The Bay City Rollers - Remember? (BBC 1, Monday)
Dropping The Number 10 For Dili (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Ironing The Land (RTE 1, Wednesday)
Easter Floods - A 999 Special (BBC 1, Monday)
Preparing to perform for a horde of teenyboppers, the Bay City Rollers were helicoptered on to a manmade island in the middle of a small lake. The excitement, however, was clearly too much for some of the female teenies, who, delirious, plunged into the putative moat. Members of the BBC sub-aqua club, moonlighting as a team of underwater bouncers, streamed like shoals of piranha to engulf the frenzied fans. Meanwhile, Tony Blackburn circled the lake in a speedboat driven by a Womble.
That's entertainment, eh? It all looked like a vision generated by dodgy hallucinogenics, reminding us that teenage life had a rather distinctive hue back in 1975. Glittery glam was ebbing and the rough beast of punk, which would be born the following year, was still in gestation. The video age of MTV, when equally idiotic visions would claim to be arty and creative, was a further few years down the road. It was the year of Rollermania in Britain as tartan supplanted glitter. Teenies wetting themselves - usually without the need of a lake - became emblematic of the year. The Bay City Rollers - Remember? was Gestaltian in its recovery of such repressed memories.
The Rollers (Alan and Derek Longmuir, Les McKeown, Eric Faulkner and Stuart "Woody" Wood) were marketed as a clean-living, blow-dried, milk-shake drinking, boy band in platform boots, cut-off trousers and tartan accessories. They were, one of them said, supposed to be like "the boys next door". It all depends where you live, of course, but to the lads' credit, they turned out to be the sort of kids who might live next door to the Manson Family: drink, drugs and fighting were their true interests. Compared to the nauseatingly slick outfits that nowadays feature on the bedroom walls and in the bedroom dreams of pubescent girls, the Rollers retained appropriately humanising rough edges and a kind of transcendent naffness.
They were a crap band, of course - seriously awful. But they had their number one hits, not only in Britain but in America too. In total, they sold an estimated 120 million albums - an achievement which generated about £40,000 for each of them. Rip-offs, even music industry ripoffs, are seldom more spectacular. In their heyday, they attracted crowds of 75,000 and 120,000 screaming teenies respectively, to Toronto and Tokyo airports. Apparently they still have a sizeable following in Japan, even though most of their original fans are now closing in on 40. It's unlikely that many of them would now be prepared to throw themselves into lakes to get closer to their unlikely idols.
Eric, shown ordering milkshakes 24 years ago, was really more keen on speed. He said he became addicted to amphetamines because he began using them to combat a weight problem. Perhaps the weight problem was caused by too many milk-shakes. He didn't say. But, whatever the spur, Eric got so heavily into speed that he couldn't sleep. So, he turned on to downers. Psychically up and down, like a piledriver at full pelt, Eric eventually collapsed. Nobody mentioned the gateway theory regarding drug addiction - but a strong case could certainly be made against those milk-shakes. If only he had managed to resist the first sip . . .
Anyway, the recounting of Eric's collapse allowed for the most revealing anecdote of this documentary. The Rollers' manager, Tam Paton, may have phoned the newspapers before he phoned for an ambulance. He couldn't quite remember. Well, it's a long time ago, of course, and Tam has led an eventful life since. In fact he's done a prison stretch for engaging in "indecent acts" with a male under the age of 21. To be fair to him, not that scrupulous fairness with the Rollers appeared to be his most defining characteristic, he was right to point out that he was not convicted of abusing anybody in the low teen age-range of typical Roller fans.
Tam was ambitious, though. After their spectacular success in Britain, he took the lads to America. Initial success and a number one hit (Saturday Night) in January 1976 led to an American TV series aimed at pre-teens. In a precursor of the anodyne slickness of today, the boys-next-door were choreographed to corporate banality. Even drink and drugs couldn't save them this time. They began to squabble and fight, culminating in a moment of punk authenticity that even The Sex Pistols could not emulate. On a tour of Japan, Woody and Les started kicking the crap out of each other on stage. Art will have its way.
However, there was an unsureness of tone to this programme. Part condescending and part moralising, it really had little more depth than a Bay City Rollers' lyric. The tartan kitsch of the whole gig was rightly lampooned but the rapacious commercial exploitation of five young lads from a Scottish council estate required a greater degree of condemnation than the awfulness of their music. There is, as there always has been, a place in the world for bad art. There is too a place in the world for bad business. Maybe the Bay City Rollers deserved what they got. But the suits that made the fortunes did not.
Perhaps the BBC, organisers of the lake/frogmen/Womble extravaganza, felt that almost a quarter of a century on, a tone of condescending incredulity was most appropriate. But an admission of complicity in promoting such codswallop required a recognition of the fact that the Bay City Rollers could have received such prominence only on the back of media with vested interests. Instead, the attitude was that the BBC was merely facilitating - not helping to inflict upon us - a teen fad with its own bizarre dynamic. If you were 14 and female in 1975, you may have been left believing that it was all your own fault for wetting your tartan back then. But there were other forces at work - and not all of them were hormonal.
THERE were, though you might not have been aware of them, rather more momentuous events than Rollermania back in 1975. In that year of tartan, Indonesia invaded East Timor. Dropping The Number 10 For Dili opened with an East Timorese man recalling the murders of members of his family by Suharto's butchers. Later we would hear stories of castration, rape and mass execution. Indeed, we saw, yet again (and, lest we forget, it's good that we did!) the massacre of students at East Timor's Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991. In all, 271 students were murdered in the incident. In all, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 East Timorese have been slaughtered since Indonesia invaded.
