Fantasy World Cup Live (ITV Tuesday, Wednesday)
Euroballs '98 (C4 Tuesday)
World Cup '98 Preview (BBC 1 Tuesday)
Prime Time (Tuesday RTE 1)
France '98 Live (Network 2 Wednesday)
My Dinner with Oswald (Network 2, Wednesday)
Glen Hoddle is a marked man. Chris Evans blew the whistle at him on TFI Fri- day, passed the attack to buddy Danny Baker for a few fumbling sideswipes on Have I Got News For You, leaving midfield clear for sweepers Baddiel and Skinner on Fantasy World Cup Live, the show ITV intercepted from birth mother BBC just in time for the 1998 opening ceremonies. It has only just begun.
Hoddle had dropped Paul Gascoigne, alias Gazza, alias a star member of the footie/telly celebrity brat pack which Chris Evans leads, from the English World Cup squad he manages. For this, he faces death by mockery. Gazza is an uproarious pagan; Hoddle a fundamentalist Christian. "Paul needs to take a long hard look at his lifestyle," Hoddle told BBC, eyes down, lashes fluttering. "You can't go to the World Cup with a risk factor." What could he mean? Pundits everywhere pondered the prospect that Gazza might in fact be shafted for conduct unbecoming something else - beating up women, fouling a young boy on a friendly visit to his old school, smoking tobacco (the last, strangely, drawing most fire). Even Gary Lineker smelt a rat, once it became politic to do so. New Lad or New Gentleman? The battlelines were drawn. So swift a repositioning caught some programmes on the hop. Worst was Euroballs 98, a Eurotrash special less vicious than Channel 4's new TV Offal and thus entirely less artful in its celebration of bad taste. In the universe that is television football, bad taste is allowed, even necessary - a foil to all that on-field drama - but only for so long as it stays smart. Not here. Stuck in the old yob mindset, Euroballs misread the signs, elaborating an entirely witfree zone with features no self-respecting porn magazine could deem interesting enough to print. Stereotypes ruled without the least touch of irony: gay footballers in Germany? Punchline: "big pompoms". Feature of the week? Sleaze star Alba plays Sit On Stan, the same Stan Colleymore who hours later condemned himself to history's scrapheap by beating up the Joan Bakewell of Laddism, girlfriend Ulrika Johnson, in a Paris bar.
Even plucking Kenneth ("they think it's all over, it is now") Wolstenholme from retirement to play commentator on a blow football game between Martin Peters (England 1966) and Lolo Ferrari (never heard of her) failed. The yobs were getting hammered: this wasn't trash, it was waste.
The action happened elsewhere. RTE introduced promising new comedy slots with Barry Murphy and Risteard Cooper in various guises, and predictable but funny send-ups by Gary Cooke of Eamon Dunphy and the great John Giles. On BBC, Des Lynam became a parody of his former self, swanning around in flockpatterned socks while regulars Alan Hanson and Gary Lineker got ever-readier to swat the poses of glory-seeker David Ginola, the hunk with no brains who reportedly excused his own absence from the French World Cup squad by explaining that when you were that good-looking, even footballers didn't play fair.
But could the Fantasy Football team make the transition to ITV? In this World Cup battle of the ratings, poaching them was ITV's expensively unimaginative answer to losing last time round. Tuesday's show looked grim. First night guests from hell like gotterdammerung-in-yellow Brigitte Nielsen and composer Jean Michel Jarre nearly made Baddiel and Skinner look dim. Within 24 hours, they staged a comeback, with a second night performance so topical they must have scripted it overnight.
More guests from hell - this may be a pattern - but now Jeff Astle became Nielsen in drag, and the show lampooned Hoddle endlessly, replaying video clips where he failed verbal dexterity tests, introducing a Hoddle alter ego who looked like he'd been reconstructed from badly-decaying archive footage of On The Buses.
REIMAGINING David Trimble makes some people nervous. Prime Time's programme by reporter Brendan O'Brien and producer Eamon T. O'Connor set out to trace the political biography of the man who "knew instinctively the claims being made of the civil rights movement were wrong," so he told us, apparently because his uncle had been mayor of Derry in the 1950s.
The same man is now set to become first minister of the new Belfast Assembly. The hatred behind some testimony against him was no less staggering for all its predictability - Trimble has made allies of his enemies, and thus made foes of some friends. He seemed sanguine about it all. Male voices sang "Who do you think you're kidding Mr Trimble?" while Philip Black, former general secretary of the Ulster Clubs, denounced Trimble's stake in the new deal. This was to be expected. Prime Time's mission was a tough one - had Trimble proven links with loyalist paramilitaries dating back to the days of Vanguard and the Ulster Clubs? Archive footage caught him protesting at Craig's 1972 Vanguard rally, soon after that famous speech where Craig proclaimed "God help those who get in our way."
Then a rising law lecturer whose surprisingly aquiline features offered a passing resemblance to the young, now late, Peter Cooke, Trimble had been Craig's lieutenant, his intellectual skills already making their analytic mark within unionist politics. Frame after frame caught the intense parochiality that is Northern Ireland's politics, but seemed puzzled by it, as if Trimble's past should somehow become different in order for us all to accept him more easily as the leader he has become. Former Secretary of State Merlyn Rees stated that the methods used to ruin Sunningdale were subversive. Former SDLP member Austin Currie TD argued that the strikes were helped by the prospect of loyalist paramilitary violence. But that could not tar Trimble. The roots of his victory lay in his tribal past, and awkward as it was to stomach, that was the platter on which Northern Ireland's future would be served. Currie's most interesting point was his comment that Trimble was not an emotional moderate, a feature which could become his greatest personal challenge in the future.
Trimble dealt with Rees unsentimentally: how could anyone take seriously a man whose autobiography couldn't even get Trimble's name right? He denied any association with paramilitaries, and argued yet again that not a shred of evidence would ever find him guilty of a sectarian or bigoted remark.
His rationality was awesome: this was a man, you sensed, who had never left a `t' uncrossed, and probably never would. Every time he came on camera, Trimble out eye-balled O'Brien with a perfunctory politeness. No, he rarely described himself as Irish, he was a member of the Ulster-British community. No, he did not foresee any prospect of a federal Ireland, nor any advantage either. No one can have been surprised by his replies. The programme wound down like a tired clock, unsure of its ground because the ground was shifting so quickly. Shots of Trimble walking awkwardly in an Ulster garden with his second wife Daphne - a persuasive and impressive commentator - confirmed his deep refusal to buy into an image he did not fit. This was no Camelot, this was Northern Ireland, and no amount of spindoctoring could change that fact.
The deliciously subversive My Dinner With Oswald put the week in perspective. Acid house colour and jugular wit made Paul Duane's Short Cuts film fantasy about obsession a testy metaphor for what happens to life when you take one small detail far too seriously. A Dublin dinner party is stymied by the host's compulsion to reenact the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, leading to a feeding frenzy where no one ever wins. Upending the sometimes grandiose pomposity of a whole genre of history films, not least Oliver Stone's JFK, Duane sent up conspiracy theory with an undercut worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, making for a movie as quirky as it was maliciously edgy. Gazza conspiracy theorists, take note.