WHAT is Fianna Fail trying to do to Bertie Ahern? The television ads haven't been broadcast yet but, if our postered poles, pillars and pylons are previews of screenings to come, The X Files won't be in it for weirdness. Staring out from the infinite blackness of the void, Bertie, formerly Anorak Man, is now portrayed as a visionary - the Vaclav Havel of Drumcondra - pensive, perspicacious, paternal. "People before politics," says the FF slogan; "ruses not reality," screams the overall impression.
It's not just Fianna Fail and Bertie Ahern. The posters for John "securing your future" Bruton and the rest of the similarly sloganed Fine Gael candidates are, although less absurd, no more heartening. So far, the television debates, soundbites and PR stunts have made this the most boring, tedious, humdrum general election in memory. RTE, to its credit, is getting out and about with the campaigns and generally making an effort - at least quantitatively, if too passively - with its coverage.
But, if this election (as seen on television) were a soap opera, it would be named Eldorado. In fact, it's even worse than that. After a week of tax, tax, tax, cnme and tax, the level of debate has been, quite simply, an insult to the electorate. The truth is, of course, that on most issues - and certainly on economic ones - there are almost no differences between the two big parties. Even when Labour is considered, the band width for debate is almost as narrow as Dick Spring's victory margin in Kerry in 1987.
It's not that convergence of policies has resulted in convivial agreement and taken the passion out of the contest. On the contrary, the level of belligerence appears to have risen in direct proportion to the shrinkage in the ideological gap. The result is that we get John O'Donoghue and Nora Owen (Six One News, Tuesday and Prime Time, Wednesday) squabbling quite viciously over crime. O'Donoghue, in fact, became so worked up that he looked like he had just caught somebody breaking into his car.
But the ferocity of his attacks was ludicrously disproportionate to the real differences between FF and FG on crime. Indeed, during his Prime Twine appearance, O'Donoghue, ruddy with gungho resolve, lashed out at interviewer Brian Farrell, accusing him of "trivialising zero tolerance". Clearly. Fianna Fail has decided that the Rainbow is vulnerable on crime - perhaps it is - and is playing hardball (what price "people before politics"?) on the issue.
The problem is that it's all artifice. When we see, Bertie Ahern getting a PR push from Rambo "POWs before politics" Stallone, it's obvious that it's codology. But when debate is characterised by a distorting intensity - PR-ing issues as well as people - then, really, it's a very sad show. Good luck to people who are doing well out of the Celtic Tiger - but, with poverty still a very serious issue in Ireland there is something obscene about the intensity of the politicians' squabble over tax.
Maybe the election, as fought on television, will improve when the party politicals are screened. Maybe the debate between Bertie Ahern and John Bruton on June 4th will be a riveting contest between a born again visionary and a Taoiseach who told Britain's Prince Charles that "you represent, in your person, so much of what we all aspire to". Maybe Ian Paisley will join Sinn Fein. Maybe ...
But, to date, it's been an appalling election. Sure, it's partly the age we live in and the fact that the main players are so alike. The general run of politicians in the past was neither better nor worse. But, if the tedium of this first week is to continue, Election 97 will alienate more voters than ever. Like the Eurovision Song Contest, the only interesting part may well be the counting of the votes - unless Bertie's party politicals actually are as weird as his posters.
BACK among the regular schedules, a genuinely weird, six part series debuted on ITV. Wokenwell - a sort of toned down, British Twin Peaks, is set in a sleepy, surreal English town. Pathological sexual passions swirl beneath the everyday mundanity of the place. This is a warped town, not just psychologically but temporally. The cast seems to live in an undetermined time in which none of the kids wears those horrifically gaudy trainers (which, surely, will be laughed at like 1970s flares and cheesecloth shirts in 2,0 years time) and there are no traffic markings in the street.
Well, it all contributes towards a sense of otherness - of not being hemmed in by boring old reality. It also provides a context for the weirdness of the plot in which dismembered body parts begin appearing outside the butcher's shop. The butcher is Ted Horrocks and he's due to wed barmaid Cheryl, the former lover of Clive Mundsen, Wokenwell's undertaker, who, of course, has ready access to a supply of spare human limbs ...
