IT was, to abuse a football cliche a weekend of two halves. Saturday gave us the annual Best fest that is the Eurovision Song Contest Sunday provided a Best fest. Best Night screened to mark George Best's 50th birthday, was a happy hour (happy three hours in fact) cocktail of nostalgia, laddishness and goals. The Best fest, as ever, was a Euro sludge cocktail of mutilated music, "culture" codology and preening presenters.
The Best fest had zest the pest fest, with rare exceptions Eimear Quinn's Voice among them was drivel. Costing £5 million, the 1996 song contest was as tedious as any in memory. The competition is almost beyond parody at this stage, but, even in its awfulness, it is not funny it is a bore, not just because most of the music is dreadful, but because it seeks to be simultaneously spectacular and safe. It is, as such, an impossibility designed to excite and to deaden at the same time.
The omens were bad from the start. A pop singer named Morten Harket, who looked like a sort of Nordic Nick Nolte, sidled on stage and began to sing "Heaven's not for saints/ You only have one cup/ Now you've filled it up/ Let it go... babe" As he paused before injecting "babe" with soul searing profundity, Morten curled a lip, narrowed his eyes and tried to smoulder like a wet sack. Later, he would treat us to his dry humour as he flirted with his co presenter, Ms Ingvild Bryn.
When the eh, music began, we were agreeably assaulted by a selection of killer mini dresses. Turkey, the United Kingdom (shorn of the Six Counties), Malta, Croatia, Belgium and Sweden sought the Pretty Polly route to victory. So high were the hemlines that we might have been watching a vest fest. Between songs, we saw promos for the host country's enterprise. The Brits were introduced by Virginia Bottomley and the Norwegian aluminium industry.
On and on it went, interminably. Twenty three songs, punctuated by Pat Kenny offering such gems as "By the way, the light used tonight, 1.6 megawatts, is enough to power a town the size of Balbriggan." Why should the permanent traffic jam that is Balbriggan have been dragged into this? Even a wet weekend in Balbriggan would have been more entertaining. Perhaps the interval act would rescue the mess. Yeah, and maybe Balbriggan, north Dublin's City of Light, will stage the Olympics before long.
A Norwegian woman in national costume sang a 500 year old Norwegian song on top of a five million year old Norwegian mountain. Or, maybe it was that a 590 year old Norwegian woman sang a five million year old Norwegian song. Either way, between the start and finish of the song (which felt like five million years) bondage dancers, jugglers and fire eaters leapt around the stage. There were, in fairness, some spectacular shots of musicians on cliff edges, light houses, cable cars and oil rigs.
But, by then, the sheer volume of tripe had induced another Euro depression. And there was still the "virtual reality voting" to come. Morten went off to smoulder with the contestants and Ingvild took charge. The UK, Spain, Croatia and Iceland gave Ireland no votes. But the rest of Europe sniggered as they handed the poisoned chalice back to RTE. Eimear Quinn, in stark contrast to the girls in vests, looked like a great white virgin and had sung too well.
Now the nonsense of being penalised for winning has struck again. With seven wins in all and four in five years, the joke has worn too thin. The thing has become a pest, draining resources from an RTE which desperately needs more and better home produced TV programmes. In the 1990s alone, RTE is on course to spend about £10 million on a song contest, which, in its present form of bloated inanity, has become not only pointless, but increasingly insulting to its audience. If RTE has to have it, then a cheapie with sharp humour is a better bet than an extravagant, boring PR monster.
AT a time when journeyman footballers, not fit to lace George Best's drinks never mind his boots, are making fortunes, Best Night restored a sense of proportion to soccer. Fifty last Wednesday Best remains hugely popular because the mazy dribble of his life has seen him ghost past defenders, run up countless cult de sac including chronic alcoholism and a spell in the nick and still emerge with the ball.
Other than a few sound bites from Best's son, Calum, and the recently recorded Michael Parkinson interview, there was really little new in Best Night. But tribute programmes are like that and, anyway, Best's story is so well known that it has long since attained the status of a modern fable it is the act of recounting the known facts which gives pleasure. George has often said that he played professional football with the abandon of a kid playing a street game and while this may be only partly true, it indicates his desire to be thought of as elemental a boy man unshackled by convention.
