Paths To Freedom, (Network 2, Monday)
Don't Feed the Gondolas, (Network 2, Monday)
True Lives, (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Ceol Tire, (TG4, Tuesday)
The Money Programme, (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Don't laugh, but there's a great, perceptive, social commentary comedy series on Network 2 at the moment and it isn't Don't Feed The Gondolas. Paths To Freedom, Network 2, might follow in the hallowed footsteps of spoof documentaries (mockumentaries, if you will) such as BBC's People Like Us and the movie Spinal Tap, but it does so with its heart and mind in the right places. Following the movements of recently-released Mountjoy inmates Jeremy (Brendan Coyle) and Rats (Michael McElhatton), the first episode situated the two radically different men in their respective radically different environments: Jeremy, Southside, a consultant gynaecologist; Rats, Northside, professional waster.
The obvious stereotypes are cleverly side-stepped without being ignored, with each former convict going about his life and making up for lost time. Jeremy is intent on getting his golf swing back in action while simultaneously pursuing the publication of his book, Women Inside Out ("too graphic," says the female publisher; "the chapter on miscarriage isn't disturbing enough," hee-haws his best friend).
Jeremy attends theatre first nights, eats al fresco in Dawson Street, chides the documentary cameraman for scratching the car upholstery, works out in the gym via Aikido ("it gives me a sense of physical confidence and empowerment"), and defends Michael Flatley from dinner party insults.
Rats, meanwhile, has fond memories of his days in punk rock band Sperm, and finds gainful employment as a security man outside an off-licence and as a server in Smiley Burger in Fairview (where his proud mother takes a photo of him in his uniform). He is on the lookout for his wife Sharon, who scarpered with the kids and furniture days before he left prison, and attempts to read his poetry on Grafton Street under the baleful eye of a Garda who suggests replacing a certain four-letter word in Rats' work with "flip, feck or fiddlesticks".
The comic conceit behind Paths To Freedom works brilliantly, but it serves equally as an all-too-poignant reflection of diverging lifestyles. Served dutifully by support actors (notably Deirdre O'Kane as Jeremy's I'm-too-busy-to-be-depressed wife and Darragh Kelly's grinning buffoon of a best mate), both Brendan Coyle and Michael McElhatton manage to distil cliches into a shrewd form of realism, thereby engendering all manner of feelings about their characters.
For the record, Jeremy is an insufferable, smug, racist, sexist, boastful middle-class idiot. Rats is a likeable, decent, genuine, not very smart working-class bloke. No stereotypes there, then.
There's more precise humour in a glance in Paths To Freedom than in the entire half-hour of Don't Feed The Gondolas. Perhaps it has the misfortune to more or less follow Paths To Freedom on Network 2's Monday night schedule, but whatever way you look at the programme (preferably though a long-range lens) it's a poor, pathetic attempt at humorously disseminating topical news.
Of course, basing a programme around BBC's Have I Got News For You was never going to be an easy task , but to execute it with all the grace of a snuff movie, as Don't Feed The Gondolas does, was surely not the plan.
Looking more like Eraserhead with each passing episode, host Brendan O' Connor presides over a pair of two-person teams. The team captains are Des Bishop and Kevin McAleer (possibly the best Irish comedian five years ago, but alas now drifting in the wake of Ardal OHanlon, Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran, and the Byrnes (Ed and Jason).
The team members on the most recent programme were Judy May Murphy and Today FM presenter, Tom Dunne. It's difficult to know who looked more embarrassed at the howling lack of wit: Dunne at the succession of cheap shots from O'Connor, or Murphy at the braying Bishop.
There were some funny moments: notably an outside spoof film with O'Connor as a security guard from an organisation called C.R.A.P. (ho hum), who was advising tourists on how to protect themselves against criminals. Back in the studio it was more banal repartee (which I'm presuming is improvised and therefore semi-excusable; if it's scripted may God forgive them) that aimed to be scabrous and scandalous but ended up sounding catty and petty.
"Fighting the boundaries of political correctness" beamed the continuity announcer before the programme started. Judging by the current series, the boundaries are incredibly narrow and thin, the programme itself teetering on the precipice of cultdom and sheer brassneck uselessness.
True Lives, RTE 1, had a certain brazen, brassneck quality to it, but this time it was rooted in the lives of people who resolutely fought for their cause, for better or worse. Narrated by Liam Neeson, this co-production between Channel 4 and RTE looked at the history of The Maze prison (formerly Long Kesh air base) through the words and recollections of former prisoners and warders. Intercut with news footage and previously unreleased footage, this was a lengthy, frightening exercise about the indomitable nature of the human spirit and political ideals.
