Sex 'n' Death - (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Prime Time - (RTE 1, Thursday)
Sports Personality of the Century - (BBC 1, Sunday)
Imprint (RTE 1, Thursday)
Nubile Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Jewish women mud-wrestled in bikinis to establish which was "the one true faith". (Naturally the Taig-babe won - proof of the convent-educated might which simple Irish lads have been grappling with for generations.) A TV host offered £5,000 to the first member of his twenty-something studio audience to strip naked. Men had, first, live crabs, then randy ferrets, stuffed down their trousers. A live beaver was split in two by a cleaver-wielding Ulrika Johnson and you can guess the double entendre of the promo for this delight. After such hearty warm-ups, the action got seriously sleazy.
Intended as a satire on the current vogue for trash television, Sex 'n' Death featured Martin Clunes as Ben Black, the fervid host of a top-rated, cable TV sleazeathon of the same name as the drama. Passionately dedicated to pushing back the frontiers of taste and decency in an out-of-control obsession to win ratings, Black had long ago embraced the Faustian pact that is TV fame. Of course, he faced competition too. A rival, equally messianic sleazemeister named Neil Biddle (ring a bell?) drew from the same sewer of pranks, stunts, hoaxes and numbing excess. Things were always likely to end in tears.
Black's and Biddle's shows were the type that would consider being described as "as entertaining as a bucket of vomit" as a rave review, the sort of encomium to highlight in PR and advertising promotions. That is, until one of them might merit comparison with a barrel of rancid pus or . . . (use your own imagination) . . . because that is the trajectory of trash TV, which seeks to shock, titillate and disgust in ever greater measure. But there is, of course, a price to be paid, not just by the viewers (though that is the most important) but by the presenters and producers of such offal.
So we get to see Black's disintegration as he mercilessly exploits his lovers, colleagues and rivals. Breaking down all barriers, he becomes lonely, paranoid, drug-dependent, insomniac. With no barriers left, he inevitably ends up with no markers for guidance. He has escaped the gravitational pull of Earthly ethics but cannot rid himself of his addiction to ratings. At one point, he seeks a bereaved spouse who, in return for a holiday in the Bahamas, will allow a partner's corpse to decompose on air throughout a series of his show.
He finds one, too, and therein was a metaphor for Black's dominant justification: it's the public's fault; we only give the punters what their prurience demands; if they had any taste, they should switch off this putrefaction. But he knows that it's the old car-crash syndrome - you can't look, yet you can't look away. In a screaming media where hard neck seeks to portray itself as talent and indeed, where shameless hard neck does grab viewers, listeners and readers on the car-crash principle, the future is bleak.
"I'll be an old has-been like Chris Evans," wails Black, before rattling on about his fears of an usurping young Turk as he imagines an unspeakable, live TV encounter between "a 19-year-old and his granny". Well, even television hasn't stooped quite that low - at least as yet - but the blame for taboo-busting (especially when those taboos protect greater freedoms than they offend) is a contentious matter. Put it this way: who's worse - you or Jerry Springer? He orchestrates a demeaning, tacky, high-farce circus of emotional masturbation and you (or I) watch.
OK, it's staged and it's not quite the Roman Colosseum or the Parisian guillotine but cruelty is a crucial part of the currency of trash TV. Realising and exploiting this, Black threatens to shoot himself on air if, first, viewers don't switch off (most won't) and second, the director doesn't fade the screen to black. When she does, there is a silence before, surprise, surprise, a shot rings out. It turns out to be another black Black prank, of course - but most importantly, Black is sure, another ratings-booster. Meanwhile Biddle, loser of a tit-for-tat series of "honey-pot" traps, which the rival sleazemeisters screen about each other, does commit suicide alone. Naturally the ambulance men who find him believe he's just pretending.
Given the grossness of so much of Sex 'n' Death's parody, the BBC could be accused of simply screening what it's railing against. But that seems a little cheap, like the tabloids' defence that the broadsheets recount tabloid scandals with a bogus, high moral tone which seeks to justify inclusion of the sleazy bits. This can, of course, be the main motive and even greater levels of prurience can be evoked by more reputable media outfits rerelaying scandal. But it needn't be; and with common decencies increasingly under threat, the last thing we need is for satire to be castrated.
There were uneven and clunky aspects to Guy Jenkin's (half of the team which wrote Drop The Dead Donkey) script. The stunts and hoaxes were rather predictable, which, you might argue, deliberately lessened shock in order to ward off the charge that the Beeb was merely doing what it was ridiculing. Perhaps, but even so, it inevitably lowered dramatic tension. Still, though pedestrian as drama, this one was sharp as satire - a 1990s reworking of the 1970s Hollywood film Network. Ironically it restored some faith in television by trashing it, reminding you that, at some levels, the medium needn't be the message at all. It's shamelessness looking in the mirror and seeing talent that we need to monitor, because the sewer which beckons these codgers is practically infinite.
