What The Dot? - (Tuesday, RTE 1)
Tomorrow's World - (Friday, BBC1)
`Love it or loathe it, we can't live without it." Dan O'Flaoinnaoin of Irish Poison Gasses was keen to stress the importance of the Internet to Irish industry on Tuesday's What The Dot? O'Flaoinnaoin himself admitted that he had never even heard of the World Wide Web until his 12-year-old son persuaded the O'Flaoinnaoin family to go "on line" two years ago. Now O'Flaoinnaoin senior sells over two tons of poison gases over the Internet daily to countries as far away as China and Botswana. "One of the great things about it is that, because it's the Internet, it's not regulated. If I was selling poison gasses through the normal channels to, say, Rwanda, I would need an export licence and I would have to give assurances about the poison gasses etc, etc. With the Internet, I don't have to bother with any of that."
Does that mean that his poison gasses pose a danger to the countries that he's exporting to? "Well, the whole point about poison gasses is that they're not safe. If they were safe, they wouldn't be poison gasses. They'd be non-poison gasses." O'Flaoinnaoin predicts that his turnover this year will be over £1 million. Away from the expanding world of e-commerce, What The Dot? presents a regular feature on the Maguire family from Mullingar, who are attempting to hook-up to the Net for the first time. After choosing a reliable service provider in last week's programme, this week we followed them as they sent their first e-mail. Dad Sean, a hospital porter, decided to send an anti-semitic message to a far-right Nazi organisation he had discovered while browsing through links from the Opus Dei website. After typing up the message thought up by Mum Philomena - "Jews, You Are The Ruin Of Our Nation's Women And Girls" - Sean, assisted by Mum and children Dennis and Sorcha, managed to send it off successfully. This task happily completed, the programme followed young Dennis as he attempted to access pornographic websites from the Far East. It will be interesting to see if, later in the series, Dennis becomes corrupted by these images and stops going to mass.
The final feature in the show featured an Irish-speaking school in Connemara, which has a regular video link, via the Web, to a planet millions of miles away in outer space. Teacher Barry Flutes stressed the benefits of this inter-cultural exchange. "The beings on the planet learn a little bit of Irish from us and we learn about ray guns and that type of thing." My partner, the nationalist poet Orla Ni Suibh, thought this was a great item, and I think it did a little to ease the black, manic depression which currently grips her. (Great for poetry, but not too easy to live with!)
Tomorrow's World on BBC1 was yet again on about what things will be like in the future. This gets rather tedious week after week; after all, gardening programmes would hardly be of much interest to the viewer if they concerned themselves solely with gardening. I think it's time for Peter Snow and company to move on to something else and stop bothering us with the what might happen, as opposed to what's going to happen.
Trying to predict the future is like looking for a needle in a haystack: OK if the needle is about six feet long and sticking out of a tiny haystack, but not so easy if the needle is a normal-sized one hidden in a huge pile of hay. This week's main item was about what travel will be like in the future. Personally, I'm less concerned about how we're all going to travel to Mars in 50 years than the far more daunting task of attempting to negotiate my way to Howth through the tea-time traffic this Friday!!! The current traffic chaos in Dublin is something that even Tomorrow's World would have deemed too fantastic! *
* Not a current edition of the programme, but one from 10 or 15 years ago.
Arthur Mathews is co-writer of Father Ted (C4) and Big Train (BBC2) and writer of Hippies (BBC2)