ON the opening night of Telefis Eireann, after Eamon de Valera and Cardinal D'Alton had sermonised about the threat of television to public morality, Charles Mitchel read his first TV newsbulletin. It was a good first night," he told Eamonn Lawlor on the updated A Performance: Charles Mitchell. This was, aptly, the language of a theatre man to describe the opening gig of a form of news which overlays journalism with showbusiness.
For the following two decades Mitchel was, as Wesley Boyd suggested, the voice of Ireland". He managed to temper gravitas with just enough urbanity to avoid pomposity or condescension - a difficult trick in Ireland, especially for a man who had attended Clongowes and Trinity in the 1930s and early 1940s. Too much gravitas and all proportion is lost, we get news as melodrama. Too much urbanity and we get news as awful, oily PR.
By all accounts, Charles Mitchel revelled in being known. Indeed, like a lot of sports stars, he found it difficult to retire and even pitched up on The Late Late Show in 1984, on the eve of his final gig to argue against the arbitrariness of retirement at 65. But, in truth, his stepping down time had come and an era in RTE news was over.
Though the idea sounds bizarre nowadays, Charles Mitchel had a fan club in the early years. He received, he said, "plenty of offers for outside affairs". No doubt, the current crop of RTE newscasters have their admirers, but the idea of a fan club of nookie seekers is from another age. Of course, RTE seemed wonderfully glamorous a generation ago: time and tiredness, inevitably, have tarnished its glitter and prestige.
Back then, RTE "personalities" had status. The fact that this status - like the status of film stars - had a very tenuous - relation ship with merit didn't seem to matter to most people. Television thrived on the cult of tee personality and throughout Ireland RTE staff, like Aer Lingus pilots and hostesses, enjoyed a sort of semi state sexiness. It was the heyday of the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie and the extension of petty snobbery to those with the sexy new, jobs.
Charles Mitchel, though he had one of the sexiest of all these new jobs, did not seem snobbish. He was on television almost every night and his, initially, was the determining tone of the new channel. He was polished without appearing patronising, a "gentleman" who, unlike most "gentlemen", did not seem smug in his own suavity or pseudo benignly avuncular because of unearned privilege. He was, in brief, just right for the gig at the time.
When RTE hired him in 1961, he was paid £26 a week and, in keeping with Montrose traditions, warned against giving interviews. Thirty five years a go, 26 quid a week was, not a mean wage, but it was no fortune either. Since then, the cult of the personality, has seen RTE pay absurd, amounts of money to some personalities - quite a few of whom will be forgotten long before Charles Mitchel.
Mitchel's death this week severed a link with New Year's Eve, 1961, when Telefis Eireann was launched. Technically, TV news is far sharper now than it was back then. But the trend towards forced informality - in fairness, not excessively abused by RTE is not progress. TV news editors and producers would do well to remember that designer sexual chemistry is best suited to bedrooms, brothels and nightclubs.
Even Dev and the cardinal knew that much all those years ago, whatever about those of Charlie's fans watching to get their kicks. Though younger people will find this hilarious, it was true that some viewers thought people on TV could see them. "They used to wave goodnight to me," Mitchell told Lawlor. Rumour has it that some of the fans used to put on their best clobber before switching on the news. So much to the sad, in studio sexual chemistry of Sky and CNN.
ANYWAY, from the former "voice of Ireland" to the voice of Ken Campbell. Ken, in grating gravelly Cockney, attempted to explain the essence of consciousness on Brainspotting: In Two Minds. "What is thought?" asked Ken (though really he said something like "Wott is fawt?"). "What does it mean to be conscious?" Ken likes big questions and he headed off to Boston's MIT to meet a big robot which (who?) might give him some big answers.
The robot's name was Cog, a word which suggests (a) being part of something bigger: or (b) a flagrant disregard for copyright. Either way, Cog, consciously or otherwise, was giving nothing away. Ken was told that, Cog was "learning like a child, by doing, seeing and acting". Perhaps it (he?) was and, to be fair, Cog did appear, like a child, to be acting the eejit half the time.
Oh, Cog looked the part all right complicated arms, a big head with swivelling cameras for eyes and, crucially, a bad attitude. It (he?) swivelled, too abruptly and stared too long, suggesting that if it (he?) continues to do, see and act in this way it (he?) will be either incarcerated for delinquency or, if it (he?) is middle class, be in therapy before long. Ken was not terribly impressed.
"It's taken a ton of electric circuitry to make a machine with the brain power of an averagely bright ant," he said (once he was well way from Cog). Certainly, Ken's meeting with Cog did nothing to shed light on whether or not consciousness has an unfathomable magic or can be created by linked computers doing myriads of computations in particular ways. So he headed off to talk to a few philosophers.
