Australia: Beyond The Fatal Shore (BBC 2, Sunday)
The Fitz (BBC 2, Friday)
Rock Babylon (Channel 4, Saturday)
Solved And Unsolved (RTE 1, Tuesday)
`There's got to be something weird about you if a good, hard game of rugby league doesn't give you an erection," an Australian sports commentator informed art critic Robert Hughes. Clearly unaware of the Viagrafying effects of a Wigan v Warrington mud-bath or a Halifax v Bradford brawl, Hughes was visibly nonplussed by this diagnosis. He nodded his head slowly, as though humouring a madman. Well, what else could he do? Obviously one of them was seriously weird and, for once, it wasn't the art critic.
The sports jock might have been indulging in a little (or hopefully, a huge) degree of hyperbole. It was impossible to be certain. After 35 years abroad, Hughes had returned to write and present Australia: Beyond The Fatal Shore, a series seeking to assess the current cultural state of Oz. With Olympics hype about to pierce global consciousness with less subtlety than a syringe of steroids pierces a weightlifter's bum, wealthy, booming Australia will displace poor, tragic Russia as the media focus of the month.
Hughes argued that the national character of Australia has, since the first white fleet's arrival in 1788, been formed by conflict between two mutually hostile forces.
Adherents to these forces, he identified as "wowsers" and "larrikins", the former puritanical spoilsports and the latter anti-authoritarian fun-lovers. The sports jock, it would appear, had overdosed on larrikinism and was experiencing its weirder side-effects. But Hughes, too, came down on the side of the larrikins.
He observed Sydney's gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, the largest homosexual parade in the world. He also observed other observers, the wowsers of the religious right, praying for rain to dampen the fun of the gaudy marchers and their supporters. Then he moved on to a recreation of "Old Sydney Town", where people in period costumes reenacted the flogging rituals of a Reverend Marsden. "Repent," roared Marsden as he drew theatrical blood with every lash. "This is the only theme park in the world devoted to punishment and repression," said Hughes.
Perhaps it is. But just as there had been a suspiciously serious element - a showy dedication - to the contrived flamboyance of the gay parade, there was a larrikin dimension to the ostensible wowserism of the Marsden gig. If a fun-loving strain versus a puritanical strain does form the bedrock dialectic of Australian culture, then each has been infected by the other. The high camp of Old Sydney Town and the earnestness of the gay parade showed the conflict to be more intricate than broad brushstrokes could depict. Still, there was a general validity to Hughes's cultural portrait of Oz.
One in three Australians now live within 15 minutes' drive of a beach. The coast, not the bush, is the country's magnet. But the larrikin/wowser conflict, at least according to Hughes, goes surfing too. We saw beachbum dudes and "Christian surfers". The wowsers of the waves, encouraged in their wowserism by prime minister John Howard's attempts to drive Australian culture back to the 1950s, seemed a peculiar mixture of hellfire and hedonism. They prayed communally for big waves - a kind of "give us, this day, our daily thrill" - but they prayed too to be kept safe.
The larrikin element appeared particularly sleazy when Hughes visited the set of a porno movie. This splendid work of art had "a convict theme", which meant that the principals were dressed up as 19th-century convicts before they got their kit off. There was some humour to be found in the stud's loss of virility - clearly, he had been neglecting those rugby league matches - but this movie wasn't just liberal and fun-loving. Porn Down Under, like porn the world over, is principally a rather grubby, commercial enterprise.
Throughout, Hughes had considered "the visual arts", which he bluntly acknowledged were not greatly developed in Australia. This, added to the killjoys v rogues and sports-mad themes, made Australia sound rather like a warm Ireland with attitude instead of history. There is a grim history of genocide, of course - with a strong Irish involvement too - but that, presumably, is for another episode. Robert Hughes showed himself to be an amiable and perceptive guide, even if his wowser/larrikin division seemed wowserishly simplistic. Then again, maybe he was acting the larrikin.
What is certain is that Australia has become, at least for now, what the United States once was for young Irish people. RTE will soon show a series titled The Craic Down Under. Near the end of this opening episode, Hughes met an executive from the MAMBO clothing company. MAMBO gear is stridently larrikin: rude cartoons on Tshirts; rude TV ads; rude language on both. "Nobody here's got an MBA or anything but I think the principle is, if you piss off half the people, the other half will love you," said the executive. Typical - marketing catches the wave and surfs all the way to the bank. In that, Australia is just like the rest of the world.
The latest series to surf the popularity wave for Irish comedy in Britain, The Fitz, ended last night. It has been uneven, hilarious in spots and silly - dull silly, not funny silly - in others. In the final episode, All Souls Night, Owen O'Neill's script did a full-blooded larrikin job on the conventions of the traditional Irish ghost story. As farce, the script worked splendidly, albeit intermittently, and the cast acted with the required manic gusto.
