Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Paying The Price (ITV, Monday)
Later With O'Leary (Network 2, Wednesday)
It was the Catholic Church which set the balls rolling but it was Gael Linn which turned bingo into a business in Ireland. "`There's no bingo like Gael Linn bingo'," said a founder of the organisation, Donall O Morain, "was a very successful slogan for us." On the face of it, one bingo's like another but perhaps there was no bingo quite like Gael Linn bingo. Certainly, its bingo lingo, being bilingual (uimhir a h-aon, number one; uimhir a do, number two; and so forth, agus mar sin) was unique.
Then again, the original Catholic Church bingo, in the early 1960s, was significantly different from contemporary gay bingo. Leargas: Ni Bingo Go Biongo produced an anecdotal portrait of the role of bingo in Irish culture. Though crammed with snippets of bingo history and bingo sociology, it was some way off being a full house on the subject. Still it did have some winning lines. "All the eights, 88, two fat lesbians," said Shirley Temple Bar aka Declan Buckley, star turn of her/his own gay bingo gig in a Dublin pub.
Mind you, Shirley Temple Bar's act mixes more than genders. Its bingo lingo isn't merely bilingual and double-meaning. It's polyglot and satirical - for the Euro generation, no doubt. It's certainly a far cry from the more traditional bingo of Kerry's Dingle peninsula, where this search for the soul of Irish bingo began. We saw the "bingo bus" collecting mostly elderly women to ferry them to Feothanach Hall. Clearly, it had more to do with community than with gambling. None the less, seeing a greying generation gathering to play bingo on the beautiful, barren edge of Europe, was rather poignant.
Veteran enthusiast, Maire Ui Mhuircheartaigh, recalled playing "when the old money was on the go". She remembered winning "a half-sovereign note" and has since won "duvets, sheets, whiskey". But the winning is just the icing on the cake, in halls where the jackpot might be £30. Socialising with her peers is what really matters to Maire. Likewise for bingo fanatic, Eileen Brosnan, who "would go to Australia for a game of bingo" and, in fact, has often gone as far as Castlemaine.
We heard how bingo profits had helped produce the Mise Eire pageant. Funny that Irish identity should be so linked to gambling. (Then again, the world's stock exchanges have forged a growing link between gambling and international culture.) Anyway, back in Dublin, Labhras O Laighleis, a former Gael Linn bingo guru, who now works for an outfit named Futter, spoke about the city's current conventional bingo scene.
Futter has hired the former Grand cinema in Whitehall where it runs bingo six nights a week. The game can still attract hundreds of punters, overwhelmingly female, but a ban on smoking since 1996 has deterred many. Young people find it all terribly boring so even big, commercial bingo is playing to a greying constituency. Down in Kerry, regulars notice that every year a few of their number pass on. While Dublin still has the population to sustain bingo for some time, it would appear that the traditional communal game will inevitably die out.
So, gay bingo and telly bingo and the Lottery, which is really just a variation on bingo, made possible by technology, have now all but replaced the parish hall game. It's not really the demise of conventional bingo which ought to be mourned. It's the continuing demise of community. For people who have used bingo as a reason to get out of the house, telly bingo is really just virtual bingo. It's brighter and bubblier and has bigger prizes but it keeps them in the house.
Natasha Fennell's report on an activity which tends not to feature in the gossip columns was evocative. It showed, at least in part, a largely hidden Ireland, marginalised historically, socially, even geographically. A more comprehensive study might have supplied us with more hard statistics (after all, bingo buffs love figures) but this one seemed to capture the flavour. The dull intimacy of a parish hall contrasted with the shiny anonymity of a television studio usually makes watchable television. It has the appeal of looking at an old photograph album. Wistfully engaging.
Like bingo, John Pilger is an anachronism. He seems to belong to an age before the vast majority of the population of the West began viewing itself as a world elite with a right to prosperity. (That is, before the meteoric rise of the "because I'm worth it" brigade.) Globalisation appears to have turned the wealthy areas of the planet into hot-beds of conservatism. No surprise there, I suppose: when you give people something to conserve, they are likely to become conservative. It's just the extent and scale of the phenomenon which is alarming.
Anyway, Pilger travelled to Iraq for Paying The Price - The Killing of the Children of Iraq. There he filmed scenes of children and adults dying in hospitals. Doctors assured him that this was happening because the continuing United Nations sanctions against Iraq prevented necessary drugs reaching the country. Pilger cited the US State Department and the British Foreign Office as being principally responsible. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein and his cronies can avail of expensive private clinics where there are no shortages of drugs.
