Seven Ages RTE1, Monday
From a whisper to a scream RTE1, Tuesday
Kevin Roche A Documentary RTE1, Tuesday
Blowing the Whistle RTE1, Saturday
Cead Isteach TG4, Sunday
Oh no, not the bloody 1950s again . . . Seven Ages returned to our screens (after that annoying, Crimeline-induced hiatus which blights every fourth Monday night on RTE1) with a portrait of the decade we've all been taught to hate. We know the drill by this stage - unemployment, emigration, depression, repression, John Charles McQuaid - followed by the accession of Lemass and the beginnings of The Great Turnaround. Perhaps it is the familiarity of this material which breeds contempt, but this was a less than illuminating portrait of an era which has assumed talismanic status as The Bad Old Days, the yardstick by which our shiny happy present is measured. All the more reason, then, to attempt to question received wisdoms, which Sean O Mordha's programme signally failed to do.
Appropriately enough, the programme started with a contribution from the man who has done more than anyone else to shape our image of that period. John McGahern recalled "a time when nothing happened", with typical understated lyricism. It's not McGahern's fault that our images of the 1950s are now so heavily imprinted by the television and film adaptations of his work, but Seven Ages disappointed with its over-reliance on familiar visual tropes.
It's surely time for a healthy dose of revisionism on this particular subject - something we are beginning to see in print from writers such as Brian Fallon, after all. But simplification was the order of the day. Artist Tony O'Malley summed up the three pillars of the Irish state at the time as "The GAA, the Church and the Fianna Fail party". The point about the GAA was rammed home at unnecessary length, and its impact was lessened by the fact that most of the accompanying footage (judging by the haircuts and the cars) seemed to date from the late 1970s. Even allowing for the paucity of archive material available from the period, there was something jarring about this temporal dislocation. There was mention of the GAA's ban on "foreign sports", but no indication of the thousands of people who attended soccer or rugby matches. Class differences, when mentioned, were quickly dismissed - everyone, it appears, was in (or had a ticket for) the same boat. A couple of contributors, including Garret FitzGerald, were at pains to point out that, by 1957, "even people with jobs left for England or Canada", but nobody suggested that it might have been this depletion of the country's middle class which finally prompted the top-down revolution instituted by the Department of Finance and Fianna Fail. And has the new orthodoxy become so powerful that it was impossible to find even one Catholic conservative to defend the role of the church?
In retrospect, the 1980s in Ireland seem very like the 1950s, but with the added indignity of mullet haircuts. Niall Stokes, the John Charles McQuaid of the Irish rock establishment (and once a prime mullet man himself), laid down the gospel according to Hot Press about that equally benighted decade in this week's from a whisper to a scream (don't you just hate those ridiculous lower-case titles?), which continues to avoid asking any truly awkward questions about the patchy history of Irish pop. This week, there was nary a suggestion that Enya's elevator muzak was anything but a good thing, or that Moving Hearts might actually have been deeply boring. These are all questions of individual taste, of course, but the fact that the only critical perspective came from Stokes meant that the programme was hopelessly compromised, subject from the outset to that most tedious of projects, "making Ireland safe for rock'n'roll". Yeah, yeah man, don't bogart that joint and all that.
To look at Irish pop of the 1980s without making reference to the conveyor belt of awful bands that came out of Dublin during those years is to take a Stalinist airbrush to history. The really interesting question about Irish pop is why the capital has produced so much pap, while the North and South have had nearly all the best tunes - with a few exceptions, of course, like the late, great Phil Lynott, who was given his due in tributes from the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof.
Because of the involvement of Bob and Bono, much time was devoted to Live Aid, a phenomenon which in retrospect seems more significant as a stepping-stone towards instantaneous, globalised mass popular culture than as any kind of meaningful moment in the relationship between the first and third worlds. Geldof himself is far too smart not to realise this, and 15 years later still makes a good case for the immediate benefits of the Live Aid phenomenon, while Paul McGuinness recalled how the rest of U2 thought Bono had lost it when he waded into the crowd during the band's set. As it happens, Ireland's Mullet King had got it exactly right - he understood better than anyone else that this was a TV show first and a stadium gig second, and the resulting images helped propel U2 towards the cover of Time and megastardom. But there was no mention of Live Aid's bastard little brother, the ghastly Self Aid, surely the nadir of Irish pop history. More Stalinist airbrushing.
