Who Wants To Be A Christmas Millionaire? (ITV, Christmas Day)
The South Bank Show (ITV, St Stephen's Day)
Bull Island (RTE 1, Christmas Day)
Bethlehem Year Zero (ITV, Wednesday to Monday)
Around The World In 80 Minutes (BBC 1, Monday)
Holiday viewing began with that light entertainment from Newgrange. The light was supposed to be the star but it was ruthlessly upstaged by the eh, entertainment. All that was missing was a leggy chorus line with dancers tripping the (strobe) light fantastic in nifty, little neolithic numbers decorated with spiral motifs. Still, even if the visuals didn't quite go the full hog, we did get Enya and Eimear Quinn providing their late-20th-century, mists-of-time, ersatz etheriality.
The effect was every bit as haunting and spiritual as that of a stall of Knock's gaudiest trinkets. It is a pity, but only that, that RTE felt it necessary to bring us a Multimedia Inc. version of the winter solstice, rock 'n' light gig by the Boyne. Much reaction has been so hostile that the people responsible have predictably become defensive. But the Bord Failte muzak, the excessive guff and the abrupt cutting from the light to the lightweight were profoundly mistaken.
In fairness, the TV people involved have all brought us fine television in the past, but only Fine Gael's 1991 ardfheis (the Twink one!) ranks with Newgrange 1999 for sheer wrongness. And you could, at least, laugh at the Twink gig. In the cold light of day, the reality is that Newgrange was Butlins-ised by the State broadcaster, even if the idea to broadcast live from the 5,000-year-old mound was a good one. Overall, however, television for the final Christmas of this century was abysmal.
On Christmas Day, the main eight terrestrial channels screened 43 movies (with satellites included, the total available to many people was probably around 60). In the pre-video recorder age of two decades ago, this might have seemed an extraordinary abundance. Now it seems like relatively cheap padding. Films aside, costume drama, a few "seasonal specials", pop music, soaps and ITV's Who Wants To Be A Christmas Millionaire? formed the centrepieces on Christmas Day.
The heyday of Christmas TV, like the heyday of Christmas, has been gone for some years now. This time around, there was also the fact that budgets have been lavished on programmes for the millennium. Anyway, when Chris Tarrant and his game show is given three outings on primetime Christmas Night television and across the day, RTE 1 opts for Boyzone, Westlife and The Corrs, you can judge the point we've reached by yourself. Perhaps television, now for all intents and purposes in its late 40s, is just too weary to play the party animal any more.
It's not too weary, of course, to try to make money. Hence Tarrant and his game show. Indeed, on Christmas Eve, it was even accorded an hour-long trailer, a kind of pre cup-final, Micheal O Murchu warmer-upper titled Is That Your Final Answer?. Was this the final insult? We were told just how wonderful are Chris, the music, the lighting, the questions and the show's dramatic structure. The most popular programme in popular culture's most popular medium still felt it profitable to assault us with advertising strength PR masquerading as a TV programme.
After that came the quiz. The format and Tarrant's irritating manner can give it a peculiarly effective dramatic tension. But arguments, as proposed in the trailer, that it's personal drama and not huge lobs of money that grabs viewers, were disingenuous. If the sums didn't count, ITV would happily and more profitably run it as Who Wants to Win a Tenner? Because of the prospect of winning and/or losing life-changing lobs of money, empathy among audiences is high. But it is a naked buying of ratings figures.
TIME was when Bing Crosby in a TV film for Christmas was almost as effective a draw. White Christmas, Melvyn Bragg said on The South Bank Show, "is one of the definitive sounds of the 20th century". Having sold more than 40 million copies, so it is. But it too is now dated and laden down by the ghosts of Christmasses past. It will probably survive for at least some time in the new century, but every passing year drives it deeper into history.
According to Bragg, White Christmas marks the linking of Christmas with commercial culture. Such is the strength of this link nowadays, of course, that Chris Tarrant's game show is just further proof of the almost total synonymity between Christmas and commerce. Anyway, Crosby, apart from being credited (or charged) with turning Christmas into a mid-winter shopping bonanza, was also said to have had "the first microphone voice". Apparently, he played the mike like an instrument, which is, I suppose, a fair trick.
Of course, his Irish mother, his Jesuit education and his expressed Catholic convictions made him especially popular in this country. When, however, this icon who radiated warmth was accused by a son of being as cold as a fish - and brutal too - cracks appeared in the old image. Who knows what a brute Crosby may or may not have been? But as an early-century bloke trained in the Irish Catholic niceties of mid-century child-rearing, it would hardly surprise us if he did steam into his children from time to time.
