Live International Soccer (TV3, Wednesday)
The Officer From France (RTE 1, Thursday)
Speakeasy (TV3, Monday to Friday)
Dots On A Page (RTE 1, Monday)
It was TV3's big night. Presenter Trevor Welch sought to build excitement for "the big kick-off" in this, "the big one for Mick". On screen a caption blared `Mick's Big Game' as we were promised/threatened that "Big Jack" would be analysing the game from a pub. TV3 was going all out - big time! All week the new channel had been laying it on as thick as newscaster Alan Cantwell's make-up that it had exclusive coverage of Yugoslavia v Ireland.
Even the news bulletin immediately preceding coverage of the match included - as a news item - the fact that TV3 had the game exclusively. A moving caption as the news went to an ad break reminded us that football was coming up next. During the break, Roy Keane featured in an ad for the match. When it was time for the weather forecast, Martin King appeared wearing an Irish soccer strip and carrying a football. On the back of his shirt - a clever touch this - was "TV" (across the shoulder blades) over a big "3".
Clearly, Jugoslavja v Republika Irska was the event of the millennium in TV3's eyes. In studio, the pundits were Mark Lawrenson and Noel King. The commentary box in Belgrade was staffed by Conor McNamara and Frank Stapleton. At 21, McNamara is just about half Stapleton's age. Even more frightening: of Ireland's starting 11, only Damien Duff was younger than the commentator. Indeed, there are still a few old pros (keepers, mostly) old enough to be McNamara's father playing serious soccer.
Still, the lad dun well. For a commentator on only his second live broadcast, he ought to feel pleased. Perhaps McNamara's most glaring flaw is that he says too much. On TV, a laconic remark here and there can often be sufficient to describe a passage of play. Naming the colours of both teams' shirts, shorts and socks is radio commentary. On television, it is unnecessary and sounds like time filling. But overall, the boy McNamara showed promise. If he can just let the action breathe a little more easily, he can became a valuable asset for TV3.
Technical considerations aside, the main test for the new channel was always going to be the contributions in the studio. Against the Holy Trinity of O'Herlihy, Giles and Dunphy, a back three of Welch, Lawrenson and King was seriously inexperienced as a team. Even as individuals, only Lawrenson has anything like the TV caps for punditry of RTE's trio. But the new triumvirate coped reasonably well. Confident and knowledgeable, Lawrenson and King played a quite straightforward system. More conflict between them would have added spice. But it was a competent debut.
Less appealing was the idea to have Helen Carroll interview Big Jack in a pub. Attempting to create an atmosphere of fever-pitch hysteria when the country is not experiencing fever-pitch hysteria inevitably looks contrived. Indeed, for all but the very biggest championship or crucial qualifying matches, this sort of "fans as fodder" TV is embarrassing. In the event, the punters in the pub proved to be quite a laid-back lot. Oh, they cheered on cue, all right. But it was muted and seemed more out of politeness than passion.
Apart from the result, however, the commercial channel had a successful night. There were a few glitches: we were told that Milosevic had been substituted when he wasn't; we could hear the director over a Mick McCarthy interview; long shots made it difficult to distinguish between the teams. But unlike the nonsense of having snooker players Ken Doherty and Fergal O'Brien pick an Irish team (which included Robbie Keane!) none of these were major faults.
Mind you, there was a grand irony about the entire evening. Back in the heyday of the Catholic Tiger, the Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, had sought to minimise the number of people who would watch Ireland play Yugoslavia. Forty-three years on, commercial TV, a brash cub of the current Tiger, sought to maximise the number watching the clash between the same teams. As a slice of social history, it pointed up not just the thrust away from isolationism to integration but from repressive religion to merciless marketing.
BACK on RTE, political history was at the heart of The Officer From France. To mark the 200th anniversary of Wolfe Tone's death, this drama, written by Gary Mitchell and directed by Tony Barry, focused on the last few days of Tone's life in a Dublin jail. Though theatrically stagey and melodramatic, its explorations of the fault lines between the (as ever) less-than-united Irishmen of the period were intriguing.
"Was the war against the English or against Protestants?" asked a captured Protestant. Well, no doubt, the war in Wexford, for instance, became at times more of a religious than a political war, albeit motivated by savage anger because of decades of dispossession of Catholics. But in Antrim and Down - the only two of Ulster's nine counties to rise against the government but now the most staunchly unionist in the country - it was a different story. Strangely though, even in this bi-centenary anniversary year, we hear no voices hectoring us about Presbyterian amnesia in relation to their glorious war dead of 1798.
