New Year's Eve - Live and Unplugged - RTE 1
The Boyz Are Back - RTE 1,
Christmas Day Teletubbies - BBC 1,
Monday to Friday Modern Times Special: The Shrine - BBC 2,
Tuesday Secret Lives: Grace Kelly - Channel 4, Monday
Drunken Dun Laoghaire faces, some puckish, others vacuous, provided diverting backdrops to RTE's New Year's Eve Live and Unplugged. From behind Ray D'Arcy, this year's presenter/victim of the gig from hell, inebriates pulled oafish expressions to camera. They squinted, curled their lips and stuck out their tongues. In a holiday period which saw television dominated by movies, Teletubbies, Spice Girls, Dustin, Boyzone (especially Ronan Keating) and blonde princesses killed in car crashes, there was something ironically real about the distortions of the face-pullers.
For almost two decades now, Christmas and New Year TV has been in decline. The autumn schedules are a bigger deal than the holiday ones and most people who want to watch particular movies have probably already seen them on video. RTE 1 screened 21 feature films over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St Stephen's Day - an average of seven films a day - which effectively changed it into a surrogate movie channel. On the evidence of The Boyz Are Back, RTE's Christmas Night "special", a 22nd film wouldn't have gone amiss.
Family viewing, now that traditional, nuclear families are approaching meltdown, is essentially a notional enterprise. No doubt, Boyzone appeals to pre-pubescents and Daniel O'Donnell, who sang gospel songs as a warm-up for Ray D'Arcy's gig, appeals to pensioners. But home-produced television hardly bothered to cater for the sizeable 10 to 60 club - the constituency most in need of a break from the crassness and preening of the Celtic Tiger at work.
The Boyzone centrepiece, the band's third major Christmas TV show in a row, saw each of the boyz granted a seasonal wish. The ubiquitous Ronan went skiing, Shane went motor racing and Keith flew a jet. But really, you needed to be interested. They had guests too, including a bizarrely incongruous piece with Lily Savage, who is to Boyzone what Jeremy Paxman might be to Jackanory - a touch strident. But the boyz, looking more like men by the week, are considered sufficiently wholesome and clean-cut for Christmas.
For his part, Ray D'Arcy worked manfully in Dun Laoghaire's County Hall. The town is celebrating its 1,500th anniversary in 1998 (very convenient how so many places discovered historically significant birthdays in the last 10 or 15 years) so we were treated to bellydancing and a bloke knocking the cork out of a champagne bottle with a sword. Thrilling. Niamh Kavanagh, Twink, Steve Collins, Altan and Dustin featured too. Individually, some of their contributions were fine. But the show was a shambles.
Even Dustin, a genuine TV star, found this one to be a gig too far. With Twink and a junior-school choir he mutilated Fairytale Of New York before Sandra, "a psychic and mystic", made some predictions concerning the Teletubbies and scandal. It was that sort of Christmas - a few created-for-the-market acts cropped up continuously. Was it, for instance, possible not to know the names of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po? Could you watch any channel (even Sky Sports) for a few hours and not hear mention of the Spice Girls?
So, Teletubbies, Spice Girls, Boyzone - all acts created to suit the market - continued television's dumbing down. It's not as if TV hasn't always promoted the faddish and the gimmicky. But how low can it go? Even David Dimbleby, presenting Review Of The Year (BBC 1, Tuesday), attempted to cast the Teletubbies as emblematic of 1997. They were, after all, he argued, thoroughly researched to suit the market - baby faces, baby voices and, like babies, slow on the uptake. They represented a victory for the packaged image. Dimbleby cited comparisons with New Labour. If the analogy was a trifle contrived, it was still valid.
The Teletubbies live in a hillock that looks like Newgrange burial mound. They gambol about a psychedelic landscape under a sun which has a baby's face. They have big behinds - like bears or kids in nappies - and they enjoy, apparently, a cult following among university students. They seem fine for toddlers. But for a serious current-affairs review of the year? Marketing has made them culturally significant - even unavoidable. It's ludicrous really. But with TV increasingly used to grow such cash crops, the codology will continue and inevitably more people will echo the Tubbies' "Time for telly bye bye" - especially at Christmas.
