IT'S hard to know what to write about a New Year's Eve special which featured such a rainbow of items: copulating rabbits; guide dogs in training; a choir of orphans; a New Year baby; junior infants' hopes for 1996; the Dun Laoghaire lifeboat; yachting; Albert Reynolds; Professor Susan McKenna Lawlor; Brendan O'Carroll as a roving reporter in Jury's Hotel and Holles Street Hospital; Jonathan Philbin Bowman, Valerie Sweeney, Maxine Brady, Pauline McLynn and Clare McKeon as studio guests; inserts about a European award for Kinsale and 23 new jobs at Dublin airport; excerpts from old Frank Hall and Mike Murphy shows; Ronnie Drew, Who's Eddie? and Full Circle as the musical talent; Barry Murphy as the comedian; Derek Davis as the presenter and a rerun of Rosaleen Linehan singing Soap Your Arse and Slide Backwards up a Rainbow.
It's hard to know. Perhaps "soap your rainbow and slide it backwards up ...
would be the best advice to RTE, for this was, truly, a show from the depths. In themselves, many of the people - the presenter and performers - are competent TV types. But mixed together like this, with neither rhyme nor reason, It's That Time of Year ... Again, showed that at this time of year RTE has cocked up spectacularly ... again!
On the previous New Year's Eve, we were given Daniel O'Donnell in a virgin white suit, doing a sort of Lourdes meets Las Vegas, gig. Kissing, touching, stroking and bugging his mostly fiftysomething fans, who resented him with gifts and flowers messianic Daniel drifted through his audience like a singing teleyangelis. It was cultish and alarmingly Bible beltish, but, at least, it was possible to react to it. It had an identity and a coherence.
It's That Time of Yeat . . . Again had neither. From shagging rabbits to rocket launches, with an Albert Reynolds inter view (albeit a reasonably interesting interview) in between, the show was as makeshift and shattered, as Man. United's defence at Spurs. Within minutes of the start, it was clear that Derek Davis was embarrassed by the talkiness of it all. He as much as said so. But even his repeated denunciations, which might have given the show, a comically manic theme of self deprecation, became duller as 1995 ebbed away. Davis, didn't disintegrated dramatically - he, like the rest of us, just got fed up and depressed.
Perhaps the random nature of the programme was to be expected. It was produced "in association with the National Lottery" but it didn't produce anything read a funny emigration poem and Ronnie Drew sang well. Derek Davis struggled against impossible odds, but it was a New Year's Eve show from hell. How anybody ever thought that it might work or that it was fit to offer to a licence paying public is astonishing.
It was so flaccid that it is impossible to be even properly angry about it. Like a cheap Christmas stocking, there was everything in it, yet there was nothing in it. In one sense, it was, I suppose, the ultimate variety show. But it was variety without meaning. The most thematic thing about it all was that there was scarcely any discernible relationships between any of the various elements of the show. It was some start to the year for RTE: "eclectic" is the showbiz word; "dog's dinner", the reality.
TO be fair to the home channels a number of profile and tribute documentaries, screened midweek, had much to recommend them.
The "Bloody Sunday priest", Edward Daly; the Connemara sean nos singer, Joe Heaney; the Crumlin rocker, Phil Lynott; and the comedy writer Gerry McNamara were featured in an unusually rich RTE week for this kind of programme.
Of the four, only Edward Daly is alive. Known in Derry, where he later became bishop, as "Hanky Daly", he spoke over footage from Bloody Sunday, in The Darkest Days - Edward Daly Remembers. There he was, almost a quarter of a century younger, waving that hanky in front of a small group carrying the dying teenager Jack Duddy to an ambulance. I'm satisfied in my mind that it was mass murder that day," he said.
He remembered arriving in Derry as a curate in 1962. Some of the little two bedroom Bogside houses had up to 29 people living in them. "People think of the visual aspects of poverty, but I still remember the smell of poverty from those times, he said. On then to the civil rights marches - Duke Street and Burntollet - the responses of the RUC and the Paisleyites and the slide towards the North's most bloody years.
Inevitably, Edward Daly will always be synonymous with Bloody Sunday. But he spoke movingly 190 about the IRA killing (for which, he insists, the wrong two people were convicted of a British army soldier - a young, Leeds Irish man, Michael Ryan. "The working class were dying on all sides, he added, correctly. But was it ever any different, and did any Church leaders - Catholic or Protestant say this often enough when it most needed to be said?
As Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly did not consider the IRA hunger strikes to be suicide and he still holds this opinion. "Some people might disagree with me on that. I respect the right to disagree, he said. He banned paramilitary funerals from Derry churches, but was fortunately blessed, indeed to be in London, when the funeral of the paramilitary son in law of one of his best friends took place in a Derry church. , ,
The orgy of criticism of John Home "from Dublin sources" he felt to be "deeply offensive". Provo punishment beatings - "people had taken a claw hammer to a man's knuckles" - he found, repulsive. Yet, it was clear that Edward Daly spoke with a firm belief that the worst is over in the North. He's 61 now, had a stroke two years ago and was an ideal subject for Joe Mulholland's TV memoir. You just have to hope that his hope is not misplaced.
THE best of the " four portrait/tribute programmes was Joe Heaney: Sing The Dark Away. Heaney was a magnificent sean nos singer and a disastrous husband and father. But this documentary, produced and directed by Michael Davitt, loved its subject and his gift with a winning enthusiasm. Joe, it seems, could be pretty prickly - awkward and headstrong - but that voice seemed to command people to forgive a lot.
In many ways, Heaney seemed like a man from another century. He looked like a healthier Sam Beckett and lived the wandering life of a spailpin fanach. Leaving Connemara, he moved to Dublin, Glasgow, London and New York - a sort of western migrant's grand slam - taking in spells off the most beaten tracks to work and sing in Southampton Texas and Seattle, where he died in 1984.
The O Donoghues generation, are getting hardy now. Ronnie Drew, who is the same age as Edward Daly (if the New Year's Eve show hasn't put years on him) remembered Joe Heane singing the bawdy ballad Seven Drunken Nights. Journalist Joe Kennedy said that he remembered thinking that Heaney, was the real thing, the authentic folk voice, among the fashionable folk boom of the 1960s.
No doubt he was. Old footage from pubs in Camden Town and the Lion's Head in Greenwich Village evoked the 1960s and the documentary seemed admirably researched. Perhaps it might have included more of Joe Heaney singing - the University of Washington Music School in Seattle seems to have a large collection of Heaney recordings. But, really, this was a fine documentary.
The point was made that Joe Heaney's audience in America was mostly composed of the formally educated middle class. His songs and style, it was argued, forged a link with a sad past which many Irish people there wanted to forget. There is something terribly sad about authenticity becoming acceptable only when it's not dangerous any more. It doesn't make it unauthentic but it does dilute the power.
THE driving guitars of Thin Lizzy sound so dated now that Whiskey In The Jar is a sort of sean nos rock. Blasted out in the Crumlin style - all Dublin with a cocky 1970s aggro attitude - it still sounds splendid. Shay Healy's The Rocker - A Portrait of Phil Lynott was screened to mark the 10th anniversary of Phil's death from drugs. As, a tribute, it worked well - it spoke to the right people.
As a portrait, it had the same sort of affection for its subject as Michael Davitt had for Joe Heaney. All that is understandable. It was clear that those who knew him liked Phil Lynott, but there might have been more said about his need to buy the whole nine yards of the rock lifestyle to the point of death from heroin. "Drugs were not the only reason we separated. He was a troubled soul," said his widow Caroline. No doubt.
Still, for those 1960s Dublin heads who preferred a flagon of cider and a Skid. Row concert to a beer and ballads seisiun in O'Donoghues, this was a nostalgic trip around Lynott's Old Town. Bono made the point that Lynott was much more of a Dub than he will ever be and this is true.
"Phil reckoned he was a hard man from Crumlin who could take anything," said one contributor. But the break up of his marriage and the break up of his band, Thin Lizzy, seemed to coincide with his increasing use of the needle. Perhaps there was an inevitable chicken and egg dimension to it all, but nobody was saying which caused which. Maybe nobody really knows.
GERRY McNamara, who died a couple of months ago, was remembered, on Nighthawk. His scripts, which included such notables as Saint Brenda, the leper nun of Benidorm, Sean the transvestite farmer, a mad Darina Allen cooking with live snakes; Cork people in space, kinky bishops and a rabid Father Michael Cleary (accusing Irish proabortionists of, assassinating JFK) reminded us of a brief and rare time when RTE comedy was funny.
Mind you, when one of the four female presenters on Beyond The Hall Door, a new interior design series, started talking about the role of "homo erectus" in the history of cooking, it was clear that RTE humour can still sprout when, least expected. But, as a consumer magazine a sort of Head To Toe meets Our House - this series has promise, though on the evidence of its first episode, it may need to tame down. I'll probe further beyond its hall door in a few weeks.
