The Naked Chef (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Great Expectations (BBC2, Monday and Tuesday)
Happy Birthday Seamus (BBC 2, Sunday)
Keeping Time: the Poet and the Piper (BBC 2, Sunday)
The Kosovo Crisis (Sky News, all week)
The Republic - Leaving the Commonwealth (RTE 1, Thursday)
There is nothing more seductive than watching an attractive man cook for you. So why hasn't anybody put it on TV before? (Keith Floyd sexy? Loyd Grossman attractive? Would you actually think of snogging that obnoxious Gary Rhodes with his sticky-uppy hair? Indeed not.) TV chefs have been more dished than dishy because the previous cooking trend has been about aspiration. Even the Delias, the Darinas and the Two Fat Ladies offered food as a kind of motherly form of social climbing. Your table didn't have home-grown herbs or bread kneaded by your own hands? Then you'd better run down to the speciality shop and buy them fast.
But we've got used to good food now. Finding once exotic items is no big deal. Today, it's not what you cook that gives the buzz - it's how you cook it. Toss aspiration and think inspiration. Forget French sauces and think saucy. Home cooking will be the sex of the 2000 2010 decade, just as gardening was the sex of the 1990s and money the sex of the 1980s. And Jamie Oliver's testosterone-spiced style is leading the way. In the first programme of his series, The Naked Chef (as in, he's not naked but you wish he was) he cooked in his designer kitchen (regulation alder, granite and stainless steel) for his chef colleagues - all male. Could it be that men are finally discovering what women have known for years: who needs sex when you have food?
Jamie Oliver's philosophy consists of "stripping down restaurant recipes to their bare essentials". This involves a lot of breathless and juicy pummelling, massaging, stuffing and splitting at top gear. You should see what he does to a fig. Preparing a leg of lamb, roast potatoes and onions, Oliver stuffed everything with butter and herbs and used the phrase "just stuff it in there" so many times that I lost count at 10. He even offered to do "The Full Monty". Good food in Oliver's language is "pukka" and "more-ish". But his athletic, macho style is balanced by a feminine side that makes you want to hug him at the very least. He's got the blonde curls of a cherub. He gave his mother vanilla sugar for Christmas and loves to cry when he chops onions. "Having a cry is good for you. It gets the emotions out and nobody knows you're doing it because you're chopping onions," he said. He was pure poetry, he was, and newer than a new man.
There is only one thing that is nearly as sexy as watching dishy men cook, and that's watching them in costume drama as they yearn passionately for the beloved whom they may never touch. The testosterone drive behind Great Expectations was Pip, played by Ioan Gruffudd, who became more beautiful by the minute. Great Expectations led us chastely up the primrose path, as all good costume dramas do, to the essential heart-stopping kiss between Pip and the unattainable Estella - a moment made even more heart-stopping because it was left until the penultimate scene, which meant that you had to watch nearly six hours of TV before you got there. A well-earned kiss, if ever there was one.
And to think that, reading Dickens's novel in school, we all thought Miss Havisham was a doddery old lady. Charlotte Rampling's sexy and bitter performance was a revelation, so wickedly alert to emotional nuance that she effortlessly manipulated Pip into his obsession with the cold Estella. Rampling was so copped on, in fact, that it was hard to believe she would ever wander into the grate and catch fire. But this scene wasn't exactly convincing in the original novel, either. In the final analysis, the BBC's Great Expectations was - like all such visual feasts - probably best watched with the sound off and a large pile of knitting on your lap. Like a thick airport novel or a holiday romance, it was entertaining while it lasted but made you feel cheap afterwards. Visually, it had some stunning set pieces, delving into the image banks of Zefferelli, Bergman, Merchant Ivory and - in its more grotesque and violent moments - De Palma. There were scenes which looked more like NYPD Blue than Dickens.
But Miss Havisham's wedding banquet looked just as it should, in its opulent decay - although there were too many close-ups of maggots and rats. If you weren't turned on by sexy young men cooking or casting smouldering looks of longing while dressed in period costume, you could plump for having poetry read to you by the world's first media poet. Famous Seamus - a sex symbol of the cuddly bear variety - was presented on a pedestal as the god of poetry in Keeping Time. Philip King and Declan Quinn (the cinematographer on Leaving Las Vegas and This Is My Father) contrived to create an MTV video for Heaneyboppers and almost succeeded in making their subject seem ludicrous. The stagey production was filmed on a trendy, shabby-chic set designed by Frank Flood - the interior of a crumbling big house with fashionably colour-washed walls, oriental carpets, candlelight and an array of objets d'art designed by artist Gabby Dowling. In the midst of this designer decay, Seamus Heaney was displayed as the penultimate accessory: a designer poet illuminated by various moody lighting effects.
