SO, Panorama revealed that consorted with Billy Wright. Well, who's surprised by any of Billy's behaviour? After last week's savagery came this week's scrutiny, as television sought to analyse the anarchy which may have ended the peace process. Monday's Panorama screened a special, which nudged its advertised report about Olympian junkies out to the following night, by which time it had finally dawned on Prime Time that the risk of the country going up in flames was more pressing than that evening's barbecue.
It was John Major's Panorama interview - with David Dimbleby which demonstrated most clearly the media's vulnerability to a balancing act being presented as genuine balance. "Both sides were wrong," said Major of the Orange Order and the Garvaghy Road residents. It's an old line, which suits British governments very well. It casts them as reasonable, indeed as exasperated honest brokers, caught between incorrigible opponents. It has elements of truth, but it is not the spirit of truth because it dispenses with proportion.
"There are bigots on both sides," Proinsias de Rossa told Prime Time. Again, there is some truth in this parity of condemnation routine. But, given the particular incident - Drumcree and its immediate consequences - under discussion, it is the kind of blanket inanity designed to re establish the ping pong inertia of debate on the North. Republicans and unionists use it too, of course, when it suits them. But we deserve something more accurately weighed from senior Irish and British government politicians.
The murderous morons who planned and carried out the Killyhevlin Hotel bombing, aided and abetted the "parity of condemnation" politicians, of course. In shifting the media's focus from Drumcree, they seriously damaged the nationalist cause, whether or not that was their aim. The news media, correctly, led with the bombing story. But the current affairs programmes, which might have been expected to seek proportion, meekly allowed it to restore the spurious ping pong routines, which the disingenuous; can claim is balance.
In fairness to Panorama's reporter Peter Taylor (whose reporting was Garvaghy Roads even queens highways ahead of David Dimbleby's interviewing) his revelation of the Drumcree meeting between David Trimble and Billy Wright was the high point of the week's TV journalism. At the very least, it exposed Trimble's huge hypocrisy about talking to paramilitaries. Beyond that, it suggested an alliance, albeit an ad hoc alliance, which has implications so grave that they need not be detailed.
But the facts of Drumcree should remain the media's prime focus. It's not that Drumcree can be separated from the rest of the North story. But the way in which it revealed the most fundamental fault lines, not just of the conflict, but of the State, mark it out as qualitatively different and it does suggest that only parties with physical force wings, albeit of varying closeness of links, can hope top get their way.
The Sinn Fein IRA link is obvious and well documented, if not fully understood. The DUP's past record of inflammatory oratory cannot always have passed by the unionist paramilitaries. The Ulster Unionists, Drumcree strongly suggests, can, through Orange power, mobilise the RUC (at least) in its cause. The British government has its army in place. What then for the moderate parties like the SDLP and the Alliance? Everybody knows that's the configuration. But television remains reluctant to consider such starkness.
So it's back to ping pong, maintaining, to paraphrase Reggie Maudling, an acceptable level of political debate. Indeed, many television interviewers seem, either willingly or not, locked into this balancing act and presenting it as balance. Even the normally indiscriminately acerbic Jeremy Paxman, presenting Newsnight (BBC 2, Monday) from Belfast, was hopelessly tame when the going got nasty.
A former RUC man, retired from the force because of injury, suddenly went berserk at Ormeau Road residents' spokesman, Gerard Rice. His face contorted and he began to call Rice "an animal". Paxman paled and his usually pugnacious put downs deserted him. It was clear that he just wanted out of there. Back on Prime Time, the balancing act continued.
Orangeman Jeffrey Donaldson characterised the Drumcree march with reference to "hymn tunes and little girls in hands". Seamus Mallon felt that "Billy Wright and thugs and bullies" reflected, more accurately, the reality. Ideologies will always, of course, locate the fulcrum of the balancing act where their ends are best served. Neither Donaldson's nor Mallon's descriptions can be said to be utterly untrue. But common sense, though perhaps less common than we would wish it to be, indicates where the truth lies.
It is not an absolute of course. But neither, crucially, is it absolutely relative. Television, in its ping pong constructs, tends to suggest that it is, thereby allowing interminable chicken and egg arguments to dominate. When the likes of John Bruton feel compelled to speak as he did about the British government's handling of Drumcree, I think you can take it that Jeffrey Donaldson's depiction is less than true. I think television should too. Parity of opportunity to propagandise may be unavoidable, but it needn't be allowed to choke common sense.