The death of Princess Diana was always going to receive more coverage than the birth of Jesus Christ this Christmas. Diana - Her Life (ITV, Sunday) and Diana - The Week The World Stood Still (ITV, New Year's Eve) were low-level hagiography. But Mod- ern Times: The Shrine made a much more lasting impression. Eschewing commentary, it specialised in lingering images, evocative music (jazz, classical, world music) and interviews with people caught up in the hysteria preceding her funeral.
Elegantly framed shots, such as a castle silhouetted against a night sky through which a jet streaked (pictorially linking the mediaeval and the modern), made this so much better than the usual nonsense on this subject. Lengthy silences - risky on television - broken only by faint moans and fainter, mumbled prayers recalled the strange atmosphere of London during those days. "It isn't real. I think I'm dreaming," said one mourner. "It's like losing a best friend," said a previously homeless man, who once received a fiver from Diana.
Considering that most television on the death of Diana has acted as though it had lost all its marbles, this was progress. Mind you, even The Shrine overdid the skyward cameras panning the heavens to the sound of church music. Planes, kites, telescopic cranes (used for more TV cameras), even clouds were focused upon in an overly orchestrated attempt to invoke a notion of paradise in the blue beyond.
The droves watching the Westminster Abbey funeral service on a giant screen in Hyde Park were like a transplanted football or rock concert crowd. Cutting between them and the people in the Abbey, the documentary visually contrasted state culture and pop culture. David Dimbleby cooed reverentially about stuff such as ". . . the half-muffled bells of Westminster Abbey ringing out their quarter peal" and it sounded not only arch but vainglorious. Dumbing down was sad but talking down was sadder.
No real attempt was made to understand the significance of the public reaction to Diana's death. But some suggestions were made, not all of them demented. Of course, there were people devastated to the point of "feeling the presence of God". But a more reasonable and detached man observed that Diana's intention had been to get multitudes - implausible as it sounds - to identify with her. The queen, on the other hand, strove to stress difference from, not similarity to, the mass of the population. Seems about right.
But already that weird week seems trapped in time. It marked a mushrooming of popular emotion - extraordinary in its swiftness and intensity, but now oddly discordant. Much was made of the fact that people felt they were participating in and not just observing history. A shrewd bloke pointed out that the participatory mindset is more suited to citizens than to subjects, so perhaps some good will result from it all. But, even in its title and in mourners' talk about coming to London "on pilgrimage", The Shrine stressed the quasireligious reaction to the death of the media's most promoted icon. That must tell us something.
Perhaps it was to promote parity of esteem that Secret Lives chose to re-examine the death of a blonde Catholic princess. Then again, perhaps not. Whatever the motivation, this documentary on Grace Kelly used reputable sources to link her to the bizarre Order of the Solar Temple. Unfortunately, it also attempted to blame the murder and suicide cult for her death. As conspiracy theories go, it had an attractive, if not quite compelling, plausibility. But crucially, it had no bloody proof.
Opening with loudly dramatic teasers about the "unexplained car crash" and "love of God and love of love", this episode was strangely tabloid in tone, given the usual rootedness of the series. Ms Kelly, we were told - though this was hardly news - was hot to trot with older leading men. There was guff about "the ice maiden with the flames of passion within". As a scene setter, this was fair enough and it was stressed for prurience, of course, but also to emphasise the contrast between Kelly's life as a libidinous, all-American Hollywood actress and her frumpy life in Monaco.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, it was claimed that Grace Kelly became involved with the Solar outfit because it offered eternal youth and because it would make her "High Priestess" of the order. Fair enough. But, in return for making her High Priestess, the Solar boys demanded subs of 20 million Swiss francs. No such thing as a free high priestessship and all that. Depressed and frustrated, the princess turned, apparently, to sexual acupuncture. The acupuncturist, Colette de Real, claimed that her royal patient had two orgasms in quick succession.
It was clear that Secret Lives had some secrets to tell - but not enough to deliver on its extravagant promises. Grace's hubby, Prince Rainier, was friendly with Jean Louis Marsan, who originally ran the local cumann of the Solar Temple. Marsan was succeeded by Joseph de Mambro, a hypnotist previously convicted of fraud. They sounded like a bunch of loopers but that doesn't mean they killed Grace Kelly or drove her to suicide. "Dying early saved Grace from becoming a relic," said one contributor. It wasn't clear if he was referring to her fatal crash or her marriage.