The title of this latest Pilger broadside comes from a remark made in a television interview by US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. Asked whether she thought half a million child deaths was a price worth paying to chastise Saddam Hussein, she replied: "We think the price is worth it". The breathtaking arrogance of this suggested a kind of geopolitical The Price is Right. (Mind you, it sounds less a case of "come on down" than "come off it, Maddy".) Anyway, James Rubin, a State Department warrior, rushed to defend Maddy's honour.
She had not meant that the deaths of half a million children over the decade of sanctions was a price worth paying - because the US does not accept that World Health Organisation (WHO) figure. That figure, said Rubin, was reached using a "flawed methodology". It sounded like an examiner's report on a student dissertation. "A flawed methodology", eh? So number crunching is the issue? Right Jim, how many child deaths is a price worth paying? Maybe 400,000 is cool? How about a quarter of a million? A mere, piffling 100,000?
Then there's the little matter of the West's involvement in the creation of the tyrant Saddam Hussein. Of course, all this is known to anybody who takes an interest in the sleazy ruthlessness that passes itself off as world politics. But if the WHO estimates that 4,000 children die every month in Iraq - who would not have died if sanctions had not been in place - there's a case to be answered. The great British ethicist, Robin Cook, was prepared to answer . . .
First, of course, there would have to be some conditions. Robin's Foreign Office demanded a private screening of the film and a 10-minute, uncut piece by Robin at the end. "In other words," said Pilger, "they wanted editorial control. Is that how accountability in a democracy works these days?" (Yes, actually, to retain control, it's necessary to Cook the TV programmes as well as the books). It was a fair question even if it was, in some respects, a pity that John Pilger had to be the one to ask it.
The problem with Pilger now is that, in a monumental irony, he has almost a monopoly on high-profile socialism and televised West-bashing. Among his more scurrilous opponents, the verb "to pilger" guarantees a hearty, reactionary, usually overfed laugh. Perhaps at 90 minutes this latest polemical documentary did drag out the point unnecessarily. But the pictures from the hospitals certainly put the West in disgrace.
In a cancer ward, where morphine or equally potent opiates are the only appropriate painkillers, a few dozen patients had one bottle of aspirin between them. That'll teach Saddam Hussein! Then there are the longterm, practically eternal, consequences of having used shells coated with depleted uranium during the Gulf massacre. Robin Cook had said he didn't want to appear in a film with dying babies. Pilger made the point that only two people made themselves unavailable for Paying the Price - Robin and Saddam.
BACK on Network 2, the low demand for trade unions in a time of plenty was discussed on Later With O'Leary. Trade union leaders Kay Garvey, John Douglas and Joe O'Toole, economic consultant Colm McCarthy and Hewlett Packard executive Una Halligan joined Olivia O'Leary on her return to TV presenting. "Why have we this growing number of non-union houses?" asked O'Leary repeatedly. Because we have a growing amount of private enterprise, which, in its own interest is likely to be hostile to unionised workforces, is the answer.
Halligan argued that unions were unnecessary if people were "managed properly". The phrase sounded eerie, not sufficiently unlike "controlled properly" or "farmed properly" or "shepherded properly" to allay fears. Who is supposed to manage the managers "properly"? Garvey said that companies such as Halligan's were paying workers "over the odds" to keep trade unions out. But the time was dominated by O'Toole and McCarthy. Even O'Leary struggled to get them to keep quiet and wait their turn.
Overall, it wasn't a very satisfactory debate. This may have been due partly to time constraints and was certainly due to longwindedness on the parts of Joe O'Toole and Colm McCarthy. Olivia O'Leary didn't interrupt unduly, which, in principle, was the right approach. However, given the behaviour of the more undisciplined members of her class, she might have reverted to the schoolmarmish persona she has used to considerable effect in the past. It was sobering in the city of the lock-out to hear what many now think of the unions.
Finally, it was very sad to hear of the death of Jonathan Philbin Bowman, a likely TV star in the making. Exasperating and (to me anyway) invariably wrong about political and social issues, he nonetheless had the kind of ego and ebullience which pleases a camera as much as it infuriates an audience. There is no point in hypocrisy at this stage: Jonathan got his start from Gay Byrne because of his background. He took it because he was bright and loved attention.
However, like a lot of young Irish media talent, he wasn't always used as well as might be hoped. He did present the RTE quiz show Dodge the Question with a suitably restrained panache and, for once, was favourably reviewed here for his work. But elements in the media seemed to encourage him to act precociously and prattishly, perhaps fastening him to a persona which, in truth, he knew he had outgrown. For all that, he was, like all 31-year-olds, much too young to die. Tragic indeed.