UNLIKE most pop dinosaurs, the Bee Gees have always been long in the tooth. Photographs of the tremulous trio showed that, even 40 years ago, their dense dentition was an ivory hunter's wet dream. Down the years, critics have kicked the band in the teeth and, not surprisingly, the teeth have won. Last Sunday, even Melvyn Bragg, British television's arbiter of cultural worth, was sucked into paying homage.
Sure, it was a somewhat embarrassed homage but The South Bank Show, acknowledging that the lads are the fourth biggest-selling pop music act in history, refused to giggle. We got the full critical analysis: history, influences, context, judgments and all done in an appropriately benign manner. What the hell? It's not even rock `n' roll but millions of people like it.
Not that millions of people would readily admit it. The Bee Gees are, face it, about as cool as the Sahara. The film began with the Brothers Gibb (wasn't there a Gibbs' toothpaste company?), Barry (50) and twins, Maurice and Robin (48), strolling around the Manchester streets of their childhood. Barry and Robin claimed to have been juvenile delinquents - arsonists actually - but, even though there was no cause to doubt them, it didn't quite fit.
In fact, it fitted as poorly as the white, ultra-tight on top, flared below, trousers that they made infamous during their disco heyday. It used to be suggested, not wholly in jest, that it was the hermetically snug trousers which accounted for the fawning falsetto fatuousness of the band. How could grown men, with chests like werewolves, sing so high?
"Look," said Robin, "we did a few records in falsetto, not a lot. It's not something new." Barry admitted that, as a result of Saturday Night Fever, which sold more than 30 million copies, the Bee Gees had "some kind of leprosy... for about 10 years. Melvyn saw an opening. "What's the stigma?" he asked. Barry thought for a moment. "I don't know," he said.
In fairness to the lads, they didn't, as can happen, become embittered by success. Being in America, they were probably counselled in how to learn to love their leprosy by looking at their bank accounts. However, they carried on and now, with renewed interest in the 1970s, they are enjoying a retro-camp appeal. "Now, it's okay to like us," said Barry.
Born in the Isle of Man, reared in Manchester and Australia, living between mansions in the US and the Thames Valley, the brothers came across as more rootless than ruthless. And yet for all their middle-of-the-roadness, the Bee Gees are the antithesis of ephemeral. They have, after all, been in and out of the charts since 1967 and have survived medallions, "leprosy", ridicule and the risk of castration by trousers.
Barry still has a dodgy bouffant hairstyle and bravely, or shamelessly, depending on your perspective, hit the falsetto highs as Melvyn tried to hold it together. You got the sense that Mel was hoping that somebody in the studio would say something even mildly amusing, in order that he could release an uncomfortable build-up of laughter.
But nobody did and Melvyn probably had to think depressing thoughts to suppress the urge to giggle. Mind you, The Beatles' old producer, George Martin, insisted that the Bee Gees "were always very, very professional". So, who can laugh? This South Bank Show was ultimately charming without being smarmy. It addressed the fact that the Bee Gees have been ridiculed but wisely decided that it would be inappropriate to sink its teeth into good fun. The lads responded in kind and enjoyed themselves.
RTE's Black Box, Dublin's quintessential South Side Show, treats the arts rather more earnestly. This week, it spoke to Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe and Eoin McNamee about the process of adapting novels for the screen. The novelists admitted that they knew next to nothing - that nobody had ever taught them - about the craft of screenwriting. It was a pity, therefore, that John Sherlock, who teaches screenwriting in Trinity College and doesn't mince his words about the Irish arts establishment, wasn't included.
"Because I teach structure, I am dismissed as mechanistic and Hollywood formulaic," he has said. "Look, there are people in this country who are supposed to be writing screenplays and don't know how to lay out a page." Now, this is a serious charge against the arts establishment and at least as worthy of coverage by an earnest arts show, as a talking heads report, which strongly suggested that there is little native screenwriting expertise. Certainly, a debate between Sherlock and one (or more) of his critics would make livelier and more relevant television.
