Hoddle And The Healer (C4, Tuesday)
You Cannot Be Serious: War (BBC 2, Monday)
The Last Resource (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Prime Time (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Limelight (RTE 1, Sunday)
WATCHING disembowelling scenes in Braveheart, Phil Drewery's gut reaction was to start wondering about his own colostomy. Might it be a punishment for his having been an executioner in a previous life? Watching Hoddle And The Healer, viewers with Phil's cast of faith must have wondered what they had done in previous lives to be so assaulted by PR. Perhaps they were all game-show hosts or spin doctors or lounge lizards. Maybe some even sank so far as to voiceover those vile, supersmarmy TV ads for financial institutions.
Whatever the karma, this was a disembowelled documentary - practically gutless. Indeed, the ruminations of Phil (husband of Eileen Drewery, Glenn Hoddle's faith-healer) were literally, whatever about idiomatically, the most gutsy aspect of a shameless piece of puffery. Certainly Hoddle deserved the right of reply to his critics, but that right had meaning only so long as the former England manager replied to the central charges against him. He didn't . . . because he didn't have to.
Instead, Hoddle played the role of misunderstood Holy Man - a martyr to the meretricious media. His only crime, as far as he and Eileen were concerned, was to be so open and trusting about his religious beliefs. Faith-healing, they claimed, is widespread in football. To prove the point, the programme produced managers Gerry Francis, Steve Coppell and Lawrie McMenemy, and players Darren Anderton, Mark Bright, Dean Austin and Danny Maddix to testify to their faith in faithhealing. Although this group could hardly be described as an A-Team, their inclusion was reasonable.
The problem is that faith-healing, though Hoddle's stress upon it had made it controversial, was not the reason he lost his job. Hod got the bum's rush because he told London Times reporter Matt Dickinson that disabled people are so afflicted because of sins committed in previous lives. "I got turned over, quite frankly," said Hoddle of the fateful interview. In football-speak, getting "turned over" isn't usually synonymous with scoring an o.g. (turning yourself over!), and Glenn Hoddle knows as much.
Mind you, had the PR not been so egregious, it might have been possible to make a more plausible case for Hoddle. The British media love to feast on an England manager. An England manager who is arrogant, secretive, too blaming of others, loses World Cup matches and rats on his players is a fattened turkey. But even allowing that many viewers recognise that there exists a streak of media sadism towards England managers, Hoddle did not do nearly enough to rehabilitate himself or, more crucially, the public's image of him as a kind of Moonie manager.
When Drewery was given the opportunity to advertise her "sensational" healing powers, she attacked with the abandon of Kevin Keegan's Newcastle. "The aura is around the head. The aura is protecting the spirit. I feel the energies coming through me. I feel the extra love!" she exclaimed in a rising voice. Perhaps she did, but viewers surely felt extra resentment at the evangelical ferocity of the PR push. Performance subsided, Eileen then lowered her voice to explain that she doesn't suffer from pride or vanity. Good God no! Any lack of humility would, it seems, destroy "God's gift".
But Hoddle and Drewery behaved throughout as though they are God's gift to football. They were especially scathing of the Tonys Blair and Banks, casting them as the political hit-men equivalents of Vinnie Jones and Chopper Harris. It is true that the interventions by the New Labour duo - especially Blair's comments on This Morning - sealed Hoddle's fate if not his faith. But there is a larger morality tale to this aspect of the story. How did football become so important in British political life that the country's prime minister was effectively given the casting vote?
Clearly television - in particular Rupert Murdoch's Sky Sports - has made football too central to popular culture in the 1990s. In the drive by all channels to have, since Murdoch practically owns the ball, some football-related programming, we can expect more PR efforts like Hoddle And The Healer. It's difficult not to conclude that Roger Mills, who made this opportunity for Hoddle to have his say, agreed to too many demands. You'd expect more biting challenges from a geriatric midfield than Hoddle faced throughout this one.
