WHAT do John Paul II, Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton think of their unwitting participation in Fine Gael's campaign? All four, along with Mary Robinson, Tony Blair and John Hume, figured prominently in Fine Gael's final party political broadcast, strategically positioned just a few minutes before John Bruton's opening address from the podium in Wednesday night's big showdown. Shots of John looking presidential, interspersed with Bord Failte-type footage and sub-Riverdance music, rammed home the message that incumbency was cool (not a message that Irish voters usually appreciate). The Fine Gael approach was the culmination of a trend, remarked on already in these pages, towards purely image-based campaigning. In fact, the spoken word was completely absent from Fine Gael's broadcast, with the exception of Bill Clinton urging the Dublin crowd to "stand by the Taoiseach".
Technically and aesthetically, the standard of most of the PPBs has been pretty gruesome, even allowing for their relatively limited budgets. Compared to most medium-sized television commercials, the Fine Gael broadcast was still shoddy-looking (a helicopter shot rising over the Skelligs was a blatant copy, though technically inferior, of a similar image in the current Bord Failte campaign) but it wiped the floor with the offerings from Fianna Fail and Democratic Left in the last week.
Within minutes of the end of the broadcast, John Bruton was oozing Clintonesque sincerity as he both praised Irish family values and admitted that his views on the role of women had changed over the last 25 years. John Bruton as New Man? Whatever black arts were performed on the Taoiseach in preparation for Wednesday night's debate in Prime Time Special, it was the most comprehensive re-making yet seen of an Irish politician's media image. It always seemed that Garret FitzGerald was the undisputed Nutty Professor of Irish politics, but suddenly it became clear that in fact it was Bruton, transformed at last from gormless Dr Julius Kelp into smooth, suave Buddy Love.
It was famously observed at the time of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 that Nixon won on radio but Kennedy triumphed on television. John Bruton probably didn't do particularly well on radio, but on screen he emerged triumphant. Whatever happens in the count, Fine Gael's handling of the final day of the television campaign has to be acknowledged as brilliant. After all, who ever thought it would be possible to compare John Bruton to John F. Kennedy?
At one point, when talking about the murder of his friend and colleague Senator Billy Fox by the IRA, it looked as though Mr Bruton might break down in tears. His emotions were clearly honestly felt, but TV tears have been proved to be potent electoral weapons in other countries in recent years. Peter Mandelson's appearance in The Chair, in which well-known people are quizzed by psychologist Oliver James, had received considerable advance publicity, due to the fact that Mandelson, reviled as the Prince of Darkness by enemies of New Labour, cried when asked about the death of his father. Mandelson is a thin-lipped, sour-looking man, who has the sort of upper lip that seems to demand facial hair (he's alleged to have banned beards and moustaches from the New Labour benches).
The much-heralded crying episode didn't really amount to much - a couple of dabs of the hankie, and Mandelson was on to the next question, but it's a relatively recent media peculiarity that crying on television is seen as evidence of true humanity. Many of the worst monsters, dictators and murderers in history were capable of bursting into tears at the drop of a hat, after all, but shedding tears is now seen as a badge of trustworthiness (unless, of course, you re a woman).
As an inquisitor, James isn't a patch on Anthony Clare or Jeremy Isaacs, who've both done this kind of thing with more wit and sympathy, but it was interesting to hear a dynastic politician (Mandelson's grandfather was the Labour politician Herbert Morrison) talking about his family background. Surely it's time for a series on Irish political dynasties, perhaps along the lines of the excellent Rock Family Trees?
FROM politicians to pigs is, some may feel, but a short hop. Prof Stanley Curtis, an animal scientist at Pennsylvania State University, might agree as he set out to prove that the porcine brain is closer to our own than we think in QED: Move Over Babe! His method was to see how good the pigs were at video games - hardly a convincing way to demonstrate intelligence, but apparently it's the method of choice these days in the US, where thousands of dogs and chimpanzees spend their lives in front of computer screens. Within a short space of time, the pigs were beating their competitors trotters down, fuelled by an unending supply of M&M's as rewards (the life of an experimental pig seems little different from the life of an American teenager).
Meanwhile, back in England, Katy Cropper, the only woman ever to win the "One Man and His Dog" competition was busy training a young piglet to herd her sheep. Somehow, "One Woman and Her Pig" just doesn't have the same ring about it, but the pig performed valiantly before retiring in a state of terminal exhaustion (those short legs were a bit of a problem).
