TV3 (week 2), including 20/20 (TV3, Sunday)
The Premiership (Network 2, Saturday)
Omnibus (BBC 1, Monday)
The 11 O'Clock Show (Channel 4, Wednesday)
Wearing shades and surrounded by babes, Martin King arrived in a red, BMW convertible to do a weather gig for TV3. Within the new channel's news family, King is not just a lad intent on raining personality all over the country. He is a souped-up showman, a prototype of pure ego with all the disconcerting fascination of a car crash: it's impossible to look, while at the same time it's impossible to look away. Beside him, the newscasters' bland and formulaic informality, in the Ken 'n' Barbie tradition, seems almost reserved and prim.
Watching TV3 this past week - its second week on air - the crucial question had to be: what does it say about contemporary Ireland? Cynics may argue (with much justification) that the channel's most glaring weakness is that it doesn't say nearly enough about contemporary Ireland. But its style and presentation, though generally technically commendable, speak volumes. It is the public face of the market - sassy, brassy, glossy, shiny and sexy. It is a brochure and it looks like it's pitched somewhere between editorial and advertising - edvertising or aditorial, to coin a couple of horrible media hybrids.
Historically (almost prehistorically now!) RTE's main contribution to Irish life has been in facilitating a country talking to itself. Though it is floundering now, The Late Late Show will remain unequalled in this respect. But even through its better soaps (The Riordans, Glenroe in its heyday, sometimes Fair City), its 1970s and early 1980s current affairs output and its belated satirical programmes, the State television service regularly sought and achieved the crucial connection between screen and life as it is lived in this country.
With TV3, as with, say, the vile ads for financial services, there is a deliberate distancing between life as it looks on screen and life as it looks in the raw. Fair enough, it's showbiz, but the excess of glamour; of pouting, glistening lips; of sparkling teeth; of stories about sex, are a reheating of the ingredients of advertising. Newscaster Grainne Seoige, TV3's babe of babes (La baba di tutte babe), fits the gig perfectly. But this is not just Television Lite, it's trenchantly and self-consciously Television Lite.
On 20/20 (TV3's current affairs show) for instance, prostitution in Dublin was the lead item. Now, to be fair, there can be a public service dimension to covering such stories. But when the channel's main news programme - TV3 News at Six - is carrying a story about the dangers faced by transvestite prostitutes in Brazil, an editorial policy can be discerned. In such an environment, the babes and lads on screen ought not be blamed too much for the less commendable aspects of TV3. The suits in the background are another matter.
Given the traditional tone of much TV reviewing - sarcastic, mocking and really, taking the mick (there are valid reasons for much of the derision) - it is easy, albeit sometimes gratuitous, to poke fun at new television ventures. But it can be unfair too. OK, Martin King, with his shades, babes and guff, is probably asking for it. However, there are more serious issues here than just doing a roustabout roasting of inexperienced TV performers. Personality is one thing; being clubbed to death by it when all you want to know is if it's going to rain tomorrow is another.
The central question remains: what does the existence, style and content (there is some) of TV3 say about Ireland today? Forget the emphasis on glamour - RTE, especially in its early years, exuded a kind of convent-school "sophistication", a prim form of provincial and snobbish semi-State glamour. No, glamour is not the central worry about the new channel. TV3 is about making money, which, for a private media outfit, is fair enough. But it is clearly only about making money, which for any media outfit, is just not good enough.
Complaining about the rampant commodification of the media (and yes, even the most effete outfits like a sexy story) is not simply precious, elitist pedantry. Giving the punters what they want is not justification for everything, especially when you consider what some punters want. But these are old arguments. Is news only the same as a can of beans or a designer dress - something to be bought and sold? Is there only marketing and profits? How relevant are transvestite Brazilian prostitutes to your life?
Understandably, initial criticisms of TV3 have focused on the people on screen. Yes, there have been ropy and occasionally dire performances - but such efforts are not unknown even on BBC. There have too, to be fair, been some competent and lively light news pieces on TV3 (Deirdre Grant's report from the National Ploughing Championships struck the right, colourful but not egomaniacal tone, for instance). The teeth, the lip gloss, the sexy stories, the Ken 'n' Barbie routines, the fashion reports - alright then, give the punters all the marketing gimmicks. Perhaps aesthetes can argue that ultimately, form is content and the medium is the message and all the rest of the received wisdom about media. But a toothless, bald, fat presenter (male or female), with a regional accent and a rootedness in Irish life (as most of us know it) is needed to leaven the glossy nonsense. There is little merit in seriously attacking the front people of the new channel - they just do their gigs with varying degrees of efficiency.