His legendary drinking and womanising are of the same order. It is, as if, in some way, he has managed to remain stuck at 19. Of course, lots of older men remain stuck at 19, but the result is almost always pathetic probably because they were no great shakes at 19 to begin with. But, some how, George Best has carried it off just about, mind. There are some suspicions of offside about the public show the greying beard, the 23 year old new wife, the only half admitted miseries but the combination of grit and swagger in the fable is winning.
There is too, the matter of the alleged 2,000 lovers. Surely, even for George Best, this figure is as inflated as a modern transfer deal. It is, perhaps, bizarre to consider a time of such rampant rumpo, a lost age of innocence. But, since AIDS, grand scale sexual adventuring indeed, even what might, ironically, be termed, modest promiscuity has an air of menace. Quite simply, modern sexual warriors are a dying breed.
Curiously inexplicably, in fact Best's choice of his 10 top goals omitted the winner against Real Madrid at Old Trafford in the first leg of the 1968 European Cup semi final. An angled half volley, which was hit on the run and required an abrupt change of feet, it was a magnificent score on an occasion as big as Manchester United can play at home. Perhaps one blackout too many has sifted it from Best's memory.
Anyway, Best Night was a tonic for a generation raised on exuberance and now besieged by the rampant mediocrity of middle age. Theme nights on TV are risky because fond memories regularly pale when they are reshown. Would the Best myth withstand the cold recollection of the cameras? Was he really that good? He was not all the time, of course but often enough and extravagantly enough to merit the cultural cachet of having BBC 2 marks his half century with a dedicated night.
BACK in George Best's native Belfast, For God and Ulster Protestant Voices from the North painted a picture of a people who, in spite of Protestantism's generally greater claims (than Catholicism's) on modernity, seemed austerely traditional. Common stereotypes depict Protestants as less fun and less feckless than Catholics (George Best, who played with the flair of the Catholic Brazilians excepted) and, on the evidence of this first of a four part series, the stereotypes appeared true.
This is dodgy ground, of course, and in recognising that fact, the programme adopted a no frills, Presbyterian tone to tell the story. Its main focus was not to dwell on the differences between Catholics and Protestants, but to examine the differences between the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Baptists. For some the Church of Ireland, for instance joint worship with Catholics is encouraged. For others most notably, the Free Presbyterians the Catholic church and the other Protestant churches are "apostate" (i.e. heretical deserters).
Though the focus was firmly on Northern Protestants, Rev Gabrielle Ellis, a Presbyterian minister from the Republic, touched on the differences between Protestants on both sides of the Border. There is greater class diversity among Northern Protestants, of course (working class especially urban working class Protestants in the Republic are rare). But, even though Rev Ellis didn't quite say it, it was hard not to conclude that the flintier Northerners must view their cross Border co-religionists as incurably genteel and soft.
This is a worthwhile series, perhaps, albeit understandably, a little cautious in its approach. What is it that makes so many Northern Protestants appear so rigid to Catholics? Has it anything to do with the fact that the God of the Old Testament is, well, not quite a fun guy (not that the New Testament one is all for drunken orgies with 2,000 lovers)? The psychological differences need examination if the religious and political conflicts are to be reconciled.
IN the run up to the North's elections, Bernadette McAliskey addressed some more immediate issues on Cursai Reatha. She did not paint a hopeful picture for nationalists, arguing that the Northern state will remain largely as it is for some decades yet. In her analysis, she for sees a post talks possibility of the SDLP and Sinn Fein uniting to form an updated version of the North's old Nationalist Party.
Ms McAliskey has always been perceptive on the reality of power, a fact often marginalised by the fear and dislike of the less radicalised towards her prescription for breaching such power. Ironically, her analysis is in accord with that of some cooler, albeit traditional, British historians, who argue that the time has not quite arrived yet for anything as dramatic as Irish unity or even joint authority.
Certainly, as Ms McAliskey pointed out, there is no talk now in republican areas unlike there was in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire of September, 1994 of imminent victory. Historically, the British establishment has managed to avoid revolutions by conceding just enough to the politically discontented. Presumably, they will not change their tactics, despite serious dangers, now. Cursai Reatha scored another direct hit with this unpretentious, hype free programme.
Whether or not the West fest that TnaG is threatening to become, can do likewise, is another day's work. What it does show, however, is that good programmes, whether in English or in Irish, are the key to worthwhile television channels. It's not just the language that counts after all, the Eurovision consistently provides rubbish in 20 languages it's the content.