TV Review Shane HegartyYou might have noticed that the Olympic Games are on. Network 2 has given itself entirely to it. It begins with Olympic Daybreak, before handing over to Olympic Midday, which segues into Afternoon Olympics.
Olympics Live launches the evening coverage, followed by Today at the Games and then Olympics Event of the Day. Every so often, the news pops up to remind you that there are other things happening in the world; except that Olympic stories led the headlines for most of the week. Then they hand back to the studio, where coverage continues with Olympics Overdose and Intravenous Olympics.
The excitement, it seems, is taking its toll. George Hamilton appeared on Tuesday night, live from Athens, jumping with adrenaline. "Terrible day for the Irish! Jamie Costin’s car accident! Gillian O’Sullivan’s hip! Nick Sweeney’s knee!" George, you realised, hadn’t blinked yet. "Great games! Empty seats! I can see the box office from here! It’s closed!" His eyes are going to pop out of his head. "Greek sprinters! Bike crash? Yeah, right!" Surely it’s medically impossible to keep your eyes open for so long.
At least reporting on the Irish has become increasingly straightforward. All they had to do was fill in the competitor’s name after the phrase "Great disappointment for . . . ". To presume that the athlete had missed out on a semifinal or final by just one place. To drop their voice lower than our hearts have already sunk.
RTÉ has deployed several divisions of reporters, presenters and analysts for what is generally accomplished coverage. It sometimes has an end-of-term mood to it, except for Tom McGurk who often presents the late evening highlights in the manner of a head teacher dismissing an unruly pupil. The casual feel sometimes proves a little too infectious. On Tuesday, Aengus MacGrianna presented the news with his shirt flapping free from his trousers, the creases on the tails giving away how they might originally have been tucked in only for him to have been overcome by the Olympic spirit.
At least it manages to resist the relentless chumminess of the BBC. Its presenters lean back on the couch, smirking at their scripted banter. Des Lynam brought this to sports presenting; inspiring a notion that the only things required are a pair of chinos, an open-necked shirt and a knowing wink. The BBC displays an unbecoming smugness, under the cover of which superficiality has overpowered insight.
It has been embarrassed enough by how Grandstand is these days forced to rely on the minority sports rejected by Sky. It shouldn’t be so self-satisfied just because those sports briefly hold some currency.
As ever, the first week was a chance for television to show sports that would otherwise make it to television only if a little light music was unavailable. Sports such as men’s synchronised diving, this year won by the Greeks after one of the Russians clipped the board and hit the water like a Mafia victim. Or archery, which the BBC’s Sue Barker compared to hitting a beer mat from seven bus lengths away; which would, of course, be far better television.
On Monday night, some demented soul in RTÉ had to put together highlights of the dressage. It is a task for which they deserved a medal. If you haven't seen it, it is a sport that largely consists of horses walking sideways very slowly. Dressage reminds us that there are not nearly enough sporting events in which athletes compete while wearing top hats.
The RTÉ commentary made an effort to clear up the rules, but it was hard to pay attention to commentary that sounded something like the instructions on a flatpack wardrobe. "Step back five." OK, got that. "Now at the start of the serpentine. Third loop, then last loop." Hold on a minute.
"Then counter canter. Change at A." Put the what in the where? "Start diagonal, H to B. And halt at X." It could take another four years to figure it out.
There has been some respite from sport, although it occurred to you this week that there are now shorter gaps between the staging of the Olympic Games than there are between appearances on television by Alan Whicker. With Whicker’s War, his voice came easing back as if he had just popped out for a moment. The skin hangs tiredly from his jowls, the posture is a mite stooped. At one point, he turned his head and it revealed a plaster behind his ear; experience perhaps allowing his vanity to relax.
This is a series about his war-time adventures as part of the Army Film Unit; shooting the shooting, so to speak, through two years of battle in Italy. It reminds you of how easy a television presence he is. Alongside the footage are the personal anecdotes, the individual tales that are the grouting of history.
He photographed Montgomery as the general pointed at nothing in particular, but did so with great authority. He recalled the time they captured 7,000 gallons of wine, the mess parties in the villa, the Italians surrendering with such bonhomie. His observations can’t help bringing it back to Whicker’s World, either directly or through his phraseology. The boats waiting off shore for the invasion of Sicily, he said, "could have been just another cut-price package cruise". But it is also an articulation of terror. "It’s rather like knowing you’ll be executed in the morning. It concentrates the mind wonderfully."
It weighs heavy with obligation. He remembers each of his friends killed in action, telling their stories, recalling the little nudges to fate that meant it was them and not him who died. He is the last surviving member of his unit, his last comrade having passed away only recently. He visited the Sicilian villa where they rested and partied for several memorable weeks while they waited for the next push. He stood on his own on the veranda.
"That’s the saddest thing of all," he said. "There’s no-one to tell it to." The photographs taken by a couple of Parisian women who wandered the west of Ireland in 1913 were the subject of Don’t Fade Away. The colour pictures taken by Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon were among the earliest taken in this country and the results are a priceless snapshot of a culture then crumbling under progress.
Mespoulet and Mignon would ask their subjects to pause, to freeze their culture for 10 seconds so that it could be captured. The wind, however, followed them everywhere, blurring the trees.
In the pictures, grass sprouts green from the thatched roofs; the women wear heavy, layered costumes, their bare feet and hands black with dirt. The Irish, they discovered, loved Ireland; even if Ireland proved a neglect neglectful lover. And they all asked the same questions of the photographers. "Do you love Ireland? Isn’t she beautiful?" They toured Connemara ("stones and more stones") in the middle of a typhoid outbreak, discovering "extreme poverty and the dirt of the inhabitants" but also finding themselves seduced by the wildness of the land and lyricism of the people. "They all talk like poets," they recorded, a little carried away by the noble savages.
Made For Each Other? is yet more lifestyle makeover television. It features couples whose relationships have reached such a crisis point that the only thing for it is to open it up to the entertainment of millions of strangers.
Relationship expert Malcolm Stern and divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd- Platt commentate on the action. Let’s go live now to the sittingroom.
This week’s couple, Sharon and Jonathan, were heading for disaster. They competed for the love of their child, with the father dangling sweets at his infant son in the hope of hooking his affections.
Sharon, meanwhile, spent most of her day sprawled across the couch; her eyes fixed on the television, rejecting his affectionate advances. Lloyd-Platt described Sharon as being in an "amoebic state" and "like a zombie".
"There’s a TV addiction here," was the conclusion. For some reason, this was a problem. Sharon, so, was ordered to watch only an hour and a half a day. With the television off, she filled her days as only she could: slouching on the sofa reading the television listings magazine. But slowly, under the tutelage of the experts, the couple rediscovered each other. They had fantasy nights.
Hers was a Christmas dinner, complete with plum pudding and presents. His was to wear a G-string. She shrieked at the sight.
But it worked, and the closing shots had them cuddling on the couch, once again reunited under the warming flicker of the television. Meanwhile, the programme had been a bit of cheap marriage counselling for those viewers who need it and cheap voyeurism for those who think they don’t.