With Kosovo rightly dominating world news at present, East Timor has slipped even further from public consciousness. It's not that it ever received due attention in the Western media but it would have received even less without the commitment of people like Tom Hyland. Tom has been a Dublin Bus driver on the number 10 route - Phoenix Park to UCD's Belfield (hence the programme's title) - and has worked tirelessly to heighten awareness of the plight of the East Timorese. "It's a global society when they want it for business," he said, coining the most laconic and perceptive political comment of the week.
Much of the thrust and content of this documentary was seen last year in John Pilger's film about the invasion and its scarcely imaginable brutalities. It's fashionable now to denigrate Pilger as a sanctimonious Old Lefty - a man too sure of his own answers to complex international problems. But Tom Hyland carries no such baggage and, as such, is a more difficult target for those sneering, pompous ranters who confuse - deliberately or otherwise - right wing projects with convenient pragmatism. Mind you, Tom has become heavily politicised himself, shaking his head about the Suharto "diplomats" who have been allowed to "wine and dine themselves in Western embassies".
There was always the risk in this documentary of glorifying Tom Hyland at some expense to the central issue. As the public face of the campaign in Ireland, he deserves not only recognition but the media platform to tell his own story. There is the argument too that making the programme personality-centred, as opposed to issue-centred, should make it more appealing to a viewership jaded from war horrors. Anyway, this one succeeded by primarily focusing its first half on Tom and its second on East Timor. As indictments of Western governments go, it was effective without descending into polemical ranting.
As the catalogue of horrors was recounted, it was difficult not to think that, ultimately, there is no law - only power - in international relations. Oh, up to a point, there is civilisation and its protocols. But when genocide against weaker opposition is on the agenda of heavily armed regimes, the key thing appears to be not to cross the interests of the world's top dogs. We know which countries have profited from selling arms to Indonesia. It is indeed a global society when certain countries want it for business.
If the media had done its job after six Western journalists were murdered in East Timor, maybe hundreds of thousands of East Timorese people would have survived, said Tom. Well, that's unlikely. Though information is power, there are more powerful forces among us than even the most powerful of information organisations. But Tom Hyland had a point. Global politics and global media have failed the people of East Timor. Almost 24 years after the invasion, we can rightly praise Tom Hyland and this documentary. But there was a sense of watching history, not journalism, made more acute by the contemporaneity of the barbarism in the Balkans.
There was, correctly, a sense of watching history about Dick Warner's newest series Ironing The Land. Having chugged along our inland waterways and sailed around the coast, Dick finally finds himself on dry land, recounting the story of Ireland's railways. This week's opening episode Dublin To Kingstown, told the tale of the first Irish railway. Opened in 1834, nine years after the world's first rail journey at Stockton in England, the navvies who laid the track between Westland Row and Dun Laoghaire have almost certainly been more responsible than any other group of people for maintaining high house prices along the route.
Navvies, short for the "navigators" who, a century earlier, dug canals, could, said Dick, each shift about 20 tons of muck a day. To fuel this human JCB ardour, they characteristically ate up to three pounds weight of beef every day, washing it down with pints - gallons even - of porter. Not surprisingly, most of them died around 40. Considered in that context, Bay City Rollers fans - whatever about lingering, even traumatic, embarrassments - aren't faring too badly. The Dublin to Kingstown line cost about £60,000 a mile. In the rest of the country, the average was closer to £15,000 a mile.
Ironing The Land, written by Kevin O'Connor, is strong on information and Warner's typically relaxed style - even if the 19th century rig-outs were dodgy enough - is ideal. There are, of course, neither stills nor moving footage from the first half of the last century but, unlike say, famine villages, many of the lines laid at the time remain. Historian Joe Lee and railway historian Fergus Mulligan add context and anecdote to the series. If it has a notable fault, the script does gush somewhat at times. The Irish railway story has not always been one of success and efficiency. Perhaps future episodes will recognise that in 1999 commuters are regularly treated like cattle.
Still, Warner has a winning way with his jaunts. Helicopter shots high above the DART moving past Blackrock Park convey a sense of the scale of railway engineering. Along with pyramids and cathedrals, railways have been the grandest project of human building, said one contributor. Perhaps, though the world's road network took a bit of constructing too. Anyway, Dick Warner is firmly on track for another winner even if the tone could do, in parts, with a little muting. The second episode is titled A Tale Of Two Cities. It's about the connecting of Dublin and Belfast by rail and includes some evocative pictures from the construction of the Boyne Viaduct, which opened in 1855. Very watchable.
FINALLY, Easter Floods A 999 Special. As the craze for "real-life disaster TV" continues, it's got to be asked if the popularity of these efforts is not primarily based on rampant schadenfreude. Five people died and 4,500 properties were damaged when more than a month's rainfall fell in 15 or 16 hours across south Wales and the English midlands at Easter 1998. Real footage - most of it home video stuff - has a certain appeal, of course. But this "special" had far too many "reconstructions". It also had its heroes and victims acting out reconstructions. Like the Bay City Rollers back in 1975, that's entertainment, eh? I don't think so. Pass the milk-shake, lads.