Cursai Ealaine Teoranta: The Truth about Gerry (RTE1, Tuesday)
Apres Match (N2, all week)
Panorama (BBC1, Monday)
Ferry Tales (N2, Wednesday)
TV3 News Special (TV3, Wednesday)
`It's not that I'm afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." Woody Allen's line on the Big D came to mind when watching the spoof-obituary, The Truth About Gerry, in which "Ireland's Woody Allen", in the words of Pauline McLynn (at least he's not Ireland's Ben Elton), orchestrated his own funeral service to the accompaniment of tributes from friends and colleagues. Some might find this in bad taste (the programme was actually held over for a week to make way for a documentary screened in tribute to the late Frank Patterson), but it could hardly have been more appropriate, in a culture which has raised the over-reverent "documentary profile" of artists to, well, a minor artform in itself. It's hard to avoid the impression, amid the torrent of programmes about Irish novelists, poets, painters and architects over the past couple of years, that our broadcasters aren't stacking up product for that fateful day when each of these National Treasures takes a final bow and exits the stage.
What a good idea, then, for Cursai Ealaine, newly reborn as a feature documentary programme, to use this rather hackneyed formula as the basis for its profile of writer/director/actor/whatever you're having yourself Stembridge. In fact, The Truth About Gerry slightly overstretched its onegag format, but there were some highly cherishable moments along the way: Stembridge performing a song to a stony-faced Late Late audience; clips from the marvellously subversive "youth employment" series, Nothing To It (what a great title for a programme about getting a job in 1980s Ireland). And clips, of course, from the glory days of Scrap Saturday. An impressively subversive programme, summed up well by Fintan O'Toole's remark: "the greatest thing for a satirist would be for lots of people to be saying, `I'm glad that bastard's dead'."
The nearest thing to Scrap Saturday these days is not, as some seem to believe, Bull Island, but the inspired brilliance of the Apres Match trio, who this week continued to test the patience of their employers with their irreverent surrealism. Is it a sign of loosening up at RTE that two successive directors of television have been lampooned on air in a matter of weeks? (The Truth About Gerry had a Joe Mulholland-soundalike pooh-poohing a proposed Late Late Show special on Stembridge, suggesting instead: "Colm Connolly could do 20 seconds on the News", while Apres Match chased a fugitive "Cathal Goan" around Montrose in search of the reason why RTE had lost Champions' League coverage to TV3). In their quest for absurdity, the Apres Matchers sometimes falter (this week's "Three Joe Duffys" sketch was overstretched), but, as with all good sketch comedy, we're prepared to accept this unevenness as part of the risk-taking process. In footballing terms, Apres Match is Portugal - delightful to watch, a little shaky at the back but always capable of a moment of brilliance. Bull Island (appropriately enough) is Ing-er-land - old-fashioned, unimaginative and insular, playing a game that went out of style 20 years or more ago.
AT least Bull Island fans don't comport themselves like their football counterparts. "I'd rather be a Paki than a Turk," was the favoured chant of the massed throngs of English supporters outside the Grasshopper pub in Amsterdam, as filmed for Panorama's superb programme on English football hooliganism. In the last week or so, the Spliffing Theory of hooligan control has become familiar: weak beer and legal marijuana tamed the mob prior to England's first game against Portugal, it was suggested. It's a persuasive point which, if applied to football grounds across the world, could radically change the atmosphere at matches: entire terraces holding cigarette lighters aloft, a stampede for fudge brownies at half-time . . . mmmm, what was the, mmmm, score again?
But the mob outside the Grasshopper wasn't wearing flowers in its hair: "If it wasn't for the English, you'd be Krauts," they bellowed at passing Amsterdammers, unsurprisingly revealing a limited amount of historical knowledge (and wasn't that originally an insult the Americans hurled at the British?). If this was the hippy-dippy, stoner end of "the English Disease", as Pan- orama called it, then what would happen if the drugs were a little less mellow?
Cut to O'Reilly's Bar in Brussels, where the beer was stronger, the drug of choice was cocaine, and the atmosphere was unlike anything I've ever seen on television before. This, one imagines, was what a Munich beer cellar might have been like in the early 1930s, apart from the designer sports gear and Colombian nose candy. The programme didn't comment on the irony of a mob of English racists, one of whose favourite slogans was "No surrender to the IRA", choosing an Irish pub as its headquarters. There was the usual whingeing about rough tactics by the Belgian police, but there's nothing like an English football hooligan to bring out the hangin' and floggin' instinct in the most liberal vegetarian pacifist. It's actually rather interesting to see what happens if you throw a CS canister into a bar full of hooligans. In fact, it's rather wonderful, although you had to feel sorry for the bar staff. As for the innocent bystanders, a representative from the Football Supporters' Association complained that "the police were very unspecific" in the people they targeted. Call me intolerant, but if you know the form on previous events like this, and insist on hanging around for hours among this bunch instead of clearing out fast, then you've only got yourself to blame.
