TVReview: RTÉ 1 poured out the Prime Time this week, four of them in all. Two were from the Prime Time Investigates strand, and they looked for dirt, under fingernails and beneath soil. The dirt of the body, a facilitator of the MRSA bug; the dirt of our landscape, which is lumpy with illegal landfills.
Tuesday's programme by reporter Katie Hannon looked at how much of our rubbish is either illegally dumped or sent abroad to a place of both physical and mental convenience. It leaves our front path and vanishes into thin air. We don't have to see the Asian workers picking through our milk cartoons and crisp packets; or at least we didn't until this week. The programme also featured Dick Roche, who was as sure, candid and mildly smug as can be expected of a Minister for the Environment so new that he can still consider himself squeaky clean.
While its investigations are thorough and perceptive, the strength of Prime Time isn't just that it tells us things we don't know, but more that it shows us things we don't really want to think about. It doesn't make for comfortable viewing. Its Ireland is not a pleasant land. You would certainly not want to rely solely on Prime Time Investigates for your view of modern life. That would be a little like learning all you can about the human condition by going only to funerals.
Otherwise, this week's news bulletins were busy with the North. I wonder if it causes a certain angst in television newsrooms when the peace process revs its engine in anticipation of another stalling. Sure, it is an opportunity to get the newsreaders out into the fresh air; to mobilise the correspondents; to build a sense of something historic that is probably, nearly, unlikely, not going to happen.
The problem remains that the North is not good box office. It bores a lot of people. They glance in occasionally to see if anything has changed, but each time the correspondents wait around in the cold for days so that they can eventually report that nothing much has happened, it reinforces the public's sense that this may be a serious and important story, but God is it tedious. It is repetitive and unsatisfactory, continually foundering on the protagonists' pettiness and myopia.
So we'll all meet back here soon and go through it all again. It'll be hot soup and live broadcasts from the cold until this drama finally stops being so frightened of ending. Meanwhile, the only people crowding the pavements in disgust this week were the journalists. There was no mass protest on the streets of Belfast against this awesome squandering of opportunity. There was no eruption of frustration. The politicians may be responsible for bringing it nowhere, but the public collaborates in its society's stagnation.
THE MOST STRIKING thing about Joe Cahill - IRA Man was its ordinariness. Cahill was responsible for appalling carnage before he became an important figurehead in the IRA's move from militarism, but here was a documentary that was calm in its portrayal of him as terrorist, freedom fighter, crook and diplomat. It suggested that the history of the modern IRA could be traced through Cahill's life - and sometimes linked directly to it.
So, here we had the State broadcaster - barely 10 years since declaring that it wouldn't even allow a Sinn Féin actor to advertise a bar of soap for fear of breaking censorship rules - airing a mainstream film about a well-known IRA figure. And it reminded you, at an opportune moment, just how much has changed even if so much else remains the same.
There was more carnage in The Hungerford Massacre, as the BBC reconstructed one of Britain's greater tragedies in recent decades. It was a painstaking recreation of the day, 20 years ago, on which Michael Ryan strolled through a small rural town, gunning down neighbours, strangers, a police officer and his own mother before turning the barrel on himself. Sixteen people died in all, although this film featured some of the remarkable escapes many others had. It was a reminder of the latent heroism most people do not know they possess and would have to be in a situation to discover.
It was a mix of computer animation, witness interviews and actual emergency telephone calls from the day. But the bulk was made up of the dramatic reconstruction, in which an actor wandered the quiet streets on a summer's afternoon while letting loose with assault rifles. It was informative about the events, if not necessarily the context. It was also oddly thrilling. Was the viewer supposed to feel guilty about such a thrill? Maybe, but there seemed little point in making this programme other than for the BBC to offer True Crime titillation under the guise of education. It may have involved the co-operation of some of the people of Hungerford, but this programme was pretty unjustifiable. The story should be told, of course, but just because it shied away from showing each moment of death did not prevent it from being gratuitous. Let's see the BBC be so cavalier in making a drama of the Dunblane school massacre.
It's clear that the BBC has become quite obsessed with reconstruction, or more obviously with constructing disasters yet to happen. The latest in its interminable "what if" guesswork this week was The Man Who Broke Britain, which was yet another docu-drama about the potential outcome of a possible terrorist attack. If you were cruel of mind, you would almost think that it was subconsciously wishing for the rush an actual terrorist attack would bring. But that couldn't possibly be the case, could it?
ANYWAY, TO THE really big stuff this week. I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! ended on Monday night. 9/11 received less coverage. For all that it required divisions of reporters to follow every move in the camp, it's worth noting that the final episode was actually watched by four million less people than tuned in to the finalé of the last series. That is the population of a small country. Our country, as it happens. Not that the two can be linked, because there remains here a voracious appetite for the genre. As soon as an Irish accent appears on the screen, we perk up on our sofas like meerkats.
At least the show fulfilled one of its secondary functions in rehabilitating reviled or forgotten figures. The winner, the likeable Joe Pasquale - a comedian whose routine is based largely around the fact that he has the voicebox of a chewed-up dog toy and that he refers to testicles as "Jacobs" - was impassive enough in the face of renewed popularity, having long ago been sidled off the telly. But it is in the runner-up Paul Burrell that the most remarkable transformation occurred. Burrell had been a tabloid hate figure for a few years until taking what has become the annual celebrity gamble on the jungle game show. Now he's Britain's most popular butler.
It was perhaps helped by his tremendous reactions to the bushtucker trials, most obviously Monday's final task in which he ate the bush food. It included giant beetle grubs ("I tasted it's bottom!") and a kangaroo testicle, which slipped delicately from its hairy sack. It's nicknamed a "bush oyster" and it does not melt in the mouth. His reaction as he bit on it was like the old Looney Tunes transformation of a character from Jeckyll to Hyde. All splurts and popping eyeballs and flapping elbows.
But it was his reaction to the public's endorsement of him that proved far more alarming. He couldn't believe it. "I am a good person," he realised. Given one chance to plead for final votes, he succumbed to a simpering appreciation of the great British public that had turned on him in the first place. It was wobbly lips and moist eyes and faltering voice. The great British public saw this and knew what they had to do. They voted for the guy with the squeaky voice.
And in his moment of glory, Burrell may have blown it. If he has indeed spent the goodwill, and the British people and papers decide that they preferred baiting him to praising him, it may be too much for the chap. For the rest of his life he'll likely sporta look of confusion and horror. Like a man with a kangaroo's testicle caught in his throat.
