TV REVIEW: For the epicentre of a moral earthquake the woman looked quite relaxed. Telling Stories to Ourselves featured a scene from 1970 series The Spike, in which an artist's model removed her gown, giving not only the unsuspecting actor David Kelly, but the entire nation a vision of technicolour nudity that had never been seen outside those foreign dramas.
Telling Your Stories: Writing to Pictures. RTÉ1, Sunday
Obsessions:Who's Normal Anyway? BBC1, Wednesday
Liar BBC2, Monday
Her modesty stretched out on a chaise long, she ignored the sound of the RTÉ switchboard hitting overload. If you see full-frontal nudity on the television these days, you presume it's just someone looking for attention and switch over to something else. The uproar at the time, though, was so loud that RTÉ yanked the show from the air after seven episodes and refused to screen the rest either then or at any time since.
It is not the most relevant example, but probably the most illustrative of a time when television acted as a foot on the accelerator of social change. The RTÉ switchboard, apparently, was always alive with complaints. In the neatly edited context of this programme, it's easy to see four decades of Irish drama as a blood-rush of creativity and radical opinion. But there is no doubt that there was a time when drama mattered in a way that it doesn't quite seem to anymore. Today, we tend to document - No Tears, Bloody Sunday - rather than expose. Technical standards are extremely high, and the quality of what is produced is consistent. But does it affect the way we think anymore?
Telling Stories to Ourselves framed Wesley Burrowes as the grand wizard altering our view on the world. The Riordans began as a public education programme to tell farmers how to farm better, but became a weekly challenge to social convention. It contained the first marriage break-up on Irish television, storylines about the pill, Tony Doyle's liberal priest. There is nothing more subversive than a soap opera with an agenda. Then, Burrowes could take a Protestant eye to Catholics' concerns and make the plotlines that were relevant far beyond their function as entertainment. Now, soap writers rustle through an empty bag of taboos in the hope of turning up a decent storyline. Fiction entertains, but rarely challenges.
Today, the two things which have drawn the largest number of complaints in RTÉ's history are recent ones. Young blondes presenting the weather forecast and Eamon Dunphy wearing a green shirt and maroon tie. Either we now hold a mirror to ourselves and like what we see, or we're not looking in the mirror as often as we should. Drama, it seems, seldom causes a drama any more.
Obsessions: Who's Normal Anyway? was science for prime-time. You do not get programmes about the latest developments in string theory on BBC1 at 9 p.m. Between the national lottery draw and the main evening news, it will not run documentaries on complex mathematics. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, on the other hand, is guaranteed a good slot. It is on the A-list of disorders as far as television is concerned, a member of an elite group, alongside Siamese Twins, Tourettes Syndrome and a selection of outrageous phobias. They were all subjects covered quite brilliantly by the original popular science series, QED, during the 80s, and of late television seems to have been in a hurry to ransack those topics and update them for a new audience.
Which is being slightly unfair to Obsessions, which was necessarily voyeuristic, but still highly compassionate towards its subjects. They were all, bar one, American, which always tends to enhance the sense of something slightly freakish. In America, as we know, they all suffer from something.
Its subjects were men, women and one child trapped in a world of either relentless order or bizarre disorder, or with a simple but devastating habit. Bob, for instance, is a hoarder. His apartment is filled to overflowing with every milk carton he's ever drank from, every TV guide he's ever read and TV he's ever bought. Actually the TV hadn't been seen in six years, buried as it was under his own personal landfill. The floor hadn't been seen in even longer. "I walk in an unbalanced world," said Bob without apparent irony. "In a way, I think I've created a nest," he added from where he perched, the walls of trash hovering above him on every side.
Liz, an Australian, suffered a different form of OCD. Trichotillomania is an obsession with pulling away your hair. She finds the greatest pleasure in chewing the roots. "I feel like I've injected something into my body." Face to face, she has beautiful, long, shampoo-ad hair. Stand over her and you see her withered, balding crown from where the juiciest roots come.
All were acutely aware of the irrationality of their lives, all keen to scrape it away and rediscover the normality in there somewhere. Most uncomfortable was the case of Stephanie, a mother whose protectiveness over one-year-old son Jake is at a point where she refuses - literally - to take her eyes off him. They pull up at traffic lights; she turns around to stare at him in his baby seat. She pushes him in his buggy; she staggers along with head down to watch him.
This fear arrived with the birth of her son, and became a companion to her obsessive fear of contamination. When they stroll along, she avoids anything on the ground, veers around cigarette butts, wheels around leaves. When strangers approach, she reverses at high speed. Her house is a shrine to her dual obsession. There are little traps set everywhere to alert her to the presence of potential kidnappers. Her house is ritually, meticulously disinfected.
Her hands are broken and raw from her compulsion to wash them up to 40 times an hour. Always the same wash routine. Three squirts of soap, rubbing it between the fingers, plunging them beneath scalding water. The first action Jake ever mimicked was his mother washing.
If you watch enough of these programmes, you begin to greet the therapies with a knowing nod. Exposure is a familiar one, favoured by doctors and television producers alike. If a person has a fear of spiders, make them hold a spider. If they fear contamination, expose them to dirt. Make them realise that the dire consequences they foresee will not occur. In her first session, Stephanie greeted with loud sobs the sight of her father-in-law kissing Jake's hands. After three, she opened a saliva-sealed envelope, rubbed it on the couch and let Jake sit on it, although still pleading for re-assurance that she wouldn't be a bad mother to do this. By nine, he was picking things up from the pavement without ensuing hysterics. Whether Jake has dropped his habit of pretending to wash repeatedly, though, it really should have said.
As a new game show, Liar has everything modern convention demands. The host is rude, the music dramatic and the lights swing at the contestants like a prison spotlight. Liar, though, has an irony and humour to it all that is immediately endearing.
It is hosted by Paul Kaye; a comedian who made his name assaulting A-list celebrities with B-list puns, but for whom subsequent television adventures have not been so enjoyable. If his career had been in free-fall, Liar is a ledge he has caught with his fingernails. The idea is that six people come on, tell the audience that they do a particular job and the audience has to decide which one of them is being truthful, and which five are lying. If they pick the right person, the audience gets £10,000 (between them, of course). If a lying contestant fools the audience he takes the £10,000.
This week six people pretended that they worked in various positions under the royal family. The fun comes in how the audience tries to catch the contestants out. They ask ridiculously difficult questions, such as the one to the supposed Under Secretary to Prince Phillip about the coding system at the entrance to the Ministry of Defence, or to Christopher the Queen Mother's footman about in what order she broke her hips.
An audience member eyed up Christopher the footman suspiciously. He could be a footman, alright, she said, "He's very stiff." The audience murmured in agreement. Cut to Christopher, rigid as a Russian doll. The audience decided that he was so stiff that he must, indeed, have been the Queen Mother's footman, and put their £10,000 on him. Christopher announced that he was actually Bryan, an ex-nurse who'd never met the Queen Mother, and greeted his victory with a punch to the air, like a man breaking through a concrete polo neck. Typically, the audience had voted out the real royal employee, a former chef to Prince Charles, in the first round. It is television to watch when you are too tired to even pick up the remote control. Every evening should have one.