"Glenn used to speak a lot to Cliff Richard," said Eileen at one point. It was a telling little anecdote. Cliff, all white and clean and shiny and holy and nice and youthful-looking in a music industry notable for the opposite qualities, has been evangelising for years. Glenn Hoddle, in casting himself as the Cliff Richard of football, lost the plot quite some time ago. When Channel 4's Cutting Edge knobbled former England manager Graham "Do I Not Like That" Taylor a few years back, it was clear that Taylor was a man out of his depth. Hoddle, in contrast, seemed out of his tree.
GRAND irony of the week is encapsulated in the programme title You Cannot Be Serious: War. Given that we've had war in Europe since Wednesday, the situation is very serious indeed. As has been the case with Iraq, the NATOSerb war on the Western front will be fought in the media, primarily on television. And the propaganda is, as ever, relentless. Already, we've seen and heard reporters gushing the clumsy euphemisms of military-speak, and we can expect more. Whether or not the war - which is essentially a clash between atavistic, old world passions and the power-protecting, new world order - can be deemed morally justifiable depends not on international law but on ideology (too often, unfortunately, an ideology formed by a semi-participant media).
Rubbing Russia's nose in the flotsam of its own decline is dangerous. All of Wednesday's bulletins contrasted Bill Clinton's rallying of support for bombing with Boris Yeltsin's furious denunciation of NATO's action. But, as ever, television was most interested in spectacle. OK, TV is a visual medium and pictures of war can be riveting and revealing. But an inevitable sanitising of the horror takes place when the loops of flame and splintered buildings are sandwiched between soap operas and sitcoms. It's just as easy and just as right to detest Slobodan Milosevic as to detest Saddam Hussein. But the latest Kate Adie soundbites give this latest war a kind of serial quality.
Although the role of television in ending the Vietnam war is generally exaggerated, it is true that it played a vital part. Now, however, as with the attacks on Iraq, it's virtually impossible to believe TV reports. It's not that there are not competent and dedicated journalists covering the conflict. But the more honest among them - John Simpson included - were admitting on Wednesday night that they really couldn't find out what precisely was going-on. A rule-of-thumb (and not just for sceptics) is emerging for war-reporting on TV: the more authoritative the voice, the more likely you are being fed, wittingly or otherwise, propaganda.
Anyway, back to You Cannot Be Serious: War. Presented by Alexei Sayle, a veteran of 1980s alternative comedy's war against the Thatcherised middle class, it looks at British television's comic takes on the subject. Cue Dad's Army; 'Allo, 'Allo; Blackadder; It Ain't 'Alf Hot, Mum! and some Monty Python sketches. So, you get cheap programming - airtime filled with snippets of old favourites. Still, it's not just TV recycling itself because Sayle does continue to pack the occasional punch. "What was World War II good for?" he asked. "It was good for flagging careers like those of Winston Churchill and Vera Lynn," he concluded.
The funniest sketch though was a mick-take of a Kate Adie type report. A combination of jolly hockey-sticks enthusiasm, gravitas with melodramatic rhythm and self-conscious reportorial performance, it was a deliciously appropriate parody given the way the week turned out. Next best was a Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie "ass" sketch on American military machismo. "You bet your ass, I own your ass. Your ass is my ass and don't let your ass ever forget it . . . " And so it went. The introduction of enormous cigars during the US general's "ass" lecture also suggested meanings of their own.
But with war looming when this programme was broadcast, there was an insensitive frivolity about it. It's not that war can never be a fit subject for comedy - of course it can. However, given the increasing seamlessness of TV, in which even ads and programmes are becoming more and more similar, there's got to be a sense generated that war is, in some respects, just another, albeit more horrific, addition to the schedules. Rather than help to end a war nowadays, television, with its familiar cast of war pundits and reporters, may be contributing to normalising it as part of the New World Order.
It's hard not to think that this latest episode is other than a kind of second sequel to the original 1990s blockbuster Desert Storm.
BACK on RTE, Brendan Gleeson presented The Last Resource. It was, essentially, a J'Accuse-type authored documentary on the threat to market-gardening in north Co Dublin. As part of the new Irish order, huge swathes of the north county seem likely to become a building site. "It's like pouring concrete over the best garden in the country. It doesn't make sense," said Gleeson, making very sound sense indeed.
