TV REVIEW/ Kathryn Holmquist: Sex On TV Tuesday, Channel 4 Helen West Monday, UTV 39 Leagues of Land: The Story of the Irish In Argentina Monday, RTÉ 1 The Changing Face of Dublin Thursday, RTÉ 1 The Edwardian Country House Tuesday, Channel 4
It wasn'tt sufficient for Pan's People to wiggle their perky posteriors for 30 seconds, the pelvic thrusting had to go on for what seemed like 30 minutes. And once wasn't enough for a barely legal, 17-year-old Koo Stark to half-coyly, half-brazenly remove her white lace undies; she had to do it again and again. Sex On TV repeated the clip of Stark going starkers in the 1960s TV shocker Blue Movie so often I lost count. This once shocking but now quaint image was cut with a lingering scene of a nude Stark lying beneath a writhing nude actor, and looking about as aroused as a tired maggot under a piece of steak. The actor - I might be forgiven for never having heard of him, and whose name I didn't catch - confessed that his main concern at the time was that Stark looked like jail-bait and he looked fat, but seeing it all these years later he realised he shouldn't have worried (about the fat, that is, since he is much heavier now).
Oh yeah, the 1960s were a time of unrestrained sexual hedonism in the BBC's drama department, Sex On TV told us in the first of a three-part series. It was a case of the bratty little sister giggling her way through an older sister's diary as Sex on TV smirked through BBC archives. When the Pandora's Box of sexual "liberation" opened, there was no holding back, and the BBC got away with images of abortion, incest, demonic rape and full frontal male nudity that it would never attempt today. Not that Mary Whitehouse is controlling TV from the grave, it's just that people have developed better taste.
Within a year or two throwing away the famous "green book" of censorship rules, the BBC went from protecting public morals, - which it did by presenting programmes that could be comfortably viewed by three generations together in the living room, - to creating dramas parents couldn't watch until the children and grandparents had gone to bed. Programme-makers became arrogant moral provocateurs as well as entertainers. The ploy was to use serious drama, such as Jean Paul Sartre's "In Camera", as an excuse for badly acted sex. Sex on TV dredged up all the embarrassing images it could find to illustrate the point that the BBC - like an adolescent justifying the nude photography magazines under the bed - was oh so silly to allow sexual titillation to masquerade as serious social commentary. Forty years later, the BBC has matured, but Channel 4 is still stuck in adolescence - offering us sexual titillation disguised as media studies. It was a bit rich to see Channel 4 poking fun at the BBC for doing something Channel 4 does every day of the week.
It would have been reasonable to expect Sex On TV to offer an insight or two into the cultural and social impact of sex on TV. However, apart from a couple of perfunctory comments from the granny of all social critics, Germaine Greer (whose presence in such a programme one would now consider mandatory), and from media studies professors who confessed to adolescent fantasies of Diana Rigg in leather, analysis was left to viewers to figure out. Not that insight didn't jump out from between the clips, and maybe that's not a bad thing.
In The Year of the Sex Olympics, a 1960s drama set in a future where sex has become a spectator sport, a character states that sex is to be viewed by many but enjoyed only by a few. "Sex is not to do, sex is to watch," stated the character. The future has arrived. There is so much sex on TV now that most people probably do watch it far more frequently than they actually do it. People self-consciously watch themselves during sex, comparing themselves to images they've seen in film and TV. For the voyeuristic masses who are too maladjusted or overworked for the real thing, watching sex has, through a thriving pornography industry, become an acceptable replacement.
Let's not go all philosophical, though. Sex on TV is really funny. That's the point. Don't be a spoilsport and look any more deeply.
My desire to close the lid on Pandora's Box was almost overwhelming during the advertising breaks that peppered Sex on TV. Take the ad for Magnum bars. Everyone's familiar with the Magnum aesthetic in which a sexually attractive female character gives fellatio to an ice cream. This year's ads take it one step further, showing us the female character's sexual fantasy on the screen. As her mouth surrounds the phallic ice pop, we see her fantasy of a naked man in bed having the sheet pulled away from his groin (in close up) so that the woman can . . . you get the idea. In the very next ad, Graham Norton was plugging his new nightly chat show (more of the same campness) and wondering if Petula Clark would go further than "downtown". TV is sex, ice cream is sex, it's everywhere you look. Maybe Mary Whitehouse had a point.
