The secret is in the soaking

If this makes any sense, it will be a minor miracle. Christmas has offered up one week of living as Shane MacGowan has most of his life, and it's all I can do to focus on the keyboard. It only increases my amazement at how Shane MacGowan has the energy to do anything other than grow that increasingly bewildering hair of his, never mind write with such genius. It's a genius that has grafted itself on to the subconscious of the nation, and this is the time of the year that we get the biggest reminder. You can't go 10 minutes without hearing Fairytale of New York being piped from a radio, supermarket, lift, pub or busker.

You Scumbags, You Maggots, You Cheap Lousy Faggots told the story of the song, and was most enjoyable for the fact that it played us so many versions, from the original cassette recording to some US metal band doing their best to kill it, although there was no airing of Christy Moore's excellent live recording and too many of the criminal Phil Coulter arrangement for the anti-MacGowan that is Ronan Keating. MacGowan wasn't asked what he thought of Keating's version. Or maybe he was, but the answer couldn't be broadcast. You get the feeling that Keating would disintegrate if MacGowan so much as breathed on him. He sang it with Maire Brennan, turning what MacGowan called "the nastiest Christmas single ever" into a non-nastiness-related-Christmas jingle.

Watching If I Should Fall From Grace, a documentary on the life of MacGowan, only confounded the bafflement at how this shambling, drunken, yellow-fingered, black-gummed wreck could have written Fiesta and Summer in Siam and A Rainy Night in Soho. Like all the great survivors of art, he has proven a pilgrimage to journalists, a Hunter S. Thompson-esque character, always guaranteed to give good copy over triple gin and tonics, slurring something profound before delivering the chainsaw laugh. But if he is a caricature, he is protected from ridicule by how he can turn superficial ugliness into a unique beauty. "He had a brilliant brain. He still has," said his dad. Some billion brain cells later. As all Christmas chefs know, then, the secret is in the soaking, although you wouldn't want to swap places with him.

They must dread the arrival of Christmas in soapland. The distant thunder of the reindeer's hoofs sends a collective shiver down the spines of the populations of Emmerdale, Carrigstown, Walford and Weatherfield. Things always go off with an extra bang. Planes fall on towns, affairs get exposed, people get bumped off. They bring tidings of comfort and joy. Hide under the sofa.

EastEnders poured so much arsenic into the Christmas pudding this year it was too much to take. Two episodes on Christmas Day, involving all the seasonal treats of alcoholism, sexual abuse, prostitution and baby-snatching. The baby in question belongs to Phil Mitchell, who crashed down the door to the Fowler household, grabbed the child, tucked her under his arm and crashed back out again. On the street Phil took the baby, and simpered: "It's mine."

Seeing daddy and daughter together made you realise how much she looks like him too. The problem is that all babies look like the pink, bald, whinging Phil. It is a paternity case that could affect the whole world.

That was the early showing of EastEnders, a relative fun-fest compared with the later programme which brought us all the Christmas cheer that you can have in domestic violence. I didn't watch it. Merry Christmas my arse. Please God it's the last.

This was the year when Fair City out-EastEndered EastEnders, if you catch my drift. It represented a small victory in a year of defeats for RT╔. It has not been a good year for a lot of reasons, but as far as what goes on to the screen, the slide in ratings will have been a huge concern.

The days of a million people watching The Late Late Show are long gone. TV3 aired the most watched programme at one point during the summer - even if that was British soap and former-RT╔ import Coronation Street. RT╔'s big ratings winners - The Late Late Show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire - are deflating balloons. And there is the uncomfortable sense of dΘjα vu about much of what we are watching.

In 2001 the penchant for buying British imports mutated into one that took those formats and put them into an Irish context. It's a plan that probably works well in other countries which don't have the original programmes pumped in from Britain in the first place. So, we got more of the over-familiar Millionaire, which has yet to actually produce a millionaire. We got the diverting Treasure Island and the anodyne Popstars. TV3 got in on the act with The Weakest Link as presented by the badly mis-cast, but well paid for it, Eamon Dunphy. Overall, watching Irish television is increasingly like watching a bad photocopy of British television.

If RT╔'s drama output proved anything, it's that it might be wiser to look forward a little more. Rebel Heart and Random Passage proved minor disasters; the Civil War drama was extremely unengaging, and the Oirish emigrants mini-series was dictated by the prejudices of the co-producers in Canada. Beckett On Film, however, proved a totally worthwhile experience. All 17 Beckett plays brought to the screen, it may not have exactly topped the ratings, but it was the truest example of public service broadcasting, a valuable archive of the works and ambitious, dull, baffling and enthralling in equal measure. Just as Beckett should be.

