Summer of Love: Tripping; Sounds of 69 (Channel 4, Saturday)
The Eclipse (All channels, Wednesday)
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Channel 4, Monday) (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Prime Time: The Bridge (RTE 1, Thursday)
Never trust a hippy," ran a much-loved slogan of this writer's youth, but the Children of the Revolution have proved more durable than we could ever have feared. There they were again, shaking their damned kaftans all week on Channel 4's Summer of Love series, while their 1990s equivalents were flocking to Cornwall for a crusty holiday under the eclipse. Will we never be rid of these pestilential potheads?
The rationale for Summer of Love is as blurred and bleary as a late-night expedition for munchies, but it seems to involve some kind of attempt to link the summer of 1969 with our own pre-millennial moment. Funny, though - I always thought the Summer of Love was in 1967.
It's not as if we haven't heard all this stuff already. One of the centrepieces of Summer of Love, Tripping, told how, in 1964, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters painted a school bus in a riotously colourful style which would soon be called psychedelic, and set out on a mission to turn America on to the joys of acid . . . Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man, but I've got this, like, weird deja vu vibe . . .
One of the more cogent arguments against mind-altering substances is that they make you stupid and cause you to repeat yourself a lot. In television terms, this is borne out by the now-decrepit Pranksters, who crop up every year or two on TV like a bad flashback to tell us yet again about what it was like in the acid wars, grandkids, and how we still haven't got the message (or The Message).
The producers of Tripping tried to fool us into thinking that this was something new by sticking Beck on the soundtrack and introducing modern pop pundits such as Jarvis Cocker and Fatboy Slim to tell us about what Kesey's crusade meant to them. Most had found out about it through reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in their late teens, presumably at that time in a young man's life when staring at wallpaper patterns for eight hours is considered the most exciting way to spend a Saturday night. Wolfe himself, who one guesses would have some caustic things to say about the whole hippy movement, didn't make an appearance, although we did get Hunter S. Thompson, who detailed the background to the early death of the Bus's driver, Neal Cassady (the model for Kerouac's On the Road). Cassady's drug of choice was crystal methamphetamine, the surest way to an early grave, intoned Thompson, although he did allow with a smirk that he still occasionally indulged in the stuff himself. With a tiny forage cap perched atop his huge, shiny head, and speech patterns so impenetrable that the producers had decided to subtitle him, Thompson came across as the Jackie Healy-Rae of the drug-guzzling classes.
In the ranks of hippy bores there's nothing more crushing than the music variety: one of their favourite myths is how pop music of the era was exclusively excellent, a point emphatically disproved by Sounds of 69, which went through the Number Ones of the year. The list included such imperishable masterpieces as Ob-la-di-ob-la-da by Marmalade, Lily the Pink by Scaffold, Dizzy by Tommy Roe and, best of all, Sugar, Sugar by The Archies, a manufactured boy band (who ever heard of such a thing?). Suddenly, modern pop music looked a little better. The Beatles had proved that it was definitely time to say goodbye by releasing The Ballad of John and Yoko on an unsuspecting world, while the biggest hit of the whole year was that anthem of a wild generation, Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys. "It echoed what John and Yoko were trying to do," Rolf reminisced. Which was what? Making unlistenable rubbish, it seemed from the evidence.
The real gems were the tackiest: Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin gasping and groaning their way through Je t'Aime, and Peter Sarsted wondering Where Do You Go To My Lovely? With a laugh, ha, ha ha ha, Sarsted revealed that he never managed to build a career out of his one-off hit because of his stammer. So how did he ever manage to get his tonsils around lines like: "You drink your Napoleon brandy/And you never get your lips wet". And how did she do that, anyway? Germaine Greer, responding to one of those quotes at the time about how you couldn't tell the girls from the long-haired boys any more, had the best line. "You couldn't for a moment imagine that Mick Jagger was a girl," she said. "He was a man with an erection, wearing your nightie". In the 1960s, Greer got her lips wet every night, and so did everybody else, according to Sounds of 69. Even Tony Blackburn, which doesn't bear thinking about.
RETURNING Austin Powers-style, to the 1990s, The Eclipse was a strange, slightly chilling event - at least, it was if you watched it on television, which reduced it to depressing banality. With a level of cross-channel coverage usually associated with huge natural disasters or major political assassinations (I was flicking between RTE 1, BBC 1, ITV, Channel 4, TnaG, Sky News, CNBC and TV5, while sticking my head out the window to see if anything was actually happening), the mood was set for a sort of doomsday atmosphere which wasn't alleviated by the bad weather forecast for most of Britain and Ireland. In TV terms, it was most interesting as a showcase for the different styles of the various broadcasters.
The BBC format was straightforward voice-of-the-nation stuff: avuncular host in studio talks with experts, while chirpy juniors on the ground mingle with the hoi polloi. You can see exactly how the Beeb would handle Armageddon: "Five minutes to the end of the world, and Julie's down there with some pensioners from Scarborough who've decided to make a day of it. Julie, what's happening?" The BBC had commissioned The Pet Shop Boys to write a piece of music to accompany the event itself. Why a couple of superannuated disco-camp ironists should have been regarded as the appropriate men for the job is a mystery, but they had the grace to look embarrassed by the whole thing. Having heard the tune, we knew why.
