The Six O'Clock News (TV3, all week)
Messrs Tylak and Rooney (TV3, Sunday)
The Royle Family (BBC 2, Monday)
Living with the Enemy (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Close Up (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Later with John Kelly (Network 2, Tuesday)
Maximum Bob (BBC 2, Sunday)
Trapped behind a huge desk, they're incredibly bland, uncomfortably stiff and there's a complete lack of chemistry between the two of them, no matter how hard they try . . . Yes, Michael and Sheila Goodbear, the furry newsreaders of Bord Gais's current, strangely disturbing, ad campaign, were the stars of Irish television this week. Zapping between TV3's Alan Cantwell and Grainne Seoige and RTE 1's Bryan Dobson and Una O'Hagan, you couldn't avoid the Goodbears, their big, bland features, staring eyes and broadcasting-generic accents inviting inevitable comparisons with their human counterparts on the rival early-evening news programmes. Is some subversive wit in Bord Gais intent on deconstructing the pretensions of the modern news bulletin?
It's a widespread assumption among the print media that, when it comes to new broadcasting services, a high proportion of news in the schedule is automatically a good thing. It's a proposition which seems to be accepted by the broadcasters themselves, partly because it seems like a fairly easy, trouble-free way of showing a little public service commitment. It also appears that the focus groups so beloved of TV3 are telling them that this is what they want, which just goes to show that you can't trust focus groups - stick a bunch of people in a room and ask them what they want to watch, and of course they're going to tell you they'd love more news, when what they'd really prefer is live naked mud wrestling.
But it's a deeply reductionist attitude to the potential of television, publicly or privately funded. The reality is that television's most powerful, memorable and, yes, important moments are at least as likely to come from drama or light entertainment as from news. The news moments we remember most derive from the visceral impact of raw footage - and the interminable, depressing Clinton tapes this week proved how that kind of material can fail to enthral as well.
In their first week on air, it was inevitable there would be a certain stiffness in Seoige's and Cantwell's delivery, but TV3's publicity campaign, which suggested a more informal approach, certainly hasn't been borne out by the evidence so far. Every time the sound faded for a commercial break (and another appointment with the Goodbears), they turned like automatons to engage in "friendly conversation". It doesn't matter that we all know they're just saying: "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb", this is the way it's supposed to be done, and they're damn well going to do it. Meanwhile, over on RTE, Dobson and O'Hagan were cosying up together like Richard and Judy on Ecstasy - the national broadcaster is obviously determined not to be left behind in the news lite stakes. TV3 goes head-to-head with RTE 1 at 6 p.m. and with Network 2 at 10.45 p.m. - this reviewer will stick his head out and predict those slots will have changed by the end of the channel's first year.
Most of the rest of TV3's schedule is as expected - Australian soaps, American sitcoms and mini-series, and re-runs of British shows. To judge from his comments in the run-up to last Sunday's opening night, TV3's boss Rick Hetherington expects a blast from "elitist" critics in the print media this weekend. None but the most misty-eyed optimists, however, will be able to summon much surprise about the schedule. For the moment, there is a significant problem with the attractiveness of the channel to its target market - TV3's programming has been described disparagingly in some quarters as an Irish version of Sky One, but Sky is now a rather successful channel on its own terms. The titles which sustain Sky, such as Friends, ER, and The Simpsons are all held by RTE here, so for the moment TV3 is picking up scraps. This will undoubtedly change, but it will take time, and probably more money.
Paul Tylak and Joe Rooney are the kind of people you would hope would benefit from the advent of a new channel. They've been hovering around the fringes of RTE for years with comedy sketches and one-offs, and it's good to see them get their own series, Messrs Tylak and Rooney. You sense, though, that they'd like to push their material a little further than this particular series - essentially a comedy version of those awful summertime "reports from festivals around the country" - allows. The first episode, from Galway Races, was an uneasy hybrid - it also felt terribly out of date to be showing it in mid-September. Make it a bit sharper and a bit quicker, though, and it could be quite enjoyable.
Comedy is one of the most difficult things to do well, as UK broadcasters know. The British sitcom has been in terminal decline for years now, not that most of them were much good in the first place, and the increasing prominence of the US variety, with its teams of writers devising killer gags, has served to underline the weaknesses of the form. From the best to the worst, British sitcoms have always used class as an engine to drive, with its recurring themes of discomfort, humiliation and failure (Upwardly Mobile, which returned to RTE 1 this week, is a carbon copy of this dismal formula, without the edge). BBC 2's The Royle Family, with Caroline Aherne (best known as Mrs Merton), Ricky Tomlinson, Sue Johnston and Ralf Little as the eponymous Manchester clan, is a fascinating attempt to escape from the limitations of the genre.