The setting was so evocative, but so empty of action, that you kept expecting Sharon Stone to walk in and seduce Heaney any moment, or to impale herself on Liam O'Flynn's uillean pipes. The saving grace was the subject, the collaboration between Heaney and O'Flynn, which has produced a stunning aural twinning of poetry and music. The poet and the piper are a wonderful combination, because each sheds light on the other. Liam O'Flynn sits quietly and lets the music flow through him, almost as if he is a mere vehicle for notes that are being generated in another dimension. Heaney, too, gives the same evocative impression that the poetry is coming through him down the millennia. Each shares the same nonchalant stance of virtual non-movement, allowing expression only to the voice or the pipes.
Still, for all its aesthetic sophistication, Keeping Time gave off an uncomfortable feeling that Heaney knew he was recording for posterity. He tagged the poems which he feels will go down in history. Can you imagine Blake or Keats reading on video? Would they be Blake or Keats if they had? Would Shelley have predicted which of his poems would be read 200 years later? But then, these are different times, with poetry broadcast through the global village and poets appreciated within their own lifetimes.
Heaney's early efforts at presenting himself as a TV poet were excerpted in Happy Birthday Seamus. We saw him in the 1970s, wearing jeans, wellies and tweeds as he expounded didactically on the places which inspired various poems. It was depressing to think that two decades later, in the Celtic Tiger era, people are too busy counting their new money to care much about the ancient Celts. We leave that to the tourists.
In one scene, meant to illustrate "Door into the Dark", we were taken inside a forge. The blacksmith - resurrected by the documentary to speak in 1999 - revealed that, 25 years previously, Heaney had never actually set foot in the forge before writing his poem. The forge had been in Heaney's imagination. Maybe that's why TV and poetry are so awkward: the images are best imagined rather than illustrated. As its title indicates, Happy Birthday Seamus was full of greetings from famous friends of the poet. Ostensibly directed to him personally, these were actually aimed at us, the viewers, giving us the message that the Bonos of this world were part of Seamus's stellar orbit of friends and admirers, Hillary Clinton thanked "Seamus, my friend" for the "joy and laughter", which sounded a bit like a stock compliment and not particularly appropriate to Heaney's work. She also said that she wished she could give Seamus "a big hug" just to show how close she was to her friend.
It was Derek Walcott who caught Heaney best, describing how in his company "you could hear the vocabulary of the landscape alive". Heaney's poetic theme has been the reclaiming of our connection to the earth, as the life-force and the spiritual centre. This preoccupation has been criticised by some as being nostalgic and pastoral - when it is anything but. Maintaining the connection between a sense of place and a sense of self is a matter of survival and has never been more relevant. When people are depersonalised and lose their sense of place, as hundreds of thousands have in Yugoslavia, they are effectively obliterated. Whether you are talking about the men of violence in Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland, it is a basic truth that you are capable of atrocity when you disconnect. Never have we been more disconnected.
A Compelling image of this disconnection came in Sky News on Tuesday when, for a moment, the viewer had the sensation of becoming the Slim Pickens character in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove - the cowboy riding the missile straight to oblivion in Kosovo. At the live broadcast of NATO's press conference, we learned what it was like to cruise astride a warhead, courtesy of missile-mounted cameras. As the missile left the plane and approached the target, the camera sent back an image of the target looming larger and larger until it filled the screen. Then the missile exploded and the picture went fuzzy.
General Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander of NATO forces, revealed himself to the public as the mastermind of the bombing campaign at a briefing in Brussels. He could have been describing dental surgery. Asked about the incident in which Nato bombers accidently struck a passenger train twice, Clark took a leaf from the book of Bill Clinton. Apologise, apologise, apologise, from the bottom of your heart and you can get away with anything.
It is weird the way you can watch this bombing with absolutely no emotion, a sensation encouraged by the literally disarming language of techno-war used by men like Clark. Bombers are "strike assets". Bombing missions are "strike sorties". Civilian casualties are "collateral damage". General Clark described the accidental double-bombing of a moving train as "uncanny", a word which implies "freakish coincidence", rather than calculated risk. The explanation contributed to the image of this war as a bloodless, technological exercise, a bit like watching polo, once you know the rules.
The notion of a PhD thesis being turned into a TV documentary is stultifying, so it was a challenge for the programme-makers to inject relevance and watch-ability into The Republic - Leaving the Commonwealth. Written and narrated by RTE newsroom journalist David McCullagh and based on his book, A Makeshift Majority, The Republic argued that Sean McBride and Hector Legge (then editor of the Sunday Independent) were the Republic's first political spin doctors, manipulating Costello into declaring the State an independent Republic without cabinet approval. Who cares? This documentary was too dull to stick with. It was brilliantly researched, but in execution it was sleep-inducing, peopled by old codgers in book-lined studies who looked bored by their own words. Well-researched programmes such as this need to be made, but they also need to be given a lot more creative resources if they are to hold a non-specialist audience for even a minute.