About 60 per cent of the Republic's vegetables are grown in north Dublin but the number of market gardeners is constantly decreasing. Although the European Union subsidises a great variety of agricultural activities, it does not do so for the growing of vegetables. Then there are the supermarket chains, making demands, ostensibly in the interests of shoppers, but crucially in the interests of profits. Many traditional market gardeners have had enough and are packing it in. Given the scale of the building proposed for the region, north Co Dublin could yet become as overbuilt as the expensive, albeit fashionable, wastelands of south Dublin.
RTE does not screen many authored documentaries and when it has done in the past, too often they've been little more than PR-ish tourism-guides for various regions or back-slapping efforts for favoured luminaries. The Last Resource, without hyping itself into a dubious state of savage indignation, made its arguments clearly and coherently. The area known as Fingal (a few years ago, there was an appallingly vulgar and proprietorial push by the region's county council to have it named "Co Fingal") has suffered more than enough planning mismanagement from cute-hoor, fastbuck boyos. Gleeson's plea won't stop the rot - but at least people will see what's going-on.
EARLIER on the same night, Prime Time, continuing its revival, looked at the Republic's economic future. Against emblematic images of the booming economy - designer labels, new buildings, flash cars - the programme wondered how long the party can last. With much of eastern Europe desperate to join the EU, Ireland can expect to find itself giving funds rather than taking them from Europe in the next decade. There was a cautionary note at the heart of this Prime Time, and though it was, to be fair, timely and well-struck, it also inevitably had the effect of preparing viewers for the slump which is slouching towards Dublin.
The episode had been unusually heavily advertised and, on balance, it was worth promoting. When it comes to matters of the economy, RTE has an improving record in news, documentary and even investigative journalism (even if the channel embarrassingly over-celebrated the Charlie Bird/George Lee NIB story). When it comes to the North, however, RTE is almost always found wanting.
All those missed opportunities in the 1980s - when British channels were producing excellent documentaries on Gibraltar, the Birmingham Six, IRA strategy etc - are being replicated in the 1990s. Peter Taylor's Provos and Loyalists series were far from flawless - but at least they were made. RTE, it would seem, loves to embrace the boom and ignore the bomb.
FINALLY, Limelight - a programme which shows that RTE can still produce PR of Hoddle proportions. This week's guest-for-adoration was Noelle Campbell-Sharpe, described by a shouting Carrie Crowley as "the Dublin jet-set icon of the 1980s". Well, fair enough - if you have to engage in that type of guff, Campbell-Sharpe was once among the most high-profile yuppies (remember them?) in Dublin. As a glossy magazine publisher, she was, of course, quite well positioned to have herself covered by the gossip columnists.
Anyway, she gave it all up and ran away to Kerry to convert a ruined village at Ballinskelligs into "an artists' retreat" - a kind of Annamaghkerrig South, perhaps. There are worse things a person could do. Former model Jackie Lavin, her husband Bill Cullen, Mary Kenny, Bibi Baskin, MarieLouise O'Donnell and Donovan Leitch were hauled on to eulogise Campbell-Sharpe. It's difficult to praise people in these situations without sounding like a Creeping Jesus. But there's a level, which most viewers probably understand as a kind of unavoidable protocol or etiquette, that is acceptable.
Beyond that, we are into gushing, unadulterated, smarmy PR. Sure, it's a light show and that's fine - such shows deserve their place among the schedules but the saccharin approach can be taken too far. When one of the cheerleaders said that Campbell-Sharpe is in the tradition of Sylvia Beach (James Joyce's patroness) in nurturing artists, Crowley might have said that such praise seemed, at least as yet, excessive. For her own part, Campbell-Sharpe appears to have done a decent job in Kerry. However, the proprietorial references to "my board" suggested that the artists' retreat is not a totally altruistic project. Then again, that might be just a gut reaction to being pelted by so much PR.