Shot entirely on one set, it disrupts many of the conventions of sitcom to good effect. The camera angles are always low and the frame full of detail, as if we're watching the action from the point of view of the television set which forms a perpetual backing track to the dialogue. By focusing so closely on its characters' faces, it manages to be far more visually interesting than the usual sitcom format, with its rigid shooting structure and brightly-lit sets. You can see the influence of Mike Leigh's films here, and, like Leigh, The Royle Family's makers have been accused of a patronising, stereotypical view of workingclass life - all bad telly, chip butties, fags and endless cups of tea. At times, the script is uncertain and the humour forced, but if you give it a chance (and it takes a while to adjust to the show's slouching rhythms) it's full of tiny, intimate, slightly uncomfortable truths.
Class was also an obvious subtext, though not necessarily the way you'd expect, in Living with the Enemy, BBC 2's new series which puts two people of opposing viewpoints together for a week. Paul Dainton and Derek Draper are both working class northern Englishmen and both members of the Labour Party, but there the resemblance ends. Dainton, a Yorkshire trade union official, is a self-proclaimed Old Labourite, while Draper, a political lobbyist living the high life in London, is an almost self-parodic example of New Labour, cruising around in his Mercedes convertible, granting access to his cronies in government in return for fat fees.
The structure of Living with the Enemy, in which one protagonist goes to stay with the other, inevitably means the lifestyle of the host comes under more scrutiny than that of the guest, but Draper's mind-boggling arrogance and indiscretion clearly made him a subject of fascination for the programme-makers. Talking about his "good friend" Peter Mandelson, he breezily confided that "Peter likes to be around bright, intelligent, confident people, and you don't find many of them in the Labour Party". Phoning up a pal in John Prescott's office to draw his attention to a proposal from Dainton, he admitted that: "Commercially, this would cost you £2,000." He did, however, score a few good hits on Dainton's flat-capped, man-of-the-people persona, pointing out his comfortably middle class union salary and nice car. There's no doubt who had the last laugh, though - a few weeks after the programme was shot, Draper became embroiled in the "cash for access" scandal and lost his job.
Sitting in Draper's spare bedroom, Dainton gazed glumly at the portrait of Lenin which Draper had sarcastically installed for his guest. Poor old Lenin has become an ironic icon since the collapse of communism, and one wonders what he would have made of Welsh glam-rockers The Manic Street Preachers, who, according to one interviewee in Close Up's history of the band, "combined Lenin with lipstick and Marx with Marilyn Monroe". Nothing particularly original about that, if you know your Jean-Luc Godard from your Malcolm McLaren, but this film, about how a bunch of intelligent, alienated kids from a depressed Welsh mining town reinvented themselves in their own heads as existentialist rock gods, was a sympathetic evocation of adolescent dreams and harsh realities, tinged with tragedy (the disappearance and presumed death of the band's troubled guitarist Richey Edwards).
Close up is a welcome addition to the BBC's arts coverage, filling the gap left by the departure of Arena in hour-long documentaries on single subjects. Simple questions of scale ensure that RTE will never be able to mount productions on a similar scale, but the rejigged Tuesday night edition of Later on Network 2, with John Kelly hosting, is a step in the right direction. Last year's version of this show had a revolving roster of hosts, and a rather demented commitment to keeping things young and fluffy at all times - popular culture, it seemed, was not for the over-25s. This year's version may be veering too far in the other direction, but it's choosing its subjects with far more acuity. Tuesday's programme, devoted to a profile of impresario and film producer Noel Pearson, managed to be both amusing and informative. Colm Toibin, in particular, had some perceptive comments to make about Pearson's central role in creating 1990s Ireland's selfimage. From theatre to movies to music, Pearson's risk-taking, his rejection of Irish provincialism and inferiority complexes, and his willingness to think on a global scale, have had a huge influence. While one of the themes of the programme was his refusal to be knocked down by begrudgers, it would have been good to add a little vinegar to the programme's mix - after all, the mellow, audience-friendly version of Irishness which Pearson has done so much to create is hardly uncontested ground.
BBC 2 must have been deeply grateful to the US Congress last weekend for releasing the Clinton tapes the day after the beginning of its new series Maximum Bob, based on Elmore Leonard's novel. A few years ago, this deeply wacky comedy, with its venal, philandering politicians, right-wing nutcases and red-necked psychopaths might have been seen as a heightened, surrealist satire on American politics and culture. Last week it seemed like docudrama. Yet again, entertainment triumphs over news - that's if we can tell the difference any more.