Despite the obvious affection in which the pigs were held by their owners, there's a certain cruel inevitability about the names they're given. Prof Curtis's top porker was named Hamlet, while the trainee sheep-pig was called Streaky - they may be bright, but they'll still end up on our breakfast plates.
Man's best friend wasn't doing well in the competition: "Lex has kinda plateaued," said one dog owner morosely, with the air of a Foxrock parent who has finally realised that no amount of grinds will get their little darling into pre-med. Lex whined and scrabbled at the cursor, to no avail, finally just giving up and howling at the ceiling. Human computer users will know exactly how he feels.
THE Death Of Childhood, the series about the history of child abuse cases in the UK over the last ten years, this week looked at the allegations of ritual abuse and the media furore which followed in high-profile cases in Rochdale and Orkney. Allegations that babies were being sacrificed in blood- drinking ceremonies led social workers in Rochdale to take children from several families into care, but the families fought back, enlisting the media as part of their campaign to prove their innocence. Social workers were accused of asking leading questions, and failing to follow guidelines, and the children were finally returned to their families, though not without consequences.
"They gave me back angry kids," said one mother. Several years on, the wounds still ran very deep - in the Orkneys case, parents had invaded the social services offices and nearly come to blows with those working there. In their battles with a faceless bureaucracy, the families found a useful ally in the press, but the ensuing media saturation was in some ways responsible for aggravating the situation even further. "Where the term `satanic abuse' came from, no one could say," observed one protagonist, implicitly blaming the media.
This was a measured, well-balanced programme about a complicated, troublesome issue. It was clear that the social workers involved, most of whom refused to be interviewed directly on camera, felt that they had been victimised for doing their jobs. Equally, it was obvious that they had breached many of the guidelines for dealing with abuse, and that the allegations were, at the very least, highly suspect. The difficulty of balancing two conflicting imperatives - the safety of children and the rights of families - led to a complete breakdown in the relationship between the state and its citizens. One of the most worrying consequences of these cases, it was suggested, was that social workers were now reluctant to investigate allegations of ritual abuse. "Abusers now know that the more odd and crazy things you do, the more the children will not be believed," said one observer.
Social services, or the lack of them, also featured prominently in Thursday night's Prime Time Special, which observed the traditional election eve moratorium by allowing Paddy O'Gorman to transfer the format of his Queueing For A Living radio programme to television. The programme was shot outside the Eastern Health Board office in central Dublin which acts as the main port of call for Dublin's homeless. O'Gorman's method - a sort of relentlessly sympathetic probing seems to work in gaining the confidence of his interviewees, but there's always a danger of prurience, and he sailed uncomfortably close to the wind at one stage, when repeatedly pushing one woman to acknowledge the role that alcoholism had played in her situation. She refused, but there was a sense that an unnecessary intrusion into her dignity bad taken place.
In transferring from radio to television, the programme obviously lost the advantage of anonymity for its subjects, but the people O'Gorman interviewed didn't seem much concerned about that - they didn't exactly have a lot to lose. As a chronicle of lives lived in the worst kind of adversity - heroin addiction, alcoholism, violence and prison all figured - the programme put human faces and emotions on a part of society usually referred to as an abstract problem. On television, as opposed to radio, it had two huge advantages - the impact of seeing people's faces and the shocking reality of the grim, rubbish-strewn wastelands where they slept at night. As a one-off, the Queueing For A Living format made for compelling television, but it's hard to see it in a recurring slot. It was another of those programmes, though, that made you realise yet again how many Irish voices are excluded from the national airwaves.
BUT the television highlight of the week, the one which people around the world will still be watching when Celtic Tigers, zero tolerance and Girl Power have all faded into the mists of time, was a couple of seconds of Brazilian brilliance on Tuesday night. Roberto Carlos's astonishing goal for Brazil in the friendly soccer tournament being played this week allowed French television (in rehearsal for its hosting of next year's World Cup) to show off a multitude of camera angles and action replays. It was a quintessentially 1990s television moment, parsed and analysed and diagrammed by the commentators until it assumed an almost sacred quality, canonised by all concerned as "the greatest free kick of all time". Like most such moments these days, it came to us courtesy of Rupert Murdoch. Now, how come he didn't show up in Fine Gael's broadcast?