However, such was the unrelieved gusto that, unlike Father Ted, for instance, there was scarcely any room at all for character to breathe. It was clever but suffocating pantomime, gag piled upon gag and all shot forth with the force and lack of discrimination of a blunderbuss. The plot, such as it was, had Ma bake a cake for her dead relatives as a violent lightning storm - complete with Angela's Ashes monsoon rain (a deft touch) - raged outside. Naturally, the Fitzgerald family decided to recount their own family ghost story from generations earlier.
This cued the possibility of cake-baker Ma delivering the line about a cake-eating ghost: "The last time I saw your Auntie Gertie's ghost, I did think she was getting an awful arse on her." It was a good example of O'Neill's ability to maximise the humour in a bawdy colloquialism, and there were flurries of similar stand-up lines. But the breathless, panto-on-acid pace almost pulverised the parody as well as the subjects being parodied. Indeed, the overall turned into a kind of mad Ceili Horror Show which left the Rocky Horror Show looking anaemic and effete.
With Ruth McCabe, Eamon Morrissey, Jon Kenny, Pat Shortt, Bronagh Gallagher, Eamonn Owens and Deirdre O'Kane among the cast, The Fitz was certainly a showcase of Irish comic talent. It did too, poke fun at Irish and British stereotypes and for that we can be grateful. But there was an overarching self-consciousness about it which gave the impression that the comedians involved were doing the gig at least as much for each other as for an audience. Perhaps that's permissible but for all its clever one-liners and surreal situations, it's a series that is likely to be forgotten. Comedy is funny like that.
One series of images which will never be forgotten by anyone who saw them was screened on Rock Babylon, presented by that Graham Norton person. As part of a Channel 4 tribute night to hell-raisers - which failed to distinguish properly between genuine nutters and mere attention-seekers - we were shown the antics of G.G. Allin. In a tradition which includes the likes of Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Keith Moon, Ozzy Osbourne, Steve Tyler, Sid Vicious and Lemmy (of Motorhead infamy), G.G. Allin made them all look like choirboys.
In truth, of course, Allin wasn't merely a wild man of rock'n'roll. The music, such as it was, was just a minor prop for him to indulge his obvious mental illness. It's best to describe his act quickly: he performed naked, slashed himself during his act, seriously assaulted members of his small audience, defecated and smeared himself with faeces and promised that he would kill himself on stage. Idiots may talk in terms of the artist's personal freedom and the message of this alleged performance art but, in truth, Allin was a mentally deranged man. He should have been stopped.
He wasn't, and so the Graham Norton person introduced video footage of his final performance. It took place in New York City in 1993 and after all of the depravity recounted above, Allin ran naked and smeared into a street in what appeared to be lower Manhattan. He hadn't killed himself during a performance but he had provoked a mini-riot. Following a taxi driver's understandable refusal to accept him, Allin found refuge (God knows how) at a nearby hotel. He was found dead the following morning. Sure, G.G. Allin was not the first and won't be the last such casualty. But he was in a different category to even the most debauched rock stars. Unlike some of the monstrously-egoed, boring, alcoholic actors who revelled in the term "hell-raiser", Allin did actually raise a sliver of Hell, and it certainly wasn't funny. Channel 4 has been accused of dumbingdown and sleazing-up in recent years.
The accusation is fair, which is not to say that it hasn't been sometimes correct in lifting stones to cast light on the seedier aspects of life. Nonetheless, the Norton person and his producer ought to have left G.G. Allin rest in peace. Certainly, as part of the "entertainment" (albeit entertainment with an edge) schedules, this snippet of Rock Babylon was reminiscent of accounts of the mediaeval practice of putting "lunatics" on display for the fun of the mob. Perhaps this review should have ignored it. But such strikingly vile television puts all the arguments about the voyeurism of Big Brother in perspective. One of the all-time lows.
Finally, Solved And Unsolved. You can't blame the Garda for taking advantage of a series which offers the force such lavish PR. This week's episode trawled over the Stephen "Rossi" Walsh case in which Collins's public house in Dublin's Ballybough was blown apart in 1992. "Rossi" was found alive in the wreckage and his "Dial-A-Witness" insurance scams were quite extensively covered in the newspapers shortly afterwards.
An amateur lawyer, "Rossi" (after Paolo Rossi, the Italian striker in the 1982 World Cup-winning team) sacked his counsel and defended himself at his trial. "A man who defends himself has a fool for a client," said one detective. It was a perceptive comment, acknowledging that dispensing with legal expertise is a dangerous game. But it had more shadowy ramifications too, not least the implicit suggestion that law is primarily for lawyers rather than for general citizens.
As a recounting of the case from the Garda viewpoint, this was engaging TV. No doubt Rossi deserved to go down. But the series' characteristic portrayals of goodies and baddies - without acknowledging social, political and historical contexts - seems hugely more vacuous and simplistic than Robert Hughes's "wowsers v larrikins" conflict. The inclusion of a regular criminologist might help to make more sense of why some criminals behave as they do.