TV Review:Some prominent historians - the ones I've just made up - identify Ireland's three successive Eurovision Song Contestvictories in the early 1990s as the key indicator that the nation was ready to shake off its animal skins, cast away its stone tools and begin forming itself into a new imperial power, writes Donald Clarke.
With this in mind, viewers could be forgiven for regarding the desperate scenes in Helsinki last Saturday as our own version of the first Sack of Rome. Certainly Marty Whelan sounded worn down by the grisly vista unfolding before him. As successive versions of Ruritania expressed their preference for caterwauling transvestites over the sober stylings of Dervish, Marty moved from emollient expressions of patriotic optimism to a series of weary exhalations and surly monosyllables. By the time the depths of our humiliation had become clear, the dubiously haired presenter - whose experiences on Celebrity Jigs 'n' Reelsmust, surely, have inured him to humiliation - was confining himself to sighing out the names of the countries queuing up to gob in our face. "Ukraine. . . Georgia. . . Belarus. . . "
This is a grim omen. The Dark Ages beckon. Next time we select a national leader, we may, perhaps, auction off the post like the compromised senators in the film version of The Fall of the Roman Empire.
UNTIL THEN WE must endure the annoying business that is the democratic process. RTÉ showed such confidence in the appeal of the debate between the two main party leaders that, just days before daggers were drawn, it pulled the opening episode of the new series of The Sopranosfrom the opposing channel and replaced it with a film so appalling even the tortuous evasions of politicians would seem compelling.
Well, that was, we assume, the intention. As things worked out RTÉ2 could have turned itself over to dead air and still offered a more thrilling evening's entertainment than that provided by the duelling politicians. It is, of course, not a party leader's responsibility to act as locum for Tony Soprano, but the desiccated, bloodless nature of Prime Time: The Leaders Debatedid the voters a genuine disservice.
We all know the differences in political alignment between the Government and the Opposition are so obscure that even those men who sex chickens for a living would have difficulty identifying who is to the right (or left) of whom. It would, however, be nice if they at least pretended there was some ideological distinction.
Did anybody win? Before the contest began, pundits had suggested that if Enda Kenny, happy beneficiary of an anaemic campaign by Fianna Fáil, merely resisted the temptation to ritually disembowel himself on air then he would emerge as a sure favourite to take the ermine.
The programme ended with Enda's intestines all still within his prim little body, but those few viewers who managed to remain awake will have detected at least one example of - is this possible? - partial hara-kiri. Having repeatedly mouthed the word "accountability" at the Taoiseach, Kenny was, perhaps, unwise to suggest that Jim O'Keeffe, his own spokesman on justice, did not have the right statistics to hand when he drifted off message on crime. Jim, not Enda, was, it seems, accountable for that little mishap.
Never mind. These showdowns between potential leaders have always been more about presentation and personality than what is actually coming out of those endlessly flapping mouths. Everybody knows about Richard Nixon's gruesome sweating in his famous debate with John F Kennedy. Only historians remember what the two men discussed.
As Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny tussled tediously with one another, it slowly dawned that cruel fate had narrowly denied satirists one of the most felicitous coincidences in political history. Bert and Ennie come across like hideously heightened simulacrums of Bert and Ernie, but, sadly, personalities have been switched on the journey from Sesame Street. Ennie is now the dull, responsible pigeon fancier who balks at the eating of cookies in bed. Bert has become the round-faced optimist whose agreeable personality makes up for an occasionally haphazard approach to personal economics.
Eager to make Ennie seem a bit less of a cyborg, the Fine Gael handlers had instructed their leader to point out the many ordinary people he had encountered on his travels. There was the man from Trim waiting for his operation. There were the children in Wicklow damned to obesity for want of a dietician. There was - I may have dozed off and dreamt this - that lady from Westmeath who had been savaged by wolverines. Meanwhile Bert, aware that he needed to gather some seriousness about him, began trotting out a list of statistics that would have strained the patience of even Sesame Street's famously numerate Count.
Neither man seemed comfortable being who he had been told to be.
