PUT it down to obtuseness, bloody mindedness or a twisted sense of humour, but the decision by the BBC to choose last night of all nights to broadcast the first episode of Safe And Sound must take the biscuit for bizarre scheduling of the year. Perhaps the thought was that a gentle comedy about sectarian divisions in Belfast might persuade everyone to see the funny side of things. If so, it would have been helpful to have had some real jokes, which were sadly absent in the opening programme.
True, it usually takes a while for a comedy drama to find its feet, but the omens are not good.
Given the length of time it takes to produce a television series, it's clear Safe And Sound was gestated during the ceasefire period, and it certainly has that "they think it's all over" feeling (it isn't now). Sean McGinley and Des McAleer play (Protestant) Dougy Flynn and (Catholic) Tommy Delaney, friends and workmates in a garage off the lower Ormeau Road. Dougy is the nominal boss but Tommy is the one with the mechanical skills.
In the first episode, the likely lads struggled with their respective spouses and became involved in a local controversy about the marriage plans of two young lovers from opposite sides of the divide. It emerged that Dougy hadn't married his true love years before because she dug with the wrong foot.
McGinley and McAleer wrestled unhappily with unwieldy lines that had none of the crackle and fizz of the city's slang as American born, London based screenwriter Timothy Prager displayed a tin ear not just for the unique modulations of Belfast English, but for believable, workable dialogue.
It's a shame to see good actors wasted on such inferior material (you could tell Tommy's sister Eleanor (Michelle Fairley) was Catholic because she mentioned Packie Bonner and the Guildford Four).
People in the North get cheesed off (rightly) about depictions of them on screen by outsiders. This is an independent production for BBC Northern Ireland, but all the key creative personnel are from the "mainland", presumably because that's where the writing and directing skills are believed to be. It's striking, therefore, how crudely made Safe And Sound is awkwardly shot and jarringly edited, with an intrusive music score.
With the success of Ballykissangel, it's not surprising BBC NI fancied having another crack at soft comedy, and it must have seemed like a good idea last year to try and do an Only Fools And Horses type of programme set in Belfast, but Ballykissangel is a much more competent, assured effort than this, and the hour long episodes allow some space for its gentle rhythms.
Half hour comedy needs to be snappier, but perhaps snappiness isn't possible when you're walking on eggshells. Surely, though, somebody in Broadcasting House could have cried stop when they saw the scripts?
DANNY Boy: In Sunshine Or In Shadow started off well but descended into bathos. "It's a song about love conquering death, knowhorrimean?" leered Shane McGowan through magnificently ruined teeth, and you held out hope that a sense of humour might be at work behind the camera.
Eric Clapton offered the thought that the song was "very Irish but it works anywhere - you could sing it at a cocktail party ... it's like Abide With Me". (What sort of cocktail parties does Clapton go to?) Other members of the rockerati proffered their versions of the famous song, from Marianne Faithfull's nicotine stained Weimar workout to Sinead O'Connor's generic "I am Irishwoman, watch me bleed" rendition.
Most of the protagonists seemed understandably underwhelmed by the whole enterprise, with the exception of John Hume, looking happier than he has in months as he described Danny Boy as "a moving story about our history". Nobody seemed to find anything ridiculous about the maudlin, mother fixated Victorian lyrics, devised in the middle of the last century by English lawyer Fred Weatherley, but there was an attempt to suggest that Danny Boy represented a shared culture between the island's two warring tribes - boxers Barry McGuigan and James Webb both cried in the ring when it was played, after all.
Brian Keenan believed it might make a good national anthem for a new Ireland. Perhaps he's right; after all, lachrymose sentimentality is a tradition shared equally by both communities.
The best version by far came from the late, great Jackie Wilson in a magnificent archive performance, taking the song by the scruff of the neck, wrenching it out of the parlour and into the dancehall with a thrilling, soaring sound. It served to remind yet again that if it weren't for black Americans, white people would still be standing around the piano singing Come Into The Garden Maud.
