Irish Dreamtime, RTE1, Tuesday
Out on your Own - 25 Years On, RTE1, Monday
Cursai Ealaine Teoranta, RTE1, Tuesday
Omnibus, BBC1, Wednesday
Gerry Kelly Meets . . . Michael Flatley, UTV, Tuesday
Remember post-modernism? You may recall a time, a few years back, when the word was as ubiquitous as combat trousers were last year. People didn't know exactly what it meant, but they knew it when they saw it. It encompassed everything from pop groups to political parties, Gulf wars to Gaultier. Then suddenly, like combat trousers, it was gone, folded invisibly away into the broader culture, never to be brought out again on pain of universal ridicule.
But post-modernism has lived on in various odd ways, and none odder than in Ireland.
There's a peculiarly local variant of p-m which involves juxtaposing images of old and new in what is meant to be a "playful" way (post-modernism was always big on inverted commas and on playfulness, which usually meant smartypants smugness and bad puns). Stick a John Hinde image of a thatched cottage beside a picture of a Boeing 747, add a kitschy religious bauble and, hey presto! You have an ironic comment on the tensions between tradition and modernity. This might have been a useful and interesting strategy for maybe six months in the early 1990s, but it's depressing that some people still seem to feel it's at the cutting edge of cultural comment.
Irish Dreamtime is a mess. In the interests of fairness, I've looked at some of the further instalments in Frank Stapleton's sixpart series on Irish heritage and they're just as incoherent as the first. It's not that it's not handsome-looking - gorgeous archive film of rural life in the 1930s and 1940s is interspersed with well-shot contemporary footage of people rushing around shopping malls. All quite easy on the eye, but conceptually bankrupt - the juxtaposition of handsome landscapes with the shopping mall footage is a direct lift from that overrated 1983 "ecological documentary", Koyaanisqatsi (the title of which, my usually trustworthy film-guide informs me, is derived from the Hopi word for "vacuous hippy").
Like Koyaanisqatsi, Irish Dreamtime seeks to establish a contrast between indigenous peoples and modern consumer society. The opening credits sequence shows Australia's Ayers Rock morphing into Croagh Patrick - the point, presumably, being to draw some sort of parallel between the psychic geography (man) of Australian aboriginal culture and the Irish experience. As such, it forms a part of that special brand of Irish post-colonialist narcissism which insists we have little or nothing in common with other European cultures, but deep-rooted similarities with oppressed/exterminated peoples such as the original inhabitants of America or Australasia, who are, of course, universally wise and good and in tune with their surroundings. It's the Macrobiotic Wing of modern Irish nationalism, and it provides the foundation, such as it is, for the series.
Along the way, we get various hirsute Men and Wimmin of the Wesht telling us about who "we" are and what makes "us" so special. This is the new institutional Ireland in the flesh, and it sure is grating, particularly the de haut en bas tone of much of the commentary (poor Joan O'Hara has the task of reading the stunningly twee and banal voiceover).
Heritage is a deeply contested territory on this island, on many levels: in antagonistic historical interpretations; in the competing interests of economic development and conservationism; in debates over the issue of sustainable tourism. Some might argue that the very word heritage has conservative political overtones (social democrats prefer the word culture). Not much sign of any such controversy in Irish Dreamtime, apart from some vague blather about our ambiguous relationship to our environment, all from people on the same side of the argument. Why not talk to a property developer? Or to somebody critical of the interpretative centres which have sprung up all over the country? It's worth noting that Irish Dreamtime is produced "in association with" The Heritage Council, a pernicious collaborative practice which affects many RTE documentaries, and immediately raises suspicions about the level of editorial autonomy.
At least we seem to be coming to the end of the current crop of RTE documentaries on "national identity", a varied bunch of programmes of differing quality on such subjects as religion, architecture, music, politics and heritage. On paper, these programmes look like an affirmation of the best sort of public service broadcasting values. In reality, some have been smug and uninteresting. Not so much navel-gazing as extensive navel surgery, often under deep anaesthetic. In an increasingly complex, multi-cultural, diffuse society, these overarching national narratives become less and less convincing. Truth (and good stories) are more likely to be found in the minutely particular rather than in sweeping generalisations about "who we are".
Which brings us to Out On Your Own - 25 Years On, a little gem of a programme in which producer Peter Canning returns to 12 people whom he first interviewed in 1974 as part of a programme about youngsters in their first jobs. Now they're middle-aged, and Michael Holmes talks to them about their lives since. There are two stories each week: Monday's programme featured Linda McMahon-Collins, who in 1974 worked in a wool-carding factory, and now runs a creche, and Tommy Kelly, who was a teenaged apprentice to a golf-bag manufacturer. (Then, he hated golf. Now it's his obsession.).
RTE is only belatedly realising the importance of its own archives as a resource for new programme ideas, such as last year's Reeling in the Years. Huge amounts of material were lost (or never saved) from the early years of Irish television up until the late 1970s. There's little point in getting agitated about this; it was accepted practice at the time, and early videotape was too expensive, it seems, to consider using it just once. So most of what we have remaining is from outside reports and documentaries, shot on film. It's unlikely the powers-that-be in 1974 would have seen much merit in keeping for posterity a low-key little programme like Out On Your Own. We should be very grateful that it did survive.
