Alfred C. Kinsey's work divides the century into "before" and "after" perhaps as sharply as does the second World War. Masked by the white coat of scientific inquiry, Kinsey's research into human sexuality shook off the musky undertow that previous studies by men such as Havleock Ellis and Sigmund Freud couldn't quite lose. Before Kinsey, sex was something furtive, strictly lights-off. After his research, human sexuality entered the snigger-free public discourse for the very first time.
Kinsey validated sex by making its study scientific. Once his 1948 study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male topped the best-seller lists, talking about sex became an international preoccupation, an unstoppable narrative which gave satisfaction the status of a constitutional imperative, right up there along with life and liberty. "Kinsey worshipped data", a former member of his team told this week's Secret History. But Kinsey's hubris was that he made data God. That God was false, as Secret History proved. In love with the idea of value-free facts, Kinsey entered into an unholy alliance with a number of paedophiles, all for the cause of better scientific understanding. An appalling vista of innocence corrupted opened up as the programme traced the way in which Kinsey made contact with habitual child abusers, and then rejigged their evidence about children's sexuality into statistical tables which no one could challenge. The tables are about to be republished by the Kinsey Institute.
The clear implication was that Kinsey not alone motivated the paedophiles to prey on children, but validated their abuse by presenting it as empirical, unbiased research, without any corroborating evidence. He encouraged them to keep diaries in an organised way and went so far as to write a note of congratulations to a man codenamed Green on his research. Green was reckoned to have abused at least 1,000 children, aged from two months to 16 years.
Kinsey became almost wholly desensitised to the human aspects of his study, using professional distance as a reason for blinding himself to wider issues of humanity as, it seems, did most of his research team - only one interviewed here resigned. Like Karamazov, he bought into the belief that removing the taboos meant everything was permitted, even sex between infants and adults: the programme caught that crisis in full bloom. When you consider how many disciplines now access material on childhood and sexuality which may have been generated by this part of his "research," the prospect that a kernel of their authority may rest on abuse data masquerading as research data is beyond imagining.
Some history is cult viewing. A minor phenomenon over the last two months has been the late night watching of I Caesar, a history series told with traditional production values which assumes firstly that you want to watch, and secondly, that you have the attention span to do so. That in itself is flattering.
The series was personality-driven to the extent that it tracked the politics and cultural achievements of the classical world through the stories of individual Roman emperors, mixing commentaries from present-day academics with a kind of it-says-in-the-papers taken from classical sources. The challenge to the empire was unprecedented - how to create the equivalent of a European Community unified by codified systems of law, culture and religious belief.
AS centuries passed, the empire began to develop a corporate attitude to problem-solving. Always keep the masses happy by giving them spectacular games and thrilling public entertainment; the same genre creates events such as the Tour de France.
By the age of Justinian, billed as the last of the Romans, some lessons had been learned. Kill the dissidents, or if you can't, give them roles which can't increase their power. When in trouble at home, create a diversion: find an enemy among the people or else start your own war and demonise whatever foreigners you think you can conquer. Orwell's Big Brother adapted those dictums well. So do others.
Justinian was a Serb, originally named Petrus, who travelled east to the new capital of Constantinople sure of a job with his Uncle Justin, who became head of the palace guard, then, through a military coup, Caesar. He made Justinian his successor, which is how an outsider with a bottomline commitment to zero tolerance came to be leader of the largest empire west of the Himalayas.
Justinian's lasting achievement was to codify Roman Law, succeeding so well that its systems went on to influence the legal structures of many mainland European countries. He lacked the common touch. But he alienated the aristocracy because they thought him common - he'd fallen in love with a circus dancer called Theodora, whom he married. Slanders about her persist to this day.
After her death, his judgment departed. When bubonic plague killed hundreds of thousands, he enforced taxes so strictly that neighbours had to pay those owed by the dead. Finally, he banned all forms of entertainment. "All laughter had gone out of life" a contemporary reported. He left so shattered an empire that no ruler would ever unite it again.
Some more recent cults are now historical. The premise of youth television was that viewers in fact had no attention span, or at least none longer than three minutes. It took so long to read the title Watch This or the Dog Dies: the History of Youth TV that the show nearly broke its first rule before starting, but it settled down into an entertaining, quite provocative backspace review of the years when television finally won what it called "the Holy Grail" of the youth audience.
Television had been determined to cater to this audience since the term "teenager" had first been created to encourage cinema attendance in the 1950s, with the unfortunates who happened to fall within the age range 16-24 expected to tune in to Young People's Programmes out of sheer gratitude. Clips from various failed efforts reminded me why I never watched anything "youth" except Top of the Pops and the latter days of The Old Grey Whistle Test - impossible rates of cringe factor to watchability. Someone said 1970s and early 1980s youth programmes looked as if a committee of sociologists had designed them. They were right.
Janet Street Porter and associates changed all that with the milestone that was Network 7 on Channel 4. This was punk TV, even though punk itself was literally in flitters. You could still taste the intensity in some clips from her shows, The Tube and earlier editions of The Word - clear branding, more colours, fast editing; the new infotainment: journalism and entertainment enhancing each other. Passionately. Oldies such as Jo Whiley and Charlie Parsons called for the same again.
Once folk realised youth was more a market than a generation, the format became the most exciting production style to hit television in years. It colonised other areas of television - news, sport, drama serials like This Life. But within the sacred market of youth TV, the format floundered, sinking into illiterate parodies like Club X and The Girlie Show, with shock tactics which proved nothing except that some people would do anything to get themselves on camera. A few such programmes somehow survive: don't watch God's Gift unless you absolutely must.
Some people believe that Vincent Browne is God's gift. If the way he rattled Aine Ni Chonaill is how he means to continue, I may consider sharing that view. Browne and Gary Agnew take over Questions and Answers from John Bowman and Betty Purcell for this month only. Already the change is visible.
Browne's slightly dotty smile greets us from the top of the table, leaving the panellists to huddle together for comfort. It tightens as he prepares to pounce, and when the recipient is Aine Ni Chonaill, whole communities in Ireland probably pounce with him.
"Get right into the substantive picture," he commands. "You're taking too long." She was too, but then we are so accustomed to broadcasters giving unnecessary airtime to tiny minority views in the interest of balance that we have been lulled into believing Ni Chonaill represents a massive popular movement, rather than a crowd that wouldn't fill a snug.
Ni Chonaill was rattled - from the Late Late Show panel to this? The discussion was predictable. Ald Padge Reck from Wexford defended the extraordinary editorial in The Wexford People about Romanian asylum-seekers which itself made news last week, but explained that neither he nor the editor were racist. Back to the old canard: if it wasn't for the refugees, we wouldn't have to say these things.
Kathy Sheridan's quiet authority unnerved him when she pointed out that most people she'd met in Wexford seemed determined to ignore the fact that refugees were simply not permitted by law to take up employment. Reck later offered obsequious tributes to Browne, Gay Byrne and, it seemed, the entire staff of RTE just to show there were no hard feelings. Browne's smile tightened.
The issue that lit up the audience was Michelle de Bruin, with surprising levels of personal abuse directed at Dr Gary O'Toole once Browne asked why did he not out her when he was commentating for RTE during the Olympics? "Because I had no evidence," he replied. The audience turned on him with an anger you don't often witness. Some dreams are hard to surrender.