AND so to the Stalker Squad. No, not the one which was removed from the North, because the RUC and the British government didn't like what it was saying. The Stalker Squad in question is officially known as the Los Angeles Police Department's Threat Management Unit (LAPDTMU), featured on Inside Story. But most people, not wishing to risk, rupture of the tongue, call LAPDTMU the Stalker Squad.
As the world's premier weirdo magnet, Los Angeles, not surprisingly, is infested with obsessional behaviour types. The most famous of these nutters - a minor celebrity in his own right - is Robert Hoskins, Madonna's stalker. Obviously operating on the advice from the other Bob ("it's good to talk") Hoskins, the stalker version decided to climb over Madonna's wall and have a little chat with her.
Security cameras filmed Bob's escapade. He claims that Madonna is his wife, so for any number of reasons he is, clearly, a very sick puppy. He covered his cell walls with Madonna graffiti and he's now serving a 10 year stretch. Another stalker, Scott Dacey, is obsessed with, wait for this, the Pink Power Ranger, who is played by the British actress/gymnast Sophia Crawford.
It appears that Mr Dacey believes he is the title character of The Punisher comic book. He sends Ms Crawford sex toys and invites her to join him in "cleaning up the world". He has phoned her as often as 30 times a day. But Madonna and the Pink Power Ranger have it easy, by stalker standards. Most of the victims 75 per cent of them women are ordinary people, who are stalked and harassed by ex boyfriends, ex girlfriends, ex husbands and ex wives.
By far the most upsetting case was that of a young black woman, who still bears a bite mark scar on her face, inflicted by her former boyfriend. Like the other victims, she had telephone answering machine tapes of his incessant calls. His suggestions did not make easy listening. But the tenacity of the stalkers was, violence aside, the most alarming aspect of all. "It's not against the law to be in love," one creep (another Bob) kept repeating to police.
He has been stalking his victim, Lynn, for almost 20 years. At present, he has rented an apartment opposite her house and watches her bringing her children to and from school. Both Bob and Lynn are Buddhists. By rejecting him, 19 years ago, when she was 17 and he 18, Bob told police: "She'll do her time in hell, because she's just messed up her karma - big time." More than 90 per cent of US women killed by ex partners are stalked beforehand.
Curiously, many victims feel sadness and guilt, as well as relief, when they get their persecutors locked away. There was much theorising about "loneliness and atomised lives" to explain the rise in stalking. It made sense, in an abstract way. But putting thousands of mentally ill people back on the streets of Weirdoville, USA - the city which thrives on Hollywood orchestrated disproportion - is probably the main culprit.
PROPORTION was also on the mind of former US sprinter, Diane Williams. She told Panorama's Tom Mangold that steroid abuse had distorted her. "I had huge legs and a large libido," she said. An awesome combination indeed.
Seriously weird men had their say too. One bloke recounted how he had clean (i.e. drug free) urine injected into his bladder through his penis. And you thought athletics was good, clean, healthy fun? When dope tested (and, I think, in context, the phrase is the most accurate available) this genuine piss artist would pass the "clean" urine. That was the theory. But he was so riddled with drugs that even the freshly inserted pee was contaminated by the time he had to release it.
In a nutshell, the story is that the vast majority - especially in "power sports" - of world class athletes are using loads of drugs. Most sensible people believe they were at it long before the sanctimonious codswallop about Ben Johnson took root. Now, apart from steroids, there is, allegedly, widespread use of growth hormone and EPO (synthetic testosterone), neither of which can be detected by dope testing. The pharmaceutical companies will have as much input as Coca Cola at the Atlanta Olympics. But that's hardly news.
REMOVING The Spikes (I presume they mean from their feet and not from their arms or back sides) was a fly on the Irish flag look at last year's athletics world championships. As obsessive as stalkers, these sportspeople are seldom publicly seen off stage. In that, this documentary broke new ground, albeit gently. Even so, of course, the main focus, as it is when they are performing, was on Sonia O'Sullivan.
Scoring a slo-mo replay of her victorious 5,000 metres run with Ode To Joy emphasised the contrast of her emotions when confronted with the nonsense about her not carrying an Irish tricolour on a lap of honour. This week, Irish Olympic officials went on a lap of dishonour by trying to foist yesterday's opening ceremony flag carrying on Ms O Sullivan, our best prospect for glory in Atlanta. Going public about her understandable avoidance of this task blew the thing out of all proportion. It was that sort of week.