The interesting thing about coverage of violence at Euro 2000 has been the way the "tiny minority" argument - that the vast majority of decent fans are being let down by a hardcore few - has been quietly jettisoned by the British media. This time out, there was talk of a "certain element" or a "substantial minority". What was clear from Panorama was that, even among the "decent fans", a set of attitudes and beliefs exists which blends seamlessly into the agenda of the agents provocateurs who were identified by the programme. Travelling with a group of Newcastle fans on a ferry across the North Sea, the camera crew captured all the tabloid-fuelled xenophobia which accompanies such trips - the Dambusters song, the macho aggression, the strange cheerlessness of the whole thing.
In Brussels, handcuffed together on the ground like the world's most miserable conga line, the deportees-to-be were a gratifyingly sorry-looking bunch. "But we won the war!" pleaded one sad specimen to the cameras. Well, no, actually, your grandfathers made a significant contribution to winning the war, which is slightly different.
English national identity is said to be tangled up with notions of an "island race", a breed apart. Such ideas become less and less of a reality and more and more of a metaphor as cheap transport, increased prosperity and advancing multiculturalism impinge on our daily lives. Airline deregulation has made it possible for millions of people to fly to places their parents never dreamed of going. But, even with the huge increase in air traffic between Britain and Ireland, seven million people still travel by ferry across the Irish Sea every year, according to Ferry Tales, a new series about those who make that trip on a regular basis. On both sides of the Irish Sea, there seems to be a reluctance to explore the many thousands of relationships those journeys represent, perhaps because most are working-class and relate to the cities of northern England rather than the metropolitan south-east. Ferry Tales is a good idea for a series, therefore, although the first programme raised doubts about how well that potential will be explored.
Linda is a Liverpudlian mother of six whose partner, Paul (who is also English), is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Mountjoy for possession of a substantial consignment of drugs (the programme-makers didn't specify what kind of drugs). "He was made out to be the leader of a big drugs organisation, which is rubbish," said Linda, a woman you wouldn't want to argue with (think Brookside's Bev crossed with Lily Savage).
As she pointed out, she would have been living in a lot more luxury had Paul been raking in the cash before his arrest. As it is, she was faced with having to move from her flat due to harassment from neighbours who knew about Paul's criminal activities. The programme glided around these issues, and the question of how unemployed Linda could afford to bring her large brood over to Dublin so regularly (every two weeks at one point) wasn't asked - we were just told it was on a shoestring budget. There was also some of that nonsense you get with "observational documentaries", with the family anxiously wondering whether a taxi would arrive to get them to the prison on time for the visit. Couldn't the camera crew have given them a lift?
Has anyone noticed the striking resemblance which TV3's political correspondent, Ursula Halligan, bears to Angela Lansbury? Wednesday night's interview with Hugh O'Flaherty was an odd affair, like Murder She Wrote without the triumphant conclusion. If O'Flaherty's intention in giving interviews to Today FM and TV3 was to cock a snook at RTE, then it backfired slightly, on television at least. Today FM's The Last Word is a serious player in Irish current affairs coverage, with an established format which allows more space and time to serious debate than does its RTE rival. TV3's news division, by contrast, is a fluffy, insubstantial affair with low ratings and a devotion to lightweight PR pap. It's not normally in the business of doing lengthy interviews on weighty topics of the day, and this News Special sat uneasily between its usual diet of imports and re-runs.
Ever since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, we've all known that television plays by different rules from other media - superficial visual impressions are far more important than they are in radio. As someone who clearly felt, at best, ill-at-ease with the media and, at worst, harassed and victimised, O'Flaherty was already at a disadvantage.
While it could be argued that he got an easier ride from Halligan's slightly softfocus interviewing style than he would have received from Miriam O'Callaghan or Brian Farrell, that was counterbalanced by unflattering lighting and a cameraman who seemed to be trying to climb up his subject's nostrils. And surely Bertie Ahern, a man who clearly understands the importance of a good lash of panstick before going on the air, could have sent one of his make-up people along. After all, that's what friends are for.