There is a difference between doing and being aware of doing," one of them told him, before drawing a distinction between "information" and "consciousness". So the conflict was set the scientists believed silicon could come to behave like neurons; the philosophers didn't. It's not, by any means, a new debate, but it, still seems unanswerable in terms that will satisfy both sides of the argument.
There's something disgustingly reductionist about the sort of science buffry which exhibits a human brain in solution and describes it as just "a mass of digital jelly". On the other hand, insisting on the brain's ultimate infathability seems illogical because, by, definition, it can't be possible to know this. All even the greatest philosopher can know is that he or she can't fathom it.
So, Ken got caught up in the middle of this unanswerable debate. Both sides presented their positions and really, all you could do was choose one as being more likely to be true. Certainty was not, possible. Whether any one mind can be in two minds or whether human minds divide into two types on this question was not addressed. But after Cog, the scientists, the philosophers and Ken's cacophonous Cockney commentary, I was acutely conscious that Brainspotting sounded like an intellectual episode of Eastenders and, really, there's no call for that.
NEITHER is it likely there will be much call for Germaine Greer to be prime minister of Britain.
Whatever chance she might have had before If I Were Prime Minister was screened, Gerry Adams would, probably beat her to the job at this stage. It's not that Germ's policies were any loonier than many of those which have kept the Tories' in power for 17 years. It's just that, like Cog, she has a bad attitude towards a lot of people.
That lot of people are male. Under the Rt Hon Ms Greer's manifesto, every 16 year old male would be vasectomised after donating a "copious sample" of semen for storage. If, however, they proved themselves to be good boys, when they grew up they would be given access to the sample and allowed the privilege of paternity."
On law and order, branding would be the law and order of the day. Violent offenders would have their faces painted bright red, until such time as they became good boys too. Rapists would have an `R' tattooed under their left eyes. Pickpockets would have their fingers dyed red. But again, this would be a liberal regime only murderers would be branded indelibly for life.
In fairness, GG was, right about the fact that machines have liberated capital and not labour. But her plan to give everybody a lump sum at 18 and send them on their way did not quite seem the best answer to the problem of imbalanced wealth distribution. Still wearing a black boiler suit and trying to imbue intellectuality with earthiness, Ms Greer did point Lip some issues which politics must address. All the same she left the impression that she was hiding behind parody (which, I suppose, is a change from rhetoric) because she had no sensible answers.
IT is unlikely that the Kelly brothers from Donegal, who have made millions in Tory led England, would vote for Ms Greer. Making Waves; The Super Highwaymen focused on Tim Kelly, MD of the lad's civil engineering firm. Tim drives a white Mercedes, which glided through this little eulogy like a 20th century version of the Lone Ranger's horse.
This was the world of the wealthy London Irish. Forget Kilburn, Camden Town or Hammersmith. The Mere rolled past: Threadneedle Street and the Nat West Tower. Driving, Tim spoke into a mobile phone. At a St Paddy's Day bash, the brothers and their wives were announced. Albert Reynolds and his wife were too. There was a few bob here, alright.
At a baronial style golf club, competition was underway for the Kelly Challenge Cup. There was talk of skiing holidays and a tautologous plaque on the wall in the lads new offices, Kelly House, said: "Quality is a continuous, never ending commitment to improvement. Pity the plaque maker didn't take his own advice. Pity too, that this documentary was just a PR vehicle for a set of brothers who, surely, are more interesting than they seemed here.
FINALLY, The Butter Road. Not since Tony O'Reilly or Marlon Brando has anybody made such claims for butter as Aidan Stanley and Jasper Winn. With a horse and cart, the pair followed an old buffer route from Killarney to Cork. The scenery and the old B&W footage were fetching, but the programme was wildly overstated.
A 60 mile trek hardly deserves the claim that it has "all the romance and history of the world's great trade routes". Sure, Millstreet is a grand place but even post Eurovision it is not quite Samarkand. Anyway, the lads enjoyed themselves. They made butter in Kerry and headed for Cork. Mr Winn rigged himself out like Clint Eastwood and used archaic words which nobody else seemed to know.
He spoke of "a knuckleful" of butter and of salmon "seethed" in butter. In recreating a Walter Scott picnic along the way, the lads gave the impression that, while faithful to the old ways and old lore, the whole enterprise was too much like those precious Bloomsday recreations. Authenticity revisited is not authenticity. Like TV news there's a delicate balance between performance and content and performing a non performance is not as easy as it sounds.