HATRED in Kosovo seems equally infinite and we shouldn't be surprised. The truth about the butchery there is still coming in, even if the truth about the war remains debatable and elusive. Prime Time screened Michael Heney's follow-up documentary Baby Adriana's Return To The Future. It was, as all the best Kosovo coverage is, a cautionary tale about the genocidal impulses unleashed when propaganda ignites atavistic misconceptions about identity. But there is a quieter, lulling, Western propaganda emanating from Kosovo now and it, too, will have long-term consequences.
Heney's film sought and found ethnic Albanians he had interviewed last April when the conflict was raging. Back then they were either fleeing or had fled Kosovo. Now they have returned to the shells of their burned-out homes, their villages with charred corpses and mass graves. Few are inclined towards forgiveness and that is only human. The emotional traumas of these returned refugees will be transmitted to future generations. Time will dilute the traumas, of course, but nobody can expect eradication.
Horrors recounted included a middle-aged woman recalling how her husband, son and nephew had been taken from her and executed. Her pain had seeped into her marrow and now all she feels she can do is wait for her young, surviving son to "grow up and get revenge". A former neighbour was prominent among the murderers. The place seethes with such impulses towards personal and ethnic revenge which threatens all Serbs, guilty and innocent, who remain in Kosovo. "Albanians were burning their own houses . . . the mass graves are fakes, they are the mass graves of Serbs . . . we didn't do anything bad," said one Serb in the village of Gorasdevac, now fenced off like a concentration camp and guarded by heavily-armed KFOR soldiers.
Of course, Serb denial is as predictable as Albanian hatred. We know their agendas: the Serbs want the rule of Belgrade restored; the Albanians want an independent Kosovo. But the agenda which matters is that of "the international community", which, in effect, is a euphemism for the United States of America. That is the foreseeable future to which baby Adriana and the rest of the refugees have returned. The head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, preferred to speak in illogical, evasive and aspirational rather than concrete terms: "We didn't know it was impossible. But we'll do it. That is the UN way. You'll see."
Indeed we will. This documentary did find the human side of Kosovo's horror. Given the rawness of the wounds - villagers are still disinterring and reburying their relatives and friends - the emotional tone was not inappropriate. But in a few years from now, the agenda of those in control will slip from altruistically "humanitarian" to selfishly human. Given the lessons of world history, the best that Kosovo can hope for is a comparatively benevolent economic despotism. It is to be hoped that Michael Heney will produce more periodic follow-up documentaries on Kosovo. Just because the old propaganda was murderous doesn't mean the new will bring justice. That's not the way these things work.
IN lighter vein, BBC's Sports Personality Of The Century gave its title to Muhammad Ali. It was, given the cusp of marked time on which we now sit, a nostalgic moment. In his heyday, Ali was often said to be the best-known person on the planet. Given his looks, personality, talent and American domination of communication systems, this was probably true. But Parkinson's Disease, surely accelerated by boxing on too long, has reduced this 20th-century icon almost to speechlessness. Is it eulogising or patronising to say that the greatest, or at any rate, most entertaining motormouth of all, now struck dumb, still retains his dignity?
Certainly those of us who, as children, considered it a precious treat to be allowed get up in the early hours of the morning to watch him win and repeatedly retain the World Heavyweight title, want him to remain dignified and unsullied. But he has paid such a huge price for fame that he, too, is a cautionary tale. He, or more accurately his legend, represents the triumph of brilliance over brutality (though, in boxing, even the classiest winners thump opponents unconscious), science over savagery, the individual against the state.
He is not unique in these qualities, of course, but his involvement in mega-profile sport and mega-profile politics (the front and back pages of the world's press; the tops and tails of the world's news bulletins) and his peculiar "vulnerable braggart" personality - connected with people. Perhaps these are classical qualities, equally attractive for all time. More likely, they are of a time and place in which events conspired to give Ali a spectacular blooming before his long, slow, inexorable withering. I'll bet that the Sports Personality of the 21st Century will be a different kind of creature. He or she (probably a Catholic she!) will likely be sponsored, if not owned, by a biochemical outfit.
Finally, Imprint. For the last in the current series, presenter Theo Dorgan assembled four reviewers: archivist Catriona Crowe, novelist Ita Daly, academic Derek Hand and barrister Peter Ward. Hugh Leonard was the writer interviewed and the "Footnotes" section of the programme discussed children's books for Christmas. With RTE's treatment of the arts yet again causing dissent, it is to be hoped that this uncondescending but engaging books programme is not given the bum's rush in Later With John Kelly fashion. Already, there is far too much screaming, projecting, in-your-face, Sex 'n' Death television. If accountancy deems dumbing-down necessary for ratings, is it too much to ask that at least some of it be done a bit more quietly in the new century?