Europe: How Are You?
RTÉ1, Thursday
The West Wing
RTÉ1, Thursday
This World: After the Famine
BBC2, Sunday
Nip/Tuck
Sky One, Tuesday
Ireland's presidency of the EU may have just begun. But, judging by its TV treatment so far, it couldn't end soon enough for RTÉ. Coverage began inauspiciously a fortnight ago when Charlie Bird followed the Taoiseach - or President of the European Union, as RTÉ seems fond of calling him - around for a day on his Euro-business. Before you could say "subsidiarity", Bird was talking about letter-bombs and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland! Is Europe that much of a turn-off? Well, yes, actually. If the EU was a football team it would be dubbed "boring, boring Europe".
Efforts by our public service broadcaster to inject some life into the presidency intensified this week with the start of a new two-legged series, Europe: How Are You?, presented by Liz Bonnin. Part "Ladybird guide to enlargement", part vox-pop, one suspects it would have more appeal to a post-primary civics class than an adult audience at 10.15 p.m. on a Thursday.
Episode one, for example, told us the accession states were on the up. Proof? Well, we used to beat them at soccer in the early 1990s, whereas now it's the reverse. Sure, hasn't Latvia only gone and qualified for the European Championship?
The series, made in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs Communicating Europe Initiative, may be worthy in some respects but it could do with more dissenting voices. We hear pro-European contributors criticising objections to Euro-policy rather than hearing from the objectors themselves.
A pattern also seems to be forming whereby Ordinary Joes reveal how little they know about the EU in order to be soothed by the comforting tones of Eurocrats like Dick Roche.
"If citizens are confused about Europe it's not the fault of the citizens," says the Minister of State for Europe patronisingly. "It's the fault of Europe."
That's it, Dick, blame the Europeans.
If RTÉ really wants people to get interested in the EU it could do worse than commission its own Euro-version of The West Wing, set in the moody environs of Dublin Castle. In its absence, we have to make do with the all-American original, which has returned for its fifth series but the first without creative genius Aaron Sorkin.
As ER producer John Wells takes up the reins, aficionados can't help wondering whether this is the beginning of the end of the best show in town.
Writing the first two episodes of the season, admitted Wells, was "like being Ethel Merman's understudy on Gypsy, and at the intermission she comes down with flu . . . the stage manager announces to the crowd: 'In the second act, Miss Merman's part will be played by John Wells.' And you hear this groan".
It's an honest, if not entirely fair, assessment.
Yes, series five dwells longer on the first family and its internal traumas, rather than on the technicalities of some abstruse piece of legislation. Yes, the dialogue has lost some of its sparkle, so much so that when Josh and Toby speak to one another you don't have to replay it twice on the video to understand. And no, Mr Wells, intrigue can't be replaced by dimming the stage lights even further; the brightness control on my remote is already at breaking point.
But, for all that, The West Wing still rules. Inspired is the only description for John Goodman's casting as the temporary president who, as he takes up the fight against Qumari terrorists, announces his intention "to blow the hell out of something" fast, and tells his cabinet to "screw the Europeans".
Avoiding the pitfalls of melodrama, the series also retains its knack of getting to those parts of the brain other dramas cannot reach. Hours after an episode concludes one might find oneself wondering: "How are things really going in Qumar?" Now that's powerful TV.
Speaking of which, was any single piece of newsreel as influential in the television age as Michael Buerk's report from Ethiopia for the BBC Six O'Clock News on October 23rd, 1984? The images of starving children in a crowded desert camp, and the deadly-still commentary which accompanied them, triggered a unity of emotion rarely seen before or since. Twenty years on, Buerk returned to Ethiopia for the This World series to see the legacy of his work, and of the phenomena it inspired: Band Aid, Live Aid, and the greatest phenomenon of them all, Sir Bob.
Buerk tracked down a tragic survivor of the Korem death-camp whose wife, son, daughter and father all died there. He spoke to a Red Cross nurse who worked during the crisis, deciding, "like a Nazi", in her own harsh assessment, who would live and die as she handed out scarce rations.
He also examined the state of Ethiopia today, with double the population and twice as many people starving as before. Its current government may not be as neglectful as previous ones but it still finds $2 million a day to spend on a futile war while the average family can feed itself for only five months of the year - if it rains.
There was some hope, notably in the extraordinary case of Berhan Waldu, who as a young girl in 1984 was being lowered into a grave when her father felt warmth still in her body. She regained her health only to face a second famine three years later, spending almost three months crossing the mountains on her father's back in search of food.
Today she lives among a people who, in Buerk's words, are kept "just alive" by an outside world that is "ashamed to let them die".
Ironically, Buerk's return to Ethiopia shed more light on how life outside the country, rather than inside, had changed. The world has become more cynical and coldly aloof than in the days when pop stars would sing "Feed the World".
One could never imagine Live Aid happening today, not with the lawyers and agents and egos getting in the way. As for political reform, the EEC, which then blithely presided over food mountains and wine lakes, has become an EU embroiled in navel-gazing debate about reforming such self-promoting structures as the Common Agricultural Policy, described by Geldof as "one of the crowning idiocies" of the common market for its impact on food security in developing countries.
Expressing the outrage we all felt before we "grew up", Geldof continues to talk more sense than a roomful of Euro-bigwigs.
"We called it Band Aid for a proper reason," he told Buerk. "You cannot put a band aid on a gaping wound. From the get-go it had to be political. The structures of the world and how we govern ourselves must be altered."
That Geldof tends to be seen today as a distracting relic, rather than the prophetic "saint" he was once dubbed, says much about our perverse moral standards.
Sky's well-publicised new drama, Nip/Cut, began this week, and to give credit where credit is due, it set its stall out early. Before the opening credits rolled the viewer was treated to (squeamish readers turn away now) a patient being carved open for "buttocks implants", the start of a predictable storyline about a Colombian drug-trafficker who needed a face transplant, and some corny banter between the two main protagonists, partners in a Miami plastic surgery.
"You saved my ass again," one told the other after a botch-job at the operating table was averted.
Comparisons with the other "lads share gruesome practice" series, Six Feet Under, end, well, just about there. Unlike the excellent funeral home-based drama, Nip/Tuck uses gore as a plot substitute rather than as a humorous aside.
Episode one, for example, boasted "death by liposuction". Lacking also are subtlety and the element of surprise. In case we hadn't already realised that playboy surgeon Christian was a slimeball, after he'd harboured a paedophile client and given his partner's wife a free boob "consultation", we find him speeding off at the end of one scene in his luxury yacht, "The Boatox".
One could argue that the operating scenes (closer to Ready Steady Cook than Casualty) are, in some crude form, "groundbreaking". So, too, the consistentlyun-PC dialogue, which, in the first 10 minutes, slandered "paraplegic kids" and the Irish - apparently, we have "flat boxer noses" that require cartilage-boosting. Neither element, however, could be regarded as nearly as unsettling as the placing of ads for cosmetics, anti-ageing cream and a dieting magazine during the first episode's commercial breaks.
Yet another "hard-hitting" new drama failing to meet the hype. Plus ça change, as President Ahern might say.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
Shane Hegarty is on leave