The Taoiseach looked in desperate need of a back to slap and a hand to pump. The challenger clearly wished to be returned to the department-store window from which he had been cruelly plucked.
HOW SAD THAT neither of the politicians chose to follow the adversarial example set by John Sweeney earlier in the week and get down to some properly deranged bellowing. Sweeney, a dogged British journalist in the Paul Foot mode, made the mistake of blowing his top during a Panoramainvestigation of that sinister combination of cult and con that goes by the name of Scientology. His deafening outburst against one of the organisation's more dogged secret policemen was deemed sufficiently volcanic to join various roller-skating puppies and boozed-up celebrities in the list of most-watched items on YouTube last week. Speculation raged that the Church of Scientology, which welcomes criticism as slugs welcome salt, was responsible for posting the item on the video-sharing website. If this is the case then the Scientologists may have miscalculated.
Publicising the investigation will, surely, have drawn many otherwise indifferent viewers to the programme and thus offered them some explanation as to why a man like Sweeney - or, to be honest, a man like St Francis - might, when exposed to these swivel-eyed zealots, see fit to turn pink and make like a malfunctioning foghorn.
Everywhere Sweeney went, one Tommy Davis, son of the actor Anne Archer, followed with a clipboard, a microphone and a smattering of supportive goons. The church's attempt to put forward its own argument involved dumping the reporter before a grim line-up of celebrity adherents - Kirstie Alley, Juliette Lewis, Tommy's mum - and then, when Sweeney dared to mention the word "cult", instructing them all to withdraw permission to broadcast their undoubtedly persuasive musings. Immediately before Sweeney launched himself into his outburst he had been shown a truly vile exhibition purporting to demonstrate how the profession of psychiatry was responsible for the Holocaust. By this stage, I too had turned the colour of gazpacho and had begun making explosive noises at the blameless television set. If there had been any crowbars lying about the house I might very well have battered the appliance into shrapnel.
My anger was not, sadly, stoked by Scientology alone. What has become of Panorama? His meltdown notwithstanding, Sweeney appears to have applied himself to the investigation with admirable dedication and imagination. Yet the programme, pared down to a paltry 30 minutes and preceded by an unnecessarily informal introduction by Jeremy Vine, seemed to have been constructed for an audience unwilling to grapple with detail or background. Panorama, once the stomping ground of Richard Dimbleby, the dean of British broadcasters, is now a little thing run by men with humble ambitions. They should find the programme a new name.
STILL, THE DECLINE in standards at the BBC seems modest when set beside the precipitous descent into the gutter that has been underway at Channel 4 over the past decade. The station was set up with minorities in mind and, I suppose, only a minority of people will be sufficiently credulous to mistake this week's Virgin School as anything other than poorly disguised pornography. They are welcome to it.
The programme, part of Channel 4's proudly dispensable Virgin Season, followed around a perfectly personable young man named James as he sought to rid himself of unwanted purity. Help was at hand from a strange organisation in - where else? - Holland that dedicates itself to introducing the unnecessarily shy to the delights of carnal release. A trio of stubbornly humourless women, none of whom was in the first blush of youth, allowed James to cup their breasts, examine their most personal areas and practise his chat-up lines on them.
As the programme progressed inevitably towards the passage that would, were this a dirty book, end up being thumbed rotten by teenage boys, an unavoidable question continued to nag away at the viewer.
James's friends and relatives were at great pains to stress how shy and emotionally reserved he was. He lacked confidence. He claimed that he was "haunted by a sense of inadequacy". Well, he has enough self-assurance to appear on national television examining the splayed pudenda of a middle-aged Dutch woman. "It expands and, like, wow," this shrinking violet ventured. The show had earlier tried to sell James, who wears two pairs of underpants, as Frank Pike from Dad's Army. At this point even Private Walker might have envied his increasingly unshakeable sangfroid. This was, after all, a chap who, according to one of the experts, had never even had "sex with himself". The target audience for Virgin School has, I suspect, quite the opposite problem.
Hilary Fannin is on leave