It's the executives who put together this provincial version of Sky who must be held accountable. The great pity for all of us viewers is that RTE, as was the case with Century Radio and the original Radio Ireland, has not been given serious competition. Maybe TV3 will get its 6 or 7 per cent of audience share and hit RTE advertising revenue for about £10 million. Maybe not. But surely the lesson of Eamon Dunphy (the new, more cerebral, less boot-boyish version) could have been taken on board. His Today FM show is succeeding because he asks real people real questions. We need to do the same of the suits in TV3, because there's more to this media game than their profits.
Anyway, introducing Eamon Dunphy in the previous paragragh will do as a link to The Premiership, Network 2's version of Match of the Day. Bill O'Herlihy treated the reunion of Johnny Giles and Dunphy on RTE, as though all four Beatles had got back together, reminding you that TV3 doesn't have a monopoly when it comes to self-promoting PR. In normal circumstances, the opening sequences to The Premiership - loud, flash and appropriately vigorous - would look and sound spot on.
But the context is not that simple. English soccer on a Saturday night is inseparable from the Match of the Day theme music - arguably the most evocative theme tune in all television - and has been since 1964. Still, going out earlier than BBC's MOTD, The Premiership is well positioned to draw capacity crowds, especially of younger fans. Last Saturday, Paolo Di Canio, Sheffield Wednesday's Italian striker, stole the show by striking (well, pushing really) the referee during his club's victory against Arsenal.
After that the pundits on both Network 2 and BBC 1 rather moralised about the awfulness of Di Canio's actions. Well, they couldn't really do much else - if players start doing refs, a sport does have a problem - even if, like most football watchers, they sniggered in private. It was a pretty quiet return for Dunphy, who reserved most of his ire for new Newcastle manager, the playmaker turned playboy, Ruud Gullit. Eamo called him "a wagon", a mild enough remark, I suppose, but hopefully an indication that we'll see more verbal studs showing soon on The Premiership.
In contrast, Omnibus went pussy-footing this week. Screening an edition titled Cat People, we were told at the outset that cats now outnumber dogs as the most popular pets in Britain. Shortly afterwards, a cat person theorised that this reflected "the growing feminisation of society". Like a tom-cat on the prowl, Freud sprang to mind at this notion but perhaps we should leave it at that. After all, word association only goes so far.
The cat people included, for literature, Doris Lessing and Vikram Seth; for painting, Sister Wendy; for jazz, Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth; for acting (big-time!) Sian Phillips and for musicals, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Phillips, straining to be more feline than a stalking tabby, stretched herself across a sofa to explain that she "abbbsooolutellly adores" her cats and is "cooompletellly shattered" when they pass on. Without being excessively catty, her performance was so cloyingly luvvie that you couldn't blame the two cats seated beside her for scarpering. Nine out of 10 cats have no time for sheer crapology.
Andy Webber related an anecdote of how he received permission from T.S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, to use T.S.'s poems for Cats. Andy told Valerie that his show would not feature pussy-cats. Instead the cats of Cats would resemble Hot Gossip (the semi-naked dance troupe which used to prance around on Kenny Everett's shows). "Ah yes," Valerie allegedly replied, "Tom would have liked that." T.S. Eliot turns on to Hot Gossip? It's enough to make a cat laugh.
Mind you, when an academic looked portentously to camera and told us that "our love-hate relationship with the feline is wired into the very hardware of our consciousness", the T.S. Eliot/Hot Gossip yarn seemed relatively tame. Still, in spite of the human pretentiousness in evidence, Cat People was an engaging programme. Its real saving grace was the fact that it admitted that cats will always be beyond human understanding - the strut and hauteur of cats acknowledges this - and that, surely, is their role in relation to people.
Finally, The 11 O'Clock Show - Channel 4's new thrice-weekly satirical revue, began on Wednesday. Written and produced on the day of transmission, it certainly looks and sounds like it. It sprayed out a series of Princess Di, Rose West, Yorkshire Ripper, Louise Woodward and Clinton and Lewinsky jokes. A few were mildly funny but most were merely nasty and vulgar. Yes, yes, of course satire must cut close to the bone, but there was a smug bluntness about this programme which sought shock-value, where once wit might have reigned. Bland or blunt - the new values of television. Watching it makes me feel like Tom Eliot's Prufrock: "I grow old, I grow old."