It was, intoned Neeson, a British prison like no other: a symbol of political struggle. It showed, therefore, a full complement of inmates as a disciplined armed force, living an ordered life inside that was in stark contrast to the rioting and chaos outside. The common goal was escape, the various inmate groups continuously digging tunnels (and occasionally going in the wrong direction).
When they weren't attempting escapes, the inmates were attending seminars and classes on political history. Ironically, for many it was the first time they had ever been questioned as to the reasons behind their actions. The first question put to the new inmates by those in charge was not "why are you here?" but "why are you fighting the war?" To many, what took place inside was a microcosm of the events taking place in Northern Ireland. People such as Brendan "Bik" McFarlane, Paddy Quinn and Gusty Spence spoke about The Maze with a mixture of disbelief, nostalgia and hard-earned distaste.
For viewers such as myself who had little or no knowledge of The Maze in its 1970s and early 1980s incarnation, this was riveting, disturbing television: the number of prison officers killed (29), the admission from the interviewees that if they had had the weapons more would have been added to the list, the hunger strike deaths, the smuggling, the rectum searches, the rioting, the abject misery, the utter commitment.
And the blanket protests, surely the most disturbing of the lot, with excrement and urine stirred up and pasted into the walls, maggots coming out of rotting food, and Margaret Thatcher's ignoble intransigence. "There was a dreadful colonialism to the whole thing," remarked Father Denis Faul, a man, like many, at the centre of the more humanistic aspects of the unfolding tragic tale. Fast forward to July of this year with all prisoners released from The Maze and you had an event that Brendan McFarlane described as "part and parcel of putting things to rest."
Paddy Quinn (one of the original Maze hunger strikers whose mother interceded as he was at death's door), meanwhile, missed the "love and comradeship" he discovered in The Maze all those years ago. It was simultaneously an odd and entirely plausible thing to say about the hell hole The Maze seemed to be, yet it put a chill up and down the spine just thinking about it.
Bad country music has the same effect. A new music programme on TG4, Ceol Tire, Tuesday, might have been the opportunity to present good country music in a different light. Alas, it failed on all counts. What we have here is not an organic music series but a talking head (the affable Alan Corcoran) and a series of videos strung together with no apparent sense, theme or semblance of thought. Yet another wasted opportunity, the only thing that separates Ceol Tire from other video-led music programmes is that the talking-head speak is in Irish. Aside from this, it's the same old, tired, boring story.
Such nonsense would not be tolerated by the mighty Sony and Microsoft, who are each currently locked in a hi-tech combat zone for domination of the $20 billion games console market. In The Money Programme, BBC2, a special report on the two consumer technology giants indicated that the battle will be somewhat more than a virtual one. The video games sector is the fastest growing entertainment area in the world, and the arrival of Sony's new Playstation console, PS2 (launched yesterday in the UK), is seen as the first shot over the bows for maintaining market-share dominance. Sony has it all to play for, it seems, as the PS2 arrives with credibility intact. Microsoft, noted marketing guru Trevor Beattie (a dead ringer for a Black Sabbath roadie; he even had the Brummie accent), hasn't got so much an image problem as an image that epitomises the words "work" and "office". They are "simply not cool with their target audience", he said.
Not so, according to Microsoft, which plans to launch its games console, Xbox, next year. Bill Gates might not be an icon to the actual Xbox product, but he is an icon to the commitment towards the product.
While the Microsoft Xbox guys travelled from office to office via skateboard, whizzing by signs that read "Caution: Adults At Play", the Sony guys were busy making sure their games came up trumps.
PS2, says Sony seriously, is not a games console, but a computer entertainment device.
Xbox, says Microsoft, is just a machine to play video games on.
Sony says the PS2 will ensure the company remains tops in the adult video games market (they leave fellow Japanese gamesters, Sega and Nintendo in the ha'penny place). Microsoft says that the Xbox will be three times more powerful than PS2. And so it went on like a slow game of computer ping-pong, sluggishly thwacking points backwards and forwards.
Playstation has the kudos and credibility amongst surfers, skaters and high-five dudes. Microsoft? With their marketing hardball, commitment and deep pockets? That's for the suits.
Perhaps. Stay tuned for an interesting battle, and (a message to mothers and fathers throughout the land) start saving now.