More sex in Helen West, where we saw a creepy chemist raping a young mother after drugging her. The image was straight out of bondage imagery, with the young mother lying unconscious in a black slip with a kinky metal anaesthesia mask over her face. The woman's child interrupted the rape - seeing too much, a neat metaphor for childhood today. But I won't say more for fear of appearing possessed by Mrs Whitehouse.
Helen West is a vehicle for Amanda Burton, who plays a crown prosecutor; viewers love to see her in strong but vulnerable roles where she's solving crimes and putting the world to rights with an air of angelic calm balanced by searing intellectual analysis. Based on Frances Fylfield's crime novels, this adaptation was more than dire due to the lame script, although Burton and her co-star, Irishman Conor Mullen as a detective inspector and Helen's lover, did their best. Here's a thought: when writing a suspenseful crime drama, keep the viewers guessing until near the end, why don't you? Don't tell us who did it in the first 15 minutes, especially if you're going to flag forthcoming developments so strongly that you kill off any vestiges of curiosity from the beginning.
Suspense is essential to drama, as it is to documentary-making, which is a visual form of story-telling. So how did Thirty-nine Leagues of Land: The Story of the Irish in Argentina manage to get through to the point of broadcast? Perhaps RTÉ is trying to make a point about the need for increased resources, and thus a higher licence fee.
Programme-maker Jim Fahy is most respected, but this documentary was sub-Nationwide rubbish - despite having two researchers on the team. It started with a great idea - to tell the story of the Irish female orphans who were shipped off to Argentina by an Irish priest, who married them off within 24 hours of their arrival to gaucho farmers.
These hasty unions developed to become some of the wealthiest land-owning families in Argentina, with estates bigger than some Irish counties - and most still retain their Irish accents. What was life like for these young girls? And the men they married? The family histories over four generations must have had all the plot-twists of Dallas, but we weren't offered a notion. Maybe a novelist will take it up.
Higher production standards thrived in the first of a new three-part series, The Changing Face of Dublin, intelligently directed by Steven Rook and produced and presented by Duncan Stewart, who has progressed from thoughtful DIY specialist to credible social analyst in one fell swoop. Stewart's statement that the 1960s and 1970s were a "golden age of gombeenism and corruption - greedy developers, speculators and bent politicians - the worst plague ever visited on the city" , could have come straight from the mouth of Frank McDonald, this newspaper's environment editor. Part one convincingly argued that we were wrong to turn our backs on the urban in favour of the suburban and featured contributions from architects and historians (as well as McDonald himself), but would have benefited from the voices of real people talking about how they feel about where they live, although that may be to come in future programmes.
I've been following the Edwardian Country House with morbid fascination, although nobody I know has caught the bug. Maybe it's because the formula - Big Brother set in the Edwardian era - is overworked. We've had our fill of these situation reality dramas where ordinary masochists volunteer to live in extraordinary situations, (desert islands, Channel 4 studios, Viking huts and so on).
I can offer no excuse for finding myself intrigued by the gradual disintegration of the fragile, disciplinarian butler, Mr Edgar (in real life Hugh Edgar, an architect who built a mausoleum mosque for the wife of King Hussein of Jordan). He is living so intensely in his role as head of the downstairs "family" that he's been seen driven to tears by the misbehaviour of his footmen - who are writing suicidal letters home to their mothers during the six hours they have free to sleep. I watch aghast as the mistress of the house, Lady Oliff (in real life, Anna Oliff Cooper, a part-time casualty doctor), changes her costumes six times a day and compares herself to Lady Diana while visiting the local cottage hospital, yet simultaneously lives in happy ignorance of the sufferings of her overworked staff who are either on the verge of breakdown or pining in bed, begging for fresh orange juice and a video. How Lady Oliff is going to make the transition from corsets and needlepoint back to real life I have no idea. Really clever that - making the architect the chief servant and the doctor the benign aristocratic despot.
Or maybe, like one of the footman said, I just think "it's hilarious that they've got these trussed up idiots following them around with trays full of crap which some mad French chef has cooked for them."