Channel 4, in its new-found incarnation as Hippy TV, was all ley-lines, dreadlocks and eyebrow-rings, while Sky News brought the same mix of breathless excitement and repetitive tedium that it offers every time someone goes gun crazy in the US. Bizarrely, RTE's programme stayed inside the studio during the peak moments of our own partial eclipse for a tepid discussion about the science and folklore surrounding the thing, before going back to the outside broadcast links for reports on how it had all gone (disconsolate in Cork and Roscommon, delighted in the Phoenix Park). Maybe they were trying to force us outside to watch, whether we had eye protection or not. Speaking of which, over on TV5, those reckless French were shamelessly watching the skies without the benefit of any protection (and probably smoking untipped Gauloises and having unsafe sex at the same time). Sitting in deckchairs on beaches and in the courtyards of handsome chateaux, they seemed to be having a far better time than the rain-sodden masses in Cornwall.
PICTURE this scenario: a rundown provincial hotel, owned by a conniving, greedy incompetent and his bossy wife, with a staff of two - a hapless Hispanic and a pleasant young woman. Sounds familiar? Well, it's not Fawlty Towers, it's Payne, an American sitcom "inspired by" the British sitcom, and a cautionary example for those who think that American comedy is inevitably superior to the British variety.
Payne is just dreadful. In this week's episode, our hero, left to his own devices for a few hours, tried to fool an unsuspecting blind woman into believing she was staying at a far more salubrious hotel up the road. It was a plotline not far removed from a Basil Fawltytype premise, but not only does the show have the deeply unfunny John Larroquette instead of John Cleese, but a team of skilled script surgeons has skilfully filleted out all the elements which made the original programme work - nasty, un-American things like cruelty, violence and self-loathing (so much for Larry Sanders). We're left with a script that makes the late, unlamented Upwardly Mobile look sharp.
For some reason, the Americans keep doing this, buying the rights to British shows and then turning out unrecognisably sanitised versions. Their version of Cracker, Fitz, takes the basic elements of the original show and turns them into mush by softening the characters and plots. They chickened out of re-making Absolutely Fabulous (too many drugs and cigarettes) but turned out a suspiciously similar, sanitised version in the form of the pathetic Cybill. After more than 200 years of independence you'd think they'd have a little more self-respect.
BUT who needs comedy when you've got Tammy Faye Bakker? The woman who, together with her former husband Jim Bakker, created the world's first religious satellite TV station is a programme-maker's dream: part Tammy Wynette, part Slobodan Milosevic, with a minor Messiah complex to boot. "When she was born, she had perfectly manicured fingernails," said a family friend in awestruck tones, which implied this was the next best thing to being born without original sin. "After the Holocaust, there will be roaches, Cher and Tammy Faye," said a slightly more jaundiced former colleague. Ever since, Tammy Faye has been adding to that perfectionist carapace, with a makeup habit that seems to involve trowels and buckets.
The programme-makers had plenty of fun at the expense of poor old Tammy Faye, now disgraced and deposed from her former position of power, and there was plenty to be goggle-eyed at, not least the theme park - the third biggest in the world - which the Bakkers had built for the faithful in North Carolina. When Jim was caught, Bill Clinton-style, in flagrante delicto with a young woman, the Bakker empire started to crumble, and this was where the real villain of the piece stepped in. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority and head honcho in the world of TV bible-thumping, had a grudge, the programme suggested, against the Bakkers' hugely profitable PTL (Praise The Lord) network, and used the scandal to step in, ostensibly to rescue, but actually to bury the Bakkers.
But Tammy Faye has soldiered on. After Jim was sent to jail, she divorced and remarried, but her second husband also ended up behind bars (if this sounds like a country and western song on steroids, you're beginning the grasp the appeal of the Tammy Faye story). Deserted by the righteous and the saved after she co-hosted a chat show with a gay presenter, she's still standing (precariously, in six-inch, diamante slingbacks).
Independent productions increasingly form the backbone of the RTE schedule in the key areas of documentary and factual programming, but current affairs has remained almost exclusively inhouse up to now. That may be starting to change, which can only be a good thing. No disrespect to Prime Time, which has turned out some fine work in the last year (especially from Kosovo), but it was a good idea to commission the independent company, Graph Films, to make The Bridge, about the work of the Trauma and Recovery Team established by the local health trust in Omagh following last year's bomb. Graph made last year's excellent documentary Missing, and this was a similarly sensitive and well-judged programme, quietly allowing the subjects to speak for themselves.
The team provides permanent counselling for over 400 people affected by the bombing, and the programme talked to three of those: Marion Radford, whose 17-year-old son Alan was killed; Una McGurk, who suffered serious facial lacerations and other injuries; and John King, whose memories of what he saw on that day have left him with post traumatic stress disorder.
There seemed to be a deliberate editorial policy of steering clear of the political ramifications of the atrocity, although some mention was made of the way in which tensions over the Belfast Agreement contributed to keeping the memories raw. But nor was there any attempt to platitudinise about solutions, or to gloss over differences of opinion. In an era where every half-baked pressure group seeks the status of victim, and where pop psychology encourages ludicrous self-absorption, here was an example of community work and therapy working at their best.
