The Roy Keane InterviewRTÉ1, MondayMurder In MindBBC1, TuesdayMurder: The JournalistBBC2, WednesdayThe OsbournesMTV, Sunday
I sincerely hope you are reading this late on Sunday, having woken late this morning, wrapped in an Irish flag, wearing the biggest grin you've ever had and still glorying in a Damien Duff hat-trick. Last week we discovered what it might be like to be children of separated parents, desperately hoping that mammy and daddy will get back together. Blind to the obvious. Turning to fantasy, conspiracy and unfounded optimism. Willing to accept anything, believe anything, as long as the ending had Roy and Mick hand in hand, heading off into the Rising Sunset together. Who cares about love? Do it for the children.
We should really have accepted it was over after the interview on Monday night. For all the rumours of impending apologies and prepared statements, it was plain from the first glance at Keane that he had not come to say sorry. As he grows older, he looks increasingly like a man who has requisitioned every muscle in his body for the cause of sport, and left none behind to form facial expressions. Even across several hundred miles of radio waves he was supremely intimidating.
The little that is given away comes through the movement of the eyes and the slight, curled droop of the mouth. That, and in the way his voice pitches at differing levels of incr edulity. He speaks like a man tired of constantly having to ex- plain himself twice. The fixed glare may suggest he is always on the attack, but the voice betrays constant defence. On Monday night this was most obvious when Gorman asked him how he would react if the team offered to take him back. "Take me back? What do you mean, take me back?" His voice was like a pierced balloon, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open. An entire nation cowered in their seats.
Gorman - a fine reporter deserving of this true scoop - got dragged along in the wake, rather like an angler who had hooked a whale and wouldn't let go. He stopped asking straight questions and began to do what most of us would have done in his place. He pleaded with Keane. Begged for Ireland. He got on his knees and invoked everything from shopkeepers to parents to 800 years of Irish conflict.
"It would do so much to lift the morale of kids who will never have a chance!" Gorman eventually gasped, as the violins rose to a crescendo.
Yet still we didn't believe it was over. By the next morning we treated it like a bad dream and snuggled up to wild rumour once more. There is a plane fuelled and ready to go. A deal has been struck. McCarthy's stepping aside. Even as late as Wednesday morning, the day after Keane's final statement had sobered us up once and for all, a gentleman appeared on Ireland AM and offered €10,000 to a charity of Keane's choice if he'd just get back on that plane. We were a nation yanking at Keane's sleeves as he walked out the door for the last time.
"They'll get over it," said Keane in the interview. By about 9.15 this morning, we'll know if he was right.
Fiction didn't have a hope. Not wanting to go so much as a few days without another murder drama, the BBC had bodies slumping out of the schedules all week. Monday night saw the last in this series of Murder in Mind. The title can be rather confusing to newcomers to the series of individual dramas. There are seldom any actual murders. Instead, normal people are usually shown getting in way over their heads, ending up with a body on their hands and somehow getting away with it in the nick of time. Their escape usually comes thanks to the intervention of a plot twist freed from a glass case marked "For Emergency Use Only".
This week, in Regrets, Dennis Waterman played a businessman forced to close his factory thanks to his bullying, uncaring bank. The solution? Kidnap the chairman of the bank and dangle him over a vat of acid while putting him through the hell of trying to contact his company's customer service. It sounds quite ingenious as I write it, but it was nothing of the sort. Extraneous characters drifted in and out as if searching for another studio. Expeditious plot developments ran rampant.
Waterman told the story in flashbacks as he sat with a mate in a prison visiting-room. The spin was that it wasn't him in prison at all, but that he was only visiting his mate. If it sounds familiar, that's because it was a plot twist you last saw in an ad for chocolates. It will also explain the enormous groan you may have heard in the wind at about 9.59 on Tuesday night.
However creaky Murder in Mind looked in isolation, set beside the following night's Murder it was positively wretched. With subtitle attached, the episode was called Murder: The Journalist. Remove the colon and that sounds like incitement. By the end of this opening episode I was seriously considering the idea of changing the profession box on my census form.
Despite the fact that the premise rests on a well-worn device - each week the drama is seen from a different point of view - Murder was bold and powerful, avoiding the temptation to approach the subject as you would in a dodgy pulp novel and instead reaching for genuine insight. Julie Walters played Angela Maurer, mother of a man savagely killed the morning after his 21st birthday. There is the element of murder mystery: Imelda Staunton plays a hard bitch detective, and the marvellous Om Puri a shopkeeper who knows more than he's letting on. But that is interwoven with a script of far more depth. This episode looked at the event through the eyes of both the mother and of a tabloid journalist, Dave Dewston (David Morrissey), who worms his way into the family at its most vulnerable moment. Hounded by a vicious editor, whom we only hear screaming down a phone line, he protests: "I am a quality journalist." The editor's reply is suitably dismissive, considering Dave has just left the home of a grieving mother, having secreted her treasured photo album in his pocket.
Morrissey injects the often stock character of the down-at-heel reporter with impressive subtlety, as someone who can be both desperate to escape from the moral morass he's crawled into and immediately rejuvenated once his story makes the front page, whatever the consequences.
Of course, for Angela, the aftershock proves only slightly less devastating than the initial murder, and Walters's performance tackles, head on, a grief that can't be learnt. Written by Abi Morgan, Murder has the potential to be as good as anything else we'll see this year. Whether it can deliver on this promise, of course, will depend on the other points of view.
And finally, a mention for The Osbournes, if only to allow you a chance to go weed the garden or make soup or do whatever else you might do if you avoided falling for the programme's hype. The series - a fly-on-the-wall look at the rock star and his mullet-heavy family - was dreadfully insipid, just as you would expect of an MTV programme that comes branded with the Dubya seal of approval. It was a lesson learnt from his dad. George Snr once had a go at The Simpsons, and ended up a character in the show. Now an entire generation has grown up with the lasting image of him not as the man who beat Iraq, but as a whiny neighbour having a crazy wig glued to his head by Homer Simpson.
Ozzy has the mumble and walk of a man who, as he admits himself, has worked with "30 billion decibels for 35 years". Like most fathers, he and technology are in a marriage of inconvenience. When he presses the TV remote control, the shower comes on.
His son, Jack, and his daughter, Sharon, are teenagers communicating solely through the medium of tantrums. Mother Sharon has a posh English accent, but has profanity down to a fine art. When she asks for a cup of tea, navvies, truck drivers and Roy Keane shake their heads in disgust.
It was one-note television, made in that tremendously irritating MTV style, perfected through endless series of the "reality" show, Real World.No shot lasts longer than a couple of seconds, no scene longer than five seconds. It is practically half-an-hour of non-sequiturs.
MTV brought this style to the mainstream, of course, and young people's television is a succession of shows built to these exact plans. It has played havoc with our attention spans, they keep telling us. They may have a point. Last week, I referred to George Lee's Winds of Change, when what I really meant was Duncan Stewart's excellent The State We're In. A while back, I took to repeatedly referring to actor Peter McDonald as Patrick. If you want to treat this column like an ongoing experiment in what effect too much television has on the brain, by all means do. I will have forgotten about it in 30 seconds anyhow.