Trust Me - I'm the Prime Minister BBC2, Monday
The Frost Interview - Muhammad Ali BBC2, Saturday
Leargas - RTE1, Tuesday
In 1960 - that's 40 years ago, mind - at a time when the US was convulsed by what was until quite recently considered a remarkably tight presidential election, Bob Newhart released his Button Down Mind album. Bob had been reading The Hidden Per- suaders, a best-selling book about the then still reasonably arcane world of advertising and public relations, in which the authors argued that the real danger of PR men was that they created mere images, that the presidential candidates were getting closer and closer, that there was no real difference between them and you were just left voting for the man. Are those bells I hear ringing?
Anyway, this left Bob to speculate about what would have happened a century earlier during the American Civil War. The advertising men, realising there was no Lincoln, would have had to create a Lincoln, and he had an idea how this might have been done; he imagined a telephone conversation between Abe and his press agent on the eve of the Gettysburg Address. "How ya Abe sweetheart, how are you kid? How's Gettysburg? Sort of a drag huh? Well Abe, you know those small Pennsylvania towns . . . you've seen one, you've seen them all! Right! Listen Abe, I got your note, what's the problem?"
Well, among the problems was that Abe was "thinking of shaving it off" (Abe, don't you see that's part of the image, yeah, with the string tie, the shawl and the stovepipe hat); and that he had changed four-score and seven to 87 (Abe, that's meant to be a "grabber"; well, Abe, it's like Mark Antony saying: "Friends, Romans, countrymen . . . I got somethin' I wanna tell ya)".
Finally, after many more struggles with an intellectually-challenged president of the US, the exasperated PR man blurts: "Abe, do the speech the way Charlie wrote it would ya? The inaugural address swung, didn't it?"
This old but frighteningly contemporary satire has been playing as a constant backdrop to my thoughts throughout these tortuous six weeks as Al and Dubyah battled it out among the swamps, citrus groves and retirement communities of Florida for the right to be - and Janey, even RTE still runs with this one - leader of the Free World.
And it was brought into even fresher perspective by the saturation coverage of this week's visit of Clinton - who even now could teach the PR gurus a thing or two, Monica or no - and the timely broadcast of Michael Cockerell's Trust Me - I'm the Prime Minister. Cockerell, who is perhaps best known for his work with Panorama, was delivering an address to a body styling itself the Royal Television Society (an incongruous string of words), taking a wry look at the evolution of the relationship between the British PM and the beast that is television.
It was a relatively affectionate but nevertheless insightful review, and opened with a telling contribution from Harold Macmillan from 1961 speaking to a black tie audience celebrating the Beeb's 25th anniversary. Three years earlier, Macmillan had been caught as unaware of the effect of appearance on television as Nixon had during his first debate with Kennedy. But Macca had learned some lessons since: "It is at airports that television chooses to lurk. If you go by sea, if you go by road, if you go by rail, nobody bothers you very much. But if you go by air, there it is, that (pointing straight to camera) pitiless, probing eye. After 14 hours on the aeroplane you get off wanting only a shave and a bath, but you're cornered, light in your eyes and the cameras whizzing . . . and there you are in the next day's Daily Chronicle, looking weary, old, worried, over a caption which implies you are past it."
Which makes you appreciate all the more the work (utterly superficial and thus, unfortunately, imperative) the likes of Bill and Tony and Bertie and the rest put in to looking their best no matter what the fatigue.
Cockerell also provided some previously unseen footage of a television screentest an ageing Winston Churchill had the courage to commission himself. There was a great deal of self-deprecating humour about the outcome, and you couldn't but suspect that a younger Churchill, had he needed to, would have tamed this pitiless medium.
Labour's Harold Wilson was, relatively speaking, instantly more at ease with the camera, and was, according to Cockerell, the first British PM to try to use TV as an instrument of government. We saw him presenting MBEs to The Beatles, and he handled their gentle ribbing with a good deal more aplomb than you could imagine John Bruton summing up in a similar scene with U2.
But Wilson finally came a cropper with a badly judged address to the nation about the devaluation of the pound, and he ended his stint in office fully convinced that the BBC was wholly biased against him. Not the first, and not the last.
Maggie Thatcher, when she became leader of the Conservatives but before she became PM, behaved, as Cockerell put it, as if the camera could take her soul away. But she was also the first to put her trust in media advisers, who advised a complete makeover: new hair, new clothes and, vitally, a lower tone of voice. She (or they) were the first to import the nascent American phenomenon of the "photo opportunity".