The central characters are three coppers and their wives. The top cop is Duncan (Ian McElhinney) whose schoolteacher wife is played by Celia Imrie. The cops, barmaids, butcher and undertaker all seem curiously out of time. But, in blending violence, domesticity, obsession and provincial sexuality (the undertaker is, it appears, quite a ram) Wokenwell is as close to David Lynch as we're likely to see from a British company.
As used to be said about Twin Peaks, if it came with subtitles, it would be real art. Wokenwell is not brilliant (neither, of course, was Twin Peaks, in which tricksiness pretended to be profundity) but it does work in parts. Certainly, there are depths of character particularly depths revealed by sexual obsession - which are unusual for popular drama. The plot twists, however, are another matter. As in Lynch's work, these can be irritatingly pretentious.
Still, with five more episodes to run, Wokenwell is undoubtedly one of the more experimental series on television this year. It's not quite an original and there is a sense that, when all is said and done, ever the buried obsessions are not all that surprising. But at least it is a variation on the usual cops, docs and frocks fare, which has made so much television drama as predictable and tedious as this year's general election. It's got cops, but they're not quite the hero cops of traditional television hokum or the good guys of cosy Heartbeat. Weird, all right.
IF you heard that Wokenwell had been written by Eric Cantona, you might not be greatly surprised. Seething provincial sexuality is, after all a common theme in French films. But, it was surprising - and quite a tribute to Cantona - that within days of announcing his retirement from football, he was accorded the cultural cachet of a BBC tribute programme to mark the event.
However, Au Revoir Cantona was rather skimpy in that it included very little that was new. It did wisely, show a few of the Frenchman's greatest goal and when all the guff - for and against - is long forgotten, these will remain. But really, this was rushed job and it showed. There were not enough interviewees and when it came to the subject of Cantona as icon - the BBC 2 part - only Louise Taylor of the Sunday Times was questioned.
She did, in fairness, make the point that Cantona "plays" the intellectual hardman with great skill. Hardly the most original observation, this nonetheless does explain much of his appeal. It suggests that Cantona is one of the few who can blend hauteur and laddishness, or Rimbaud and Rambo - the ability to be standoffish and to be part of at the same time. It suggests too that, by definition, he is quite knowing in the construction and maintenance of this "enigma for the common man" image.
On the football side, the programme spoke to George Best. "He's lit up my football. I would pay to go and see him," said Best. Simple as that. If Cantona has been good enough for Best, he's been good enough for all but the most begrudging or most deliberately controversial. But, of course, the arguments will continue to rage. Still, even if Cantona changes his mind about retirement, an era has ended.
It is beyond question that Cantona's association with Manchester United - always the most glamorous but regularly an underachieving football club in Britain helped to make him, perhaps, the popular culture icon of the 1990s. But, his period in the ascendant also parallels the growth of Sky Sports and the "repositioning" of soccer to appeal to the middle classes. Even without Sky, this guy - five English championships (including two doubles) in six years - was going to be a megastar.
But saturation television coverage - in which all of his 80 plus goals are on tape - guaranteed that he would be the first of a new breed of pop culture stars in Britain. Indeed, football in the 1990s became rather like pop music had been in the 1960s - defining. With Cantona departing the stage, the initial, exuberant phase of the public's new love affair with soccer may be over now. The football boom will continue - but sports television, preparing itself for pay per view, may not create another pop culture icon for some time.
"The history books will record Cantona as one of, the greats," said Blackburn's England international Graham Le Saux. Indeed.
FINALLY, the Open University. Given the week that was in it, a half hour titled Pyramids, Plato And Football sounded uncannily apt. Surely Cantona hadn't thrown up the day job to appear on the OU? No. Ray Nelson and Carmen Pryce delivered a maths lecture, fascinating in its own way, which linked the pyramids of Egypt with Platonic solids and the panels on a football.
Along the way, they demonstrated the significance of the fact that the faces on the pyramids are comprised of isosceles (and not, as is usually assumed, equilateral) triangles, while the base is a perfect square. This, they linked to the most common form of football design - 20 hexagons with 12 pentagons - and proceeded to explain one of Euler's theorems. Well, okay, it wasn't quite as, exciting as Eric Cantona at his best and yes, you'd really want to be in the mood for that sort of television. But, given the terrible tedium of the most boring election since Plato was a lad, even an OU maths module made pretty sexy television. Yawn!