How quickly we forget, but Glenroe went quietly early in the year, and On Home Ground was supposed to be the rural drama replacement, but failed to be anything near as enjoyable. The real success came with Bachelors Walk, which ran as part of Network 2's impressive Monday home-grown comedy night but which handled the drama as well as it did the laughs.

It also proved the sharpest take in a year when RT╔ seemed to belatedly take stock of contemporary Ireland. Unfortunately, the documentary series, Boomtown, was not so definitive as it might have hoped to be, while sitcom The Cassidys attracted a level of ridicule to the station not seen since . . . well, since the last time RT╔ did a sitcom.

True Lives, meanwhile, has proved indispensable. The documentary series has attracted 300 pitches from production companies for its next series, and more than anything it proved that RT╔'s increasing reliance on the competitive, ambitious independent sector will have positive benefits. Endgame In Ireland was also important television, an excellent companion to Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick's stunning history of the peace process. Nurses did its best to stick its nose in to the unpleasant realities of hospital life, and found the nurses themselves only too willing to make sure it wasn't feel-good television.

Meanwhile, Duncan Stewart proved that he's a singular television personality and a little more than just a bloke pottering about building sites, with The State We're In, the impressively shot and revealing series on exactly what we're doing to our environment.

If there is a station that points the way for RT╔ it is TG4. Unencumbered by the politics and arrogance which has acted as a dead weight to the national broadcaster, TG4 celebrated its fifth birthday as a station that doesn't simply reflect the trendification of the Irish language, but takes a lead. There is a youth and sureness among its programmes that increasingly makes RT╔ look like dad trying to be cool in front of the kids.

Of all they made this year, it is the consistently entertaining Am· San ┴ise which stood out most. That red-headed jackhammer of a presenter Hector O'Heochagain taps into the backpacker gene that runs through the Irish youth, and if it wasn't for the limitations placed on it by the language, it would have made a lot of money in international sales by now.

The success, though, doesn't stop the criticism that TG4 has blurred the lines by buying in big movies in which you will not find Tom Cruise speaking fluent Irish. At least there's a sense of proportion about the station.

The only alternative which TV3 provides is the choice of whether to watch Emmerdale and Coronation Street on an Irish or British channel. It continues to run on the notion that it can only attract viewers and advertising by buying up top-rated British soaps from RT╔. Even when it did come up with its own production, it was a variation on that theme with the tepid The Weakest Link. It's an understandable tactic, but not a convincing one while the station continues to hold back on home-produced television. One has to dig deep into the dustier parts of the memory banks to recall anything else of real interest.

Only the understated, under-watched Agenda prevented the station from finally disappearing beneath a quicksand of imported dramas, awful TV movies and blanket Champion's League football. The New Year sees the station involving itself in its first film, co-producing Bloody Sunday with Jim Sheridan's Hell's Kitchen. It needs to be the spark of something much bigger or the personality of the station is in danger of fizzling out altogether.

Across the water, both east and west of us, we continue to benefit from television being paid for by others. The Office and People Like Us proved to be the zenith of the TV mockumentary, both being so rich in humour it was hard to take it all in. Spaced, meanwhile, brought comedy to the chemical generation in a way that will age quickly but was great while it lasted. With its satire on news treatment of paedophilia, Brass Eye took comedy to places it had never been before, and to which many thought it shouldn't have gone at all. In gloriously predictable fashion, the media coverage which followed, most notably the widely repeated soundbites of one politician who hadn't even seen the show, went as far as possible to prove that Chris Morris was right all along.

In terms of drama, The Sopranos continues to remind us that even in the age of telly vets and home-video calamities and reality game shows, television has the power in it to be great art. It did have a rival, though, in Band of Brothers, the 10-parter following the fortunes of US paratroopers as they liberated Europe. It was extraordinary at times, portraying war with a veracity and strange beauty unseen before. It is made all the sweeter by knowing that there will never be another series.

Of course, there was really only one image that will be remembered from this year. Television became a prime character in September 11th, overwhelmed a little at first, but one which defined an event previously only imagined in the heads of Hollywood scriptwriters. For all the gratuity which television engages in, the blanket decision not to repeatedly show clips of the planes crashing into the towers proved a surprising act of sensitivity.

All the same, things returned to the norm of the news stations turning the whole thing into a production. John Simpson typified it by marching into Kabul while declaring that the BBC had liberated it. He later apologised for it, but the damage had been done.

Although there was the unexpected side-effect:it pointed out to us that there was a whole world out there in which people don't get their information from Sky or CNN or the BBC. Al-Jazeera, a station available to digital viewers, suddenly became one of the most closely watched on the planet.

On that day, though, one set of images was watched across the globe by anyone who could get to a television set, and it is those which will define 2001 for many years to come.

tvreview@irish-times.ie

Celebrating 40 years of RT╔ Television: Weekend 16