All teaching of writing, of course, risks the charge (usually by people who can't write) that it encourages writing by numbers. But art is invariably a by-product of craft and if it's true, as Sherlockinsisis and the novelists indicated, that writing screenplays (indeed, all writing) is, primarily, a craft, then a good studio row on the subject would make good TV. Isn't conflict necessary for drama?
Black Box needs vigorous conflict. Having presenter Anne Marie Hourihane and guests, Anne Enright, Fintan O'Toole and Ailbhe Smyth, quibble about the Theatre of Cruelty has its place. But, such topics are of interest to so few that, in any one edition of the programme, such limited-appeal material needs to be mixed with arts questions of a general interest. "Is the Arts Council safeguarding standards or perpetuating the interests of a cosy elite?" could make for a lively evening. "When it comes to screnwriting, does it know its arts from its elbow?" would do as a sequel.
THEN again, with RTE producing so little - the competent soap Fair City and the tired soap Glen roe excepted - that requires screenwriting, the subject is largely academic in relation to Irish television. Films, however are a different story. Doyle, McCabe and McNamee got their novels filmed. All seemed pleased that the films captured the spirits of the books. Presumably, there was craft required for the adaptations.
It was graft, damn hard graft, which was required of Blasket islanders who emigrated to the US. Blasket Roots, American Dreams, screened on the 60th anniversary of the death of Tomas O Criomhthain (author of An tOileanach), recounted stories of islanders' arduous working lives once they headed west.
Like life on the Great Blasket, this documentary was slow-paced without being leisurely. There was too much talk of work for leisure to feature centrally. Labouring hard to give their children an education, the islanders chose, almost exclusively, it seemed to make their lives in Springfield, Massachusetts. Even before the first World War, there were more Blasket people in Springfield than on the Great Blasket itself.
The Great Blasket has often been romantically construed as a sort of Ireland in microcosm. Out on the edge of the edge of Europe, culturally distinct and bleeding to death because of emigration, it nonetheless recorded and told its own story. Breandan Feirtear's documentary has added a new chapter to that story but really, it is a postscript.
Depopulated since 1953, the Blaskets are sinking into the murk of the heritage industry. People who remember living there, even as children, are almost all old now and the younger generations are, not surprisingly, "regular" Americans. Still, seeing 87-year-old Helen Coply, Peig Sayers's last surviving daughter, made history visible and for that alone, this documentary was worth making.
Seeing so many members of other Blasket families in US law enforcement - as policemen and court officers and prison wardens - was illuminating too. Almost all of the people they policed were black. Blasket history, like Irish history has, even with romanticism added, been no bed of roses. But, beside the black experience in America. . . well, let's just say that even exploited hard graft has been better than slavery.
FINALLY, law enforcement in Britain. Insight examined the case of Roisin McAliskey, who is on remand in London's Holloway prison. Almost seven months pregnant, Ms McAliskey continues to be strip-searched "six or seven times a week, probably 75 times to date" since her detention nearly three months ago, according to an Amnesty International woman.
Denied bail and perhaps the right to her baby (and her baby's right to his/her mother), it is hard to see how such persecution is anything other than spiteful and vengeful degradation. Tories Ann Widdecombe and Nicholas Budgen and unionist Ken Maginnis supported the continued incarceration of Ms McAliskey, who has been found guilty of nothing. Michael Farrell of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties argued that unless it's "absolutely necessary" people "should not be held in custody until convicted".
Mention of "chains" and "handcuffs" being used to bring this young woman to a delivery ward gig, in fact, bring slavery to mind. British prisons minister, Ms Widdecombe, gave assurances that Ms McAliskey will not be chained during childbirth. Aah, there's humane, eh? No chains while you're giving birth. But the baby might be taken away from you even though you remain legally innocent.
There's something very disgraceful about the current treatment of Bernadette McAliskey's daughter, who may or may not, have committed a serious crime in Germany. In a television week which began with fun about dodgy dentition, it ended up very seriously concerned with an even dodgier detention.
Insight might have gone harder but at least it asked some of the necessary questions.