TVReview: Hilary Fannin'I'm in debt recovery at the moment, but I would like to get into human rights - though it's such a hard area to get into." "I was on crutches . . . Someone accidentally stood on my foot . . . I was in four-inch heels . . . It certainly made me more aware of people with disability."
It was late, and getting later; as one Rose fell, another one sprouted. Diminutive Ray D'Arcy, now a proud father, had told the thunderous house of banner-waving folk from Texas to Toomevara how he'd interviewed his infant daughter over the cot bars with a hairbrush: "Tell us why you want to be the Rose of Tralee?" "Goo," she replied. Good answer
For a long wet summer, it seemed like the only thing that had been on the telly was a wilting aspidistra - then suddenly this week, hey presto, the scheduling gods decided to relent, and coherent television reappeared with the nonchalance of a monsoon in Mayo. There was one sting in the tail, however; it was that blooming time of year again, when The Rose of Tralee sets up camp on the box for two long nights, a TV critic's annual penance, the punishment for adhering your posterior to an armchair to make a living.
According to my radio, one in six of us tuned in to see the New York Rose, Lisa Murtagh, inaugurated on Tuesday night, but I wonder how many endured the mind-numbing tedium of all 31 interviews, how many of us watched the rattling bevy of many, many bones and bodices shuffle through their one-two-threes, their elegant shoulders glued to their bejewelled ears. How many of us endured the piercing, over-elocuted rendition of more blinking Percy French, how many of us sat through the dogmatic harpists and obdurate flautists and the ever-so-witty bursts of Tie Me Kangaroo Down and I Left My Heart in San Francisco from the Garda band, as well-groomed, well-educated lovely after well-groomed, well-educated lovely tottered over to Ray to tell him how they owed it all to mammy? Oh holy cow. I'm sorry, I know the fashionable view is to cut The Rose of Tralee a bit of slack, and celebrate the anachronistic festival of Irish heritage and hairspray with a bit of light-hearted good humour, but really, what is it all about? There is something deeply confusing about a tantalisingly back-combed spokeswoman for a Dubai development corporation breathily endorsing the purchase of a condo on a man-made, palm-tree-shaped island (shag the environmental consequences), and some long-forgotten ideal of a solid lump of Irish womanhood keeping the turf smouldering and the faith alive.
These 21st-century Roses are, I suppose, a glimpse of a confident sub-section - the healthy, sporty, glossy offspring of shoals of economic migrants and others who stayed put and struggled through the lousy 1980s to buy the Barbie bikes and pay for the Irish- dancing lessons. These young women are living proof of our prosperity - an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to self-sacrifice and parental devotion.
"My passion is shooting. I started when I was four with a .22, shooting Coke cans hanging from the olive tree . . . And my boyfriend, he's a professional Muay Thai, that's kick-boxing with knees and elbows," said Ms Cisco.
"The small talk must be, er . . . classic," mused D'Arcy, who, like the aspidistra, looked like he needed a drink.
Same time, same channel next year, mate, and if you're really lucky, maybe another chance to see a flying podiatrist in an evening dress.
'WE DIDN'T GIVE a hoot about democracy, it didn't mean a thing to us." So said a linen-suited CIA man recalling his sojourn in "the backyard" of the US, the blighted world of Latin America, a place about which Richard Nixon said "people don't give a s**t".
Journalist and film-maker John Pilger has been shaking his stick at the military and economic misdemeanours of western governments since the 1960s. Foreign correspondent and frontline war reporter, he has, Zelig-like, it seems, been everywhere, from the assassination of Robert Kennedy to the killing fields of Cambodia. The War on Democracy, his first feature-length documentary (his contribution to the genre's renaissance), had a late-night screening this fecund week, and as a mark of respect to the man, or maybe to the lateness of the hour, the 100-minute film was broken for ads only once.
