Afternoon delights

TV REVIEW: Loose WomenITV, weekdays
XposéTV3, weekdays
The Afternoon ShowRTÉ 1, weekdays
The Week In PoliticsRTÉ1, Sunday
The Nine O'Clock NewsRTÉ1, Monday

IT IS HARD to find good television these days. All the best telly is on in the afternoon. Who knew? Only about a quarter of a million elderly, disabled and unemployed citizens, as well as parents minding small kids and a couple of thousand carers. They’re the ones who had the opportunity to watch Spencer Tracy in

Bad Day At Blackrock

on Monday on Channel 4 at 12.50pm.

Daytime television is not usually about tough old codgers coming to clean up desert towns; daytime television is about cosy television pleasures. The Maltesers advertisements which snuggle up to Loose Women– the programme is sponsored by Maltesers – are funnier than most television comedy. (The other advertisement which is a great favourite round here at the moment is the dad defending his Oats More cereal from his children. That guy should get a Bafta.) In its neglected way daytime television is a pretty crowded field, and what the Irish shows lack in imaginative titles they make up for in sheer numbers. TV3, particularly, goes from The Morning Showwith Sybil and Martin to Midday to the Xposérepeat and then to Oprah Winfreyand T he Ellen Degeneres Show, and Judge Judyis on at 4.30pm.

This solid block of programming deserves its own review. For the moment let's just say that on Tuesday's repeat of Xposé Glenda Gilson seemed to be doing the heavy lifting. She interviewed Jedward at their personal appearance in Dublin, and Jedward were well impressed. They'd obviously fancied her for years. Glenda just stood there in a big scarf, dealing with them. Then she introduced her interview with an extremely cranky Samuel L Jackson at a charity premiere in Dublin. In the Xposécompetition you were asked to supply a surname: Is it Meryl Cruz, or Cotillard, or Streep?

BACK IN THE LANDwhere programmes still have budgets and don't rely solely on the hard work of their presenters, the Loose Women don't get out much and the panel rotates. This week Andrea was joined by Coleen, Jane and Beverley. Loose Womenrelies for content on the female genius for self-disclosure, and an Olympic level of chat. This works great. On Wednesday, by the time we'd heard whether the four of them could give up their mobile phones for Lent, learned what they had wanted to be when they were 11, and discovered their views on the advisability of chasing men, their interviews, with Huey from Fun Lovin' Criminals and Dr Hillary Jones from GMTV and Dancing On Ice, seemed a bit superfluous. There is a great deal of female messing, which is not captured on camera very often. For the Loose Womencompetition, which ran all week, you had to decide: Hearts, Spades, Clubs. Is the fourth suit in a deck of cards Diamonds, Rubies or Emeralds? The prize was £15,000.

THE AFTERNOON SHOWalways seems to have been teetering on the verge of extinction, despite a recent drama regarding its line-up of presenters. But there are two surprising things about The Afternoon Show. Firstly, how long it is – one hour forty five minutes, for goodness' sake – and secondly, how very good it is. If anything, The Afternoon Showhas too much going on.

The programmes I saw were a blur of studio experts, studio chefs – of whom there seem to be an inordinate number – and the presenters, Sheana Keane and Maura Derrane, whizzing between sofas at high speed.

On Tuesday the show’s vet injected Freddie the dog with a microchip (Freddie did not flinch). And Tina Leonard, the show’s consumer expert, who is impressive enough to be given her own programme, updated us on the case of the dress that went missing from a Galway dry cleaners (Note: the dress had originally cost €500).

Despite being lit as if by uranium, Keane and Derrane deserve full credit here, as do the producers, who are not afraid to send reporters to film outside Dublin. Last week the programme launched a campaign to make kids’ menus healthier, and visited a restaurant in each province, taking a local family along with them. Sheana and Maura are a pleasure to watch. “I’d better move on or I’ll be killed,” said Maura as she ran up against the clock.

On Ash Wednesday both of them were fasting through the cookery items. On Tuesday Sheana was previewing an item on this season’s fashion “It’s all about the trench coat, apparently,” she said. “It’s always all about the trench coat,” said Maura darkly.

The Afternoon Showhas a problem with its caption writers – on Wednesday there were two ls in "panel" and a stray apostrophe in "kids' menu", although, tellingly, "dietician" was rendered correctly. And its competitions are insulting, even by the standards of daytime television. On Tuesday you had to complete the sentence, "Laughter is the best . . ." and on Wednesday you had to decide whether a pet fish was housed in a kennel, a hutch or a tank. Having muttered how inane these questions were, I then left the correct answer out of my text to the show on Tuesday, and my name out of the text to the programme on Wednesday. But on daytime television no one would ever call you stupid.

Current Couture: What Are Political Fashion Icons Wearing This Week?

Someone should make a series about the television jacket, which is televisual shorthand for gravitas. Last week the jacket started strongly as Olivia Mitchell TD provided the only reason real people would watch The Week in Politics,which looks like it is recorded at the bottom of a well.

In the middle of this Stygian gloom glowed Olivia Mitchell, in a bronze metallic-finish jacket. She looked fantastic. Opposite her the Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin, another attractive woman, was weighed down by a white jacket which seemed somehow stiff and did nothing for her. Alex White of Labour, heading for George Lee’s seat, had a pretty good jacket with determined shoulders.

On Monday, Anne Doyle looked stunning in the opening shot of the Nine O'Clock Newsin a jacket of dark purple. A nation held its breath: were the producers of the Nine O'Clock News going to let Anne, our best and most beloved newsreader, look authoritative and fab the whole way through the bulletin? But no. Soon she was imprisoned in that sideways camera angle which would defeat Carla Bruni.

What is it with the people who produce the news? Most of RTÉ’s newsreaders are female, yet the studio is lit like a rescue site and the desk is the wrong height for anyone with breasts.

On Tuesday Anne was back in the pink jacket, which doesn’t work so well.

Symphysiotomy   A true horror story

Prime Time Special: Brutal Practice RTÉ1, Thursday

Paul Maguire’s report on the history of symphysiotomy in Ireland was profoundly upsetting – a history of savagery which then turned into news. Symphysiotomy, the cutting of a woman’s pelvis into two to facilitate the delivery of her baby, was discontinued in the developed world in the early part of the 20th century. Symphysiotomy was reintroduced here in 1944. Unbelievably, it continued in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda until 1982.

Paul Maguire told this horror story with great seriousness and care, whether talking to the victims of symphysiotomy about their continuing pain, incontinence and difficulty walking, or revealing the blistering criticism that international obstetricians levelled at Irish obstetricians during the 1950s.

The programme implied that symphysiotomy was a symptom of the misogynistic Catholic medicine that pertained in Ireland at that time, although this link was not really explained. Enough, perhaps, that Mary Borg underwent it when she was delivering her baby at the age of 14.

Most of the women who had symphysiotomy seemed to have been young and pretty at the time. They also seem to have been, on the evidence here – although this was never explicitly said – working class.

There was no rational reason for modern symphysiotomy. It was not about the safe delivery of a baby – it had a high infant mortality rate – but about punishing the young and fertile. Records at Our Lady of Lourdes revealed something called an “on the way out” symphysiotomy, which was performed after a Caesarean section. In other words, it was performed when the baby was already out of the woman’s body. This was chilling viewing.

And a remark by Dr Michael Neary about the injured women – “Is it the smell of the money that’s getting to them?” – was so offensive as to be almost unbroadcastable. However, it is right that it was broadcast, because it was highly informative.