THE centrality of black music to modern pop culture has been the dominant theme of BBC 2's Dancing In The Street: A Rock And Roll History, which this week arrived at the messy, snarling birth of punk, and the crossover with reggae. With a series like this, at some point your personal number comes up, and you're brought face to face with the faded icons of your own adolescence. Very well they look, too - it soon became apparent to this ageing fan that the Blank Generation have not been starving themselves over the last 20 years. John Lydon, Steve Jones and Richard Hell are all twice the guys they used to be. The amphetamine fuelled, skinny young hellraisers have become men of some substance, sleek and tanned and cheerful.
The only two people who seemed not to have changed at all were Patti Smith and Joey Ramone (confirming this writer's long held suspicion that they're actually the same person). For survivors of a movement supposedly based on nihilism and anarchy, everybody was being astonishingly nice about each other, with the honourable exception of Lydon, who can still muster some venom ("all those bands like the Police doing duff versions of reggae - I couldn't stand all that stuff"). The story - from New York artrock through British tabloid frenzy to commercial success - was told competently enough, but it's the clips that make Dancing In The Street worth watching most memorably the Sex Pistols hurtling through Anarchy In The UK as chaos spreads around them. Dancing hi The Street is addictive viewing for pop music addicts, although it tries to cram too much into some programmes, and the fact that it's an American co production causes it to stretch at the seams sometimes - for some unfathomable reason, Nirvana were tacked on to the end of this week's programme.
COMEDIAN Barry Murphy went on an extended walkabout around Kilkenny for Barry Murphy's Cat Laughs, a half hour documentary about the city's comedy festival. Murphy is a talented, deadpan comic but his abilities were put to the test by the strained format, which had him gallivanting around the city in search of interviews and drink. It's obviously a problem when comedians don't want their performances filmed hut, with so many funny people in town, it was a mistake to concentrate on festival director Richard Cook to the exclusion of the talented roster he had attracted to Kilkenny. Whatever they may themselves think, arts administrators are best advised to stay behind the scenes where they belong, and leave the entertaining to the entertainers.
The footage of the live shows was frustratingly short, but Irish comedians Eddie Bannon and Alex Lyons took some well aimed shots at the smugness of Gerry Ryan and 98 FM.
Cat Laughs, with all its flaws, was a triumph of quality programme making compared to the first episode in Peter McNiff's new series Making Waves, about Irish emigrants' experiences overseas. Joe Cooke is an engineer and management consultant originally from Galway, who was instrumental in the restructuring of the Telegraph newspaper group in London during the 1980s. Unlike Uncle Alo in Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Cooke's claim to fame was not that he had "10 men under him", but that he got nearly 3,000 men out from under the feet of his company. When Rupert Murdoch launched his Wapping revolution, Cooke followed suit in the Telegraph in 1986. Of 3,500 non journalist staff at the group, 700 remained when he'd finished the job.
One can argue the point about what happened in the British newspaper industry in the 1980s - certainly, companies were being strangled by restrictive practices and overmanning, and many would have failed had there not been radical changes. But You would hardly have known from Making Waves that there was any trauma involved in the mass redundancies which followed. The camera roamed admiringly around the futuristic landscapes of Canary Wharf and craned in on Cooke's luxurious riverfront apartment - the boy from the Claddagh done good in the big smoke.
We flicked through a photo album with shots of him aboard the Royal Yacht, we travelled along as he played a round of golf, and we saw his pleasant house in Sheffield. This was embarrassing provincialist sycophancy dressed up as personal history - we found out very little about Cooke's opinions about modern business practices in the UK, beyond some bland truisms about the changing nature of work. The place of the emigrant in modern Irish culture is ambiguous and complex, and well to do Irish Tories in Britain are an interesting and unusual subject for a good television programme. This was not it.