Seven Ages and from a whisper to a scream, along with Erin is Alba, On This Rock (the new series on Irish Christianity) and Nation Building represent the fruits of RTE's millennial programming policy. Taken together, they probably amount to the broadcaster's most substantial engagement ever with the country's political, cultural and social history in terms of sheer screen time - and all in the space of a couple of months. On paper, it looks pretty impressive - classic public service broadcasting, it might be argued - but, with the possible exception of Nation Building, there has been a depressing orthodoxy and conformity with the current consensus in these programmes. Dissent seems as thin on the ground now as it was in the 1950s. If we never hear again that Ireland "is now a modern, self-confident European country", it will still be too soon. Time to move on, sharpen up and find some new voices to challenge the smugness.
Plenty of sharp voices in Blowing the Whistle, a revealing, beautifullymade look behind the scenes at the reality of being a top GAA referee. You'd really have to wonder what masochistic impulse drives Pat McEnaney and Michael Curley to spend their Sundays travelling the length and breadth of the country in order to be vilified and sometimes assaulted, and then to have every mistake dissected and abused in the national media in the following week. But Adrian McCarthy's fine documentary teased out the motivation of both men and, crucially, set them in the context of their communities and families. It also did a superb job of conveying the excitement, verging on hysteria, of the All Ireland championship.
There's often a sense with Irish TV documentaries of over-stretched resources, leading to inadequate coverage and over-reliance on talking heads to fill in the gaps. Not here - McCarthy's crew seemed to have access all areas, and picked up some brilliantly telling moments - a sequence in which match officials waited quietly in their dressing room at half-time during the Munster final, while a blood-curdling team talk filtered in from the next room, telling you more about the pressure on referees than any interview could. With the increasing problems faced by its referees, it was clearly in the GAA's interest to allow the cameras behind the scenes, but this was no cut and paste fly-on-the-wall job. You could smell the blood, sweat and tears in this highly-crafted and often very funny portrait of men under pressure. Great stuff.
Another highly polished piece of work, Kevin Roche A Documentary was a biographical - and rather hagiographical - portrait of the Dublin-born, internationally-renowned architect whose controversial plans for the Spencer Dock site are currently the subject of much controversy. Roche was one of those who left this country during the dog days of post-second World War Ireland, and who could blame him? As one contributor to Seven Ages noted this week, a visitor returning to Dublin in the late 1950s for the first time in 40 years would have had trouble finding any significant alteration in the fabric of the city, with the exception of Busaras. Mind you, 40 years later again, the same visitor would have been faced with some appalling architectural monstrosities, as Nation Building pointed out on Thursday. One wonders whether, if Roche had stayed in Ireland, he would have been forced into producing the same cost-cutting provincial brutalism as many of his contemporaries. As it happens, he rose to prominence in the US at a time when capitalist self-confidence was at its height, and modernism reigned unchallenged in architecture.
The range of stunning buildings featured in this one-hour programme were expressions of imperial power, like much great architecture. Whether contributing to the high-rise skyline of Manhattan, elegantly expanding the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or building a vast corporate headquarters into the rolling woodland of Connecticut, Roche works on a scale rarely, if ever, seen in Ireland. For this layman, though, the contrast between the light-filled, richly detailed buildings in the US and the squatting monoliths proposed for Spencer Dock could hardly have been greater.
Cead Isteach - Post Haste, Patsy Murphy's programme about the importance of the postal service to rural communities, unearthed some telling tales. One woman recalled how, while pregnant and alone in her remote, phoneless home, she had an arrangement with the post office across the valley to hang a white flag out the window in case of emergencies. Others remembered the post office as the only place where people could congregate and chat during the day. Poet Cathal O Searcaigh argued passionately that the daily arrival of the postman was a rare chance of human contact for thousands of old people living alone in his part of Donegal. The overall impression was of a disappearing culture, of hard lives being ameliorated by cars, mobile phones and technology, but becoming increasingly atomised in the process.
A final thought: why is there a time lag between pictures and sound on Network 2's Champions League coverage, with the picture slightly behind? Is it an insuperable technical fault (which would be odd in this day and age), or is it built in to try to make the commentators sound quicker on the uptake than they actually are? If, as I suspect, it's the latter, then it just doesn't work.