Pilger is a relentless polemicist and it is difficult to take issue with him, his courage and doggedness being such rare qualities in a television world where consensus seems to dominate. The film's centrepiece was an optimistic interview with the inspirational Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, reunited with his people after a short-lived, American-financed coup d'etat in 2002. Pilger presented a moving account of the social changes taking place in Chávez's country, which for the first time in its troubled history offers the children of the barrios a full day at school with a hot meal, teaches literacy to women in their 80s, and provides free healthcare to all.
This desert orchid was counterpointed by a trawl through Latin America's tormented and brutalised recent past, including the whispered testimonies of men and women tortured, raped and imprisoned under the dictatorship of US-backed regimes such as Gen Pinochet's in Chile. Alongside the accounts of the cautiously optimistic living were the shocking and heartbreaking photographs of the dead lining the walls outside Chile's notorious interrogation centres, or footage of the mummified remains of the victims of Nicaraguan death squads, or grainy film of mourners being gunned down on the steps of San Salvador Cathedral.
"Thanks to Bush and his cabal, and to Blair, the scales have fallen from millions of eyes. I would like The War on Democracy to contribute something to this awakening," Pilger said. One would like to believe that the hope of the human spirit, which this elegant old-timer's film so eloquently articulated, prevails.
THE JAPANESE ISLANDS of Okinawa are awash with centenarians. They sit in huddled groups watching the Sumo and sipping green tea through toothless gums, like pods of ancient abandoned babies, wrinkled, defenceless and silent. The Oldest People in the World, a gently disturbing documentary, disinterred the strange limbo between life and death inhabited by the truly ancient, and, I am sorry to report, despite the fiery cheer of the care staff and excited descendants extinguishing the 114 candles on the birthday cake of Emma Faust Tillman (the oldest person in the world at the time of filming, who has since died), there seems little or nothing to recommend excessive longevity. The Rose of Tralee might make one groan, man's appalling inhumanity to man will make one weep, but my God, the slow, metronomic drip of life seeping from the well of a paper-thin and exhausted body is enough to have you reaching for the laudanum.
Having been loudly and slowly interviewed, the world's oldest inhabitants in England, the US and Asia appeared to form an overwhelming consensus. "Age is a bit of a tragedy," they concluded, with many of the centenarians feeling that they were not entirely of this world, hardly surprising given the often terrifying rate of change. Some notable exceptions clung to the life raft of their independence, however, and one man called Buster (a mere slip of a thing at just 100) still worked a couple of hours a day cleaning cars, before going down the pub for a pint and a smoke. But the majority of the participants lived in care homes, watching the window, existing in memory; some had outlived their own children, all had outlived partners and friends.
"He doesn't want me up there," said Charlotte (110), despairing at God's negligence, "so I have to be content down here." Fascinating and deeply sad, the programme provoked the question: just where is it we are running so fast to?
ENTIRELY AT THE other end of the age spectrum was the first in a new series of Child of Our Time, in which the Groucho-esque Prof Robert Winston revisited his millennium babies, who are now six going on seven, to ask the question, "are we born with an inner drive?". This was a way of reigniting the old nature/nurture debate, and the programme provided equally predictable answers this time around: by and large, the rich kids were doing fine and the poor kids were struggling.
The children, all equally sweet and painfully tender, have, inevitably, become burdened by parental ambition (or lack of) and by societal and economic forces over which they have no control. Sometimes with television you want to reach inside and smooth out the wrinkled lives displayed before you. But with Winston's living, breathing, bleating, skipping, wailing, laughing sociological experiments in knee-socks and gossamer wings, who will continue to grace our screens, it seems we will have to content ourselves with facing the inevitable and hoping secretly for the unexpected.
James is one boy who has had it tough, his quixotic mother dangerously mired in poverty, anger and a new romance. There is hope for him, though - he's as bright as a button.
"What do we do when we find a purse in a shop, James?" his teacher asked.
"Take it." "Take it where, James?" "Home?" Well . . .