Where Irish Dreamtime overloaded us with archive footage of a "lost" rural culture, that world seemed oddly familiar because it has been rendered so often in literature, art and film. The world of Out On Your Own, while much closer to our time, seems more peculiar, because it has never been codified or represented on-screen. This was teenaged urban Ireland of the mid-1970s - parallel trousers, tight denim jackets, wedgie hairstyles. It was also working-class or lower-middle-class: the protagonists had mostly left school by their midteens, many of them for apprenticeships or manufacturing jobs which have themselves become strange and archaic (the wool-carding industry is hardly the force it used to be). While that world has changed enormously, there's a recognisable continuity in the family lives of people such as Tommy Kelly and Linda McMahon-Collins, not recognised in many of the recent TV explorations of Irish identity, which prefer a more simplistic equation: old equals rural and traditional; new equals urban and deracinated. The thatched cottage and the Boeing 747 again.
Most importantly, Canning allows us a glimpse into the ebb and flow of "ordinary" lives as lived over a quarter of a century; tragedies and triumphs on a domestic scale. In doing so, he achieves more in a single half-hour programme than you'd get from several hours of mystic Celtic navel-fluff.
THAT'S not to say that big cultural issues should not be the subject of serious programmes. Cursai Ealaine Teo this week looked at Irish myths, old and new. The Fianna and the Tain are being replaced in our children's imaginations by new heroes, was the programme's thesis: "The modern world of The Simpsons and Pokemon has put paid to storytelling."
As it happens, the change may not be as enormous as we think. "We discovered that the life pattern of Luke Skywalker is very similar to that of Fionn MacCumhail or King Arthur," said one commentator, although this will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about Hollywood's almost religious belief in its role as modern recycler of primal myths.
The concern - a very valid one - is whether it's possible to resist, or at least counterbalance, the global homogenisation which accompanies modern media saturation, and to translate our own ancient myths into forms which can survive into the 21st century. Cursai Ealaine talked to various animators who are trying to do just that. Some, while obviously well-intentioned, looked a little too earnest and self-consciously "artistic" to have much chance of weaning the nation's pre-teens off a diet of Saturday-morning Nickelodeon. Others were more pragmatic. Paul Bolger, who is trying to get an ambitious, multi-million-pound version of the story of Cuchulainn off the ground, pointed out that there has been "a sort of preciousness about these stories, but they're not just a worthy cause . . . they're good stories". He also suggested that it would be a good idea to "inject some humour, some devilment" into such films. That would certainly seem wise. After all, even those of us who venerate The Simpsons as the most important work of art of the past 10 years acknowledge that the best cartoons are the funniest ones.
Which brings us to Omnibus: Wallace and Gromit go Chicken. On the other side of the Irish Sea in Bristol, Aardman Animation has achieved the sort of scale and status to which its counterparts on Cursai Ealaine aspire. Having grown over 25 years from schoolboy hobbyists to Oscar-winning film-makers, Nick Park and his colleagues are now playing with the big boys on that global stage, releasing a bigbudget feature film, Chicken Run, in association with the Hollywood studio, DreamWorks.
After a month in which modern English culture has been defined, through its football hooligans, as nasty, brutish and not short enough, it was salutary to be reminded by Anglophile director Terry Gilliam that there's an entirely different sort of Englishness, "more cosy, more calm, less frenzied," which the world can't get enough of, and which Wallace and Gromit provide in spades. Whether that gentle charm can survive the embrace of DreamWorks remains to be seen, but, as Simpsons creator Matt Groening has proved in the case of Rupert Murdoch, it is possible to lie down with dogs and not get up with fleas.
ESSENTIALLY, this week's Omni- bus was a shameless plug for an upcoming movie. But not as shameless as Gerry Kelly meets Michael Flatley (doesn't that title have a certain ring to it, like Godzilla meets King Kong, or Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman?). There's really nothing left to say about Flatley, who has seen off his enemies, settled his court battles and emerged rich and defiant. He is, in fact, in these respects, the Charles Haughey of the Irish dancing scene - except, perhaps, for the fact that the Plain People of Dublin never seemed that impressed by him (his show is coming to Belfast, but not Dublin - hence UTV's plug). We saw Michael joshing backstage with adoring underlings; Michael doing his Raging Bull warm-up before the show; Michael, pricelessly, kneeling in prayer behind a huge stage curtain, and blessing himself just before the curtain opened.
Michael told us about the joy he derives from giving employment to so many talented young Irish people: "I love the faces of the dancers behind me," he confided (those eyes on the front of his head always looked rather small and false; now all is explained).
Only one small cloud hovers in the Flatley universe. Apparently, the one place where the Magnificence of Michael is not unanimously accepted is - gasp! - in Ireland. This, sad to say, has caused deep hurt, although some of us churlish types cherish it as a sign that begrudgery is not quite dead. "There's been a lot of negative press we don't deserve," said Michael, wearily. "It genuinely hurts me if they do write negative things." And then the clincher: "We're doing this for Ireland." Oh, that's all right so, but where's our cheque?
Eddie Holt is on holidays