So, it wasn't all crooning and twinkling with Bing. But even if the context of the times shows the Bing dynasty to have been little more than averagely harsh, there can never be any excuse for all that golf with Bob Hope. "There was a darker side to Bing Crosby," said a voiceover, referring to allegations that he regularly beat his family. But it was the bright-pullovered golf side which was truly frightening, because its effects were much more widespread.
Still, with Crosby as a quintessential Christmas figure - aside from his films and that song, he continued, long after his career had begun to slide, to record annual Christmas "specials" for TV - it was timely to see this retrospective. Between 1934 and 1954, he dominated American entertainment and American entertainment began its domination of the world. It wasn't just the microphone but the tape-recorder which he understood, showing yet again that in every age someone emerges to marry talent to available technology. Watching, in 1999, Bing Crosby indulging in the valedictory sentimentalism of singing That's What Life is All About (on Parkinson in 1975) was to sense the 20th century as history.
BETWEEN its eight feature films, soaps and gigs by Boyzone, Westlife and The Corrs, RTE 1 found a half-hour for Bull Island on Christmas Day. As ever, the quality of the impersonations was only sporadically matched by the sharpness of the script. So far, the best parody in the series has been the splendid Christy Hennessy/Frances Black gig. "The Clare Witch Project" has its moments too, as do the Paddy O'Gorman and Mary Robinson mick-takes. But the Dail politicians, though generally well-mimicked, remain scarcely, if at all, more absurd than the real creatures.
Still, at least it is home-produced and provides some satire, albeit satire lite. It does, however, need a somewhat darker, Bing Crosby edge to lift its pervasive sense of pantomime. That can be risky, of course, because humour can turn polemical in a dull or even spiteful way if it doesn't remember that it's supposed to be funny. But the 1990s have been so rich in scandal and posing that there's no shortage of material, which doesn't merely deserve, but needs to be satirised.
PRESENTED and cut as contemporary news, Bethlehem Year Zero was read by Martyn Lewis, had tabloid angles, studio experts and political analysis. Whether or not it was intended as such, it probably worked better as a parody of TV news than of the Nativity story. "The Bethlehem miracle birth . . . the unfolding crisis in Palestine . . . Rome's response" all sounded convincing in their breathless journalese.
But casting Herod as "Rome's puppet", Joseph as "a building contractor" and translating "no room at the inn" into "an accommodation crisis" made Lewis's grave, newscasting face appear absurd. When he said that "the three-man mission of the socalled `wise men' has arrived", the spell was straining. Tellingly, however, the Nativity story seemed to require contemporarising this Christmas. Like lavish light entertainment and Bing Crosby, even the central story of the season seemed to be evanescing into a remembered but fading past.
GIVEN the year which begins tomorrow, it was inevitable that once Christmas had passed, television would indulge in some more eulogies to the 20th century. Around The World in 80 Minutes - A Century In Song began and concluded with The Leningrad Cowboys singing Those Were the Days. In between, sounds of the century included most of the usual suspects (but no Bing Crosby, who perhaps has been written out already) set to news footage.
As the makers had opted, in part, to try to match lyrics with historical themes, it wasn't quite The Rock 'n' Roll Years. None the less, Vera Lynn for London's Blitz; The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan for the 1960s and Buffalo Springfield for the Vietnam War were examples of links between popular music and the spirits of certain periods which have fused into synonymity. On the other hand, Judy Garland belting out Over the Rainbow over footage from Guernica, though time-wise close enough, seemed oddly, if intriguingly disjointed.
We did get to see Adele Dixon singing on the first BBC television broadcast, in 1936. Even then, it should have been clear that TV would inevitably become the world's dominant medium in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence continues to grow too, especially throughout the less developed world. Whether or not, at least in the wealthy world, it will be able to adapt to the coming media environment of the 21st century, without losing much of its influence, is another matter.
But on this final day of a year, decade, century and OK then, millennium (even though TV has been around for only about five or six per cent of the last 1,000 years, so that context is too inflated) television seems less relevant to Irish people than it once did. It will continue to be watched, of course, and will produce endless hours of dross and occasional moments of magnificence. One of the satellite channels has an ad running at present which claims that it produces "TV that makes life worth watching".
Like the mobile phone crowd, who try to tempt punters with the promise that "you're never alone with a mobile phone", the idea of a life worth watching, instead of living, sounds like a threat. If never being alone and watching life are the greatest comforts offered by 20th-century technology, we're in trouble. But they're not, of course. They are merely propaganda designed to serve the technology they're promoting. The trouble with television has always been in separating the propaganda from the worthwhile, and that fundamental task will not change tomorrow or throughout the foreseeable 21st century. Just expect the PR to scream ever louder where once it, at least, had the politeness to croon.