Thatcher was also the first to appear on a chat show. It was at the height of the miners' strike and, in an effort to present "her human face", she went on Aspel. Asked, innocently, about her reputation as a workaholic, she replied: "I'm always on the job." It was an eloquent example of the hazards of moving out of the traditional arena for political discussion.
And so to Blair, and appropriately this week as we watched Bill and Tony share a stage (or ice rink) in Belfast. Obviously, both Oxford-educated lawyers have proven themselves near masters of the medium, not least in their exploitation of the sound bite. The Blair advisers, according to Cockerell, refer to the tactic as The Heineken Approach; designed to reach parts of the audience that traditional political programmes can't reach.
Cockerell suggested much of this was inspired from the western side of the pond, and ran a tightly edited series of clips to prove it: Clinton: Opportunity and responsibility, they go hand in hand. Blair: And in return for those opportunities - responsibility. Clinton: Not bigger government, but more effective government. Blair: Not bigger government, better government. Clinton: New ideas for new challenges. Blair: New challenges, new ideas.
George W. is going to need a big mouth to fit into those shoes.
One man who was simply born to the medium was Muhammad Ali. In 1974, six weeks before the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman, now so memorably captured in the stunning When We Were Kings, Ali welcomed The Frost Interview into his training camp. It began, as you might expect, with Ali in butterfly mode: "If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait 'til I whup Foreman's behind." Or: "I'm so bad, only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick - I'm so mean I make medicine sick."
But these days, fortunately, we know how much more there was to Ali than boxing genius and showman. Among several significant studies of the man published in recent years was Mark Marqusee's Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, which detailed the complex context in which Cassius Clay had re-invented himself and moved towards his destiny, "a fusion of black pride with universal humanism".
At one point in the chat, Frost touched on Ali's conversion to Islam. Ali first explained how he rose at 4.30 a.m. each day to prepare for his prayer to Allah at 5.00 a.m. He then recited the entire thing, which was fascinating to these ears simply because I had never heard a translation. Interestingly, it closed with a prayer for Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam; I suspect such sentiment did not figure prominently in the morning ritual of Malcolm X.
But then, out of nowhere, he was asked what this fight meant to him, what he prayed for, and he launched into an utterly spontaneous, stunning speech of identity. In virtually one breath, he said:
"I'm representing God, I'm representing the freedom of black people in America, I wanna be the one black man who stands up and looks at the white people and tells the truth, who won't sell 'em out, who don't Uncle Tom, who don't promote cigarettes, who don't promote whiskey, to take his fame to lift up his little brother in the ghetto, cause all these movie stars, they're all white-minded, they all wanna marry a white, they don't think black, and make movies huggin' a white woman, they get their fame and they leave the little people. So I'm asking God to make me strong - not for me, don't give me no money, don't give me no fame - I wanna win so I can come home and speak for the brothers living in rat-infested houses, sleepin' on concrete, in the ghetto, can't go on television to speak. So God, I'm your tool, I'm your servant, so let me get this man tonight and go out blastin'!
"So this is the way I feel, so I'm not fightin' for me, I'm not lookin' at George Foreman - I'm lookin' at the Establishment, the Flag Waver (Foreman, Mexico City 1968). If he wins, I'm thinkin' - which is not true - we're in slaves for 300 more years. If I win, we're free."
From Allah to the Gospel according to Christ. Pat Butler and Leargas gave us a fine profile of Father Dermod McCarthy, who was recently presented with an award for his "35 years spreading God's word through the medium of television" - largely, as Father McCarthy was quick to point out, as part of the Radharc team along with Father Joe Dunne and others.
Given his reputation as the arch conservative (deserved or not), it's interesting to be reminded that Radharc was the brainchild of John Charles McQuaid, who instinctively understood the importance of having priests well-versed in the media and broadcasting - after all, you can't control what you can't understand. "It gave us the chance to show the people the Gospel at work," McCarthy explained, though they found the authorities were much more comfortable if the Gospel was working abroad rather than back in Ireland: prostitution in Manila was a much more favourable subject than prostitution on the Cork docks.
"We were mainly influenced by Christ's basic message: `I come to give liberty to captives, to give sight to the blind, to set the downtrodden free'."
By the way, at the end of their conversation Abe asks his PR man over to the house. "A bridge party at the White House? Ah Abe, I'd love to make it, but I'll be in New York on Saturday. Did you ask Seward? No, huh? So you and what's-her-name - Mary - will be on your own. Listen Abe, why don't you take in a play?"