and obviously far from stupid, but he's more comfortable making jokes about the Spice Girls on Never Mind the Buzzcocks than getting to grips with conceptual art. Top marks, though, for the moment when he told the ridiculous Donovan, blathering on about Celtic spirituality, Enya, Van Morrison et al, to shut up because he was talking gibberish. With Celtic mushiness spreading like a rash across the Irish channels (stand up Carrie Crowley), we could do with a bit of that over here.
Jon Ronson's Critical Condition has already cast a cold eye over the nefarious goings-on of comedy critics at Edinburgh, and this week it travelled to the West End for the opening night of Moliere's The Misanthrope, an appropriate enough choice, said presenter Jon Ronson, given that it was a play "about telling people the truth, even when the truth hurts". The Evening Standard's Nicholas De Jongh was only too happy to play on the image of critics as sordid and bitter.
"Critics have a reputation for being dirty, rancid and sleazy," he admitted, trying unsuccessfully to dab a food stain off the front of his shirt. "Everybody involved in theatre is dying to say they're mediocrities, but they're scared," according to Ranjit Bolt, the play's translator and the only one on the theatre side prepared to shed anything but sweetness and light on his relationship with his reviewers.
Given the premise of the series, which seems to be that critics and criticised alike are equally objectionable creatures, locked in a perpetual embrace of mutual contempt and barely concealed loathing, it's essential that the subjects of each programme let the masks slip a little, but nobody gave too much away, so the programme's main pleasure was in getting a peek into Bolt's incredibly messy flat. Of such things is truly memorable television made, after all.
Now that we in cableland have had NBC replaced by the National Geographic Channel, we're getting used to the US style of nature programming, in which "nature's wonders" are explained to us in rolling tones by Charlton Heston soundalikes. So we were well prepared for the oddest programme of the week, Titanic Live, which wasn't live at all, but a highlights package of an expedition sponsored by the Discovery Channel (a sort of National Geographic Lite) to explore the famous shipwreck.
To the accompaniment of the kind of doomy music usually reserved for the artier type of horror film, miniature submarines prowled up gangways and through portholes for no discernible purpose. We were supposed to be excited by the footage they were sending back, although there seemed to be very little to get excited about. Much of the programme was devoted to the raising of a big piece of the ship's hull - imaginatively named The Big Piece by the intrepid salvagers. The footage from the ocean floor was, well, murky, despite the best efforts of our excited hosts to raise the excitement level.
There was hysteria when we came across the unfortunate Captain Smith's bathtub - which seemed strange, as it was one of the first things seen at the start of the programme. Only one image had real resonance - a perfectly intact, still gleaming chandelier looming over the dining room waters. But didn't we see that in the movie?
Amid the flim and the flam of summertime television, Omagh was a dark stain seeping across all the channels. For most people television was the primary medium through which they received the news of the atrocity and watched the consequences unfold and they were well served by all the broadcasters on the island.
UTV and BBC Northern Ireland don't often get the credit they deserve for the professionalism and integrity with which they regularly cover complex events in the North, and both were superb all week in their coverage of the human cost of the tragedy.
RTE also had the right idea in taking its outside broadcast unit to Omagh on Monday night, but having shown that flexibility, the producers should probably have junked the Questions and Answers format entirely. There was an inappropriateness in going from the audience of witnesses and relatives to the panel of politicians, which those present seemed well aware of. In making such decisions in pressurised circumstances, it's understandably difficult to get the balance right, but it was almost a relief when technical problems intervened to make the programme unwatchable.
Sky News has become by default the automatic button to press first at times like these in the absence of a programme on terrestrial channels, and there's certainly no doubt that it provides a useful service in providing immediate news, but there's something deeply distasteful about its tabloid presentation. By mid-evening, a dramatic "Omagh Bombing" graphic had been devised, replacing the usual Sky logo before ad breaks. Soon, the amateur video footage of the immediate aftermath was being shown over and over. All the channels showed that footage, of course, but the incessant repetition of these images felt voyeuristic, exploitative and unnecessary.