The fact that many Belfast Presbyterians celebrated the fall of the Bastille appears to have been as Stalinistically removed from unionist memory as the Irish dead of the first World War used to be from nationalist consciousness. We can understand why, of course. Like the nationalist Irish in the first World War, the Presbyterians of 1798 muddied the official grand narrative of their tribe. Anyway, with Adrian Dunbar in the role of Tone, resplendent in his French officer's uniform among the peasants in rags, this was a provocative piece.
It used a series of flashbacks to flesh out the previous three years of Tone's life. We saw him with his wife Matilda and their baby. Mind you, Matilda was wearing a dress so low cut that her appearance fleshed out a cleavage far bigger than any between Protestants, Catholics or Dissenters could possibly have been. Still, that's period drama for you. We saw Tone in America and just before his death, we saw Matilda continuing to tend to the children.
But the main action took place in the jail, which looked as if a large group of Irish soap opera actors had invaded the set of a 1960s Hammer Horror movie. It was gory and grim - injury, despair and delusion everywhere - but its staginess sanitised it somewhat. To some prisoners and one jailer, Tone remained mythical, still capable even after rout and capture of turning the tide. To others and to the particularly vile jailer, O'Keeffe, he was not just a beaten docket, but about to get his just desserts.
It is probably impossible to recreate or even thoroughly understand the mindsets of the time in relation to the United Irishmen. France and America had had their revolutions, and these supplied the political ideologies of republicanism. But there were even deeper forces informing most people's worlds then - not least their relationships with a Christian God. Nonetheless, Mitchell's script was generally convincing, if dramatically opportunistic in raising larger issues through sometimes conveniently cipher-like characters.
It has always been uncomfortable for religious bigots to trumpet the roles played by Protestants and Presbyterians in founding violent Irish republicanism. Just three or four years after the founding of the United Irishmen, the Orange Order emerged. Intent on maintaining a Protestant ascendancy, its appropriation of the meaning, heroism and symbolism of the first World War increased sectarian divisions. On the strength of this drama, we are unlikely to see a delegation from Belfast's Shankill Road at Bodenstown (though there was such an event in the 1930s). But particularly in the context of the first World War blitz of recent weeks, The Officer from France asked awkward questions of both pikes and poppies. Good.
While TV3 was going big, big, big on football, it was also screening Speakeasy, a five-days-a-week daytime chat show. This week's theme was addiction, a different aspect of which was foregrounded each day. Presented by Caroline Callaghan, who prompted guests with social-worker type questioning, it was among the most real programmes in the glossathon than is typically TV3.
We saw people addicted to cigarettes, drink, gambling, heroin, being liked by others and housecleaning. Only Susan, the smoker, was still active in her addiction. Geraldine was the cleaning addict, now clean (or rather not) and sober, but still mindful that she could start cleaning manically again at any time. She described how she used to lie awake at night worrying over whether or not her house was clean. Of course, short of hermetically sealing it, it could never possibly be clean enough.
Geraldine even took a cleaning job, but because of perfectionism and an eye trained to spot the smallest particle of dust at 20 paces, she proved too slow for her less fastidious colleagues. Among the more regular horror stories of addiction, Geraldine's affliction sounded initially trivial. But her account was perhaps the most illuminating of all in relation to the mental processes which ensnare and drive addicts.
Speakeasy is inexpensive television, and its daytime slot means that it can only expect paltry viewing figures. But, of its genre, it is competent. Listening to Bernie recall her heroin-addicted, 21-year-old son's suicide in 1995, was not the first time such a voice appeared on Irish television. Compared however, with much of the fashion and showbiz fluff which passes as news on TV3, it was an authentic human voice. A serious, gutsy, prime-time talk show - not just a PR vehicle for over-rehearsed minor "celebrities" - shouldn't be beyond the new channel. Lively discussion of remembrances of 1798 and first World War, for instance, could spark a needed revolution in the station's schedules, which are characterised by international blandness at present.
Finally, Dots On A Page. Screened to mark 150 years of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), it was essentially a celebratory, not a critical documentary. Certainly, the dedication of parents in ferrying students from around the country was astonishing. One woman told of getting up at 4.15 a.m. to begin preparations. It made even the swimming kids - the ones who swim miles every day before school - seem rather pampered.
Watching the director of the RIAM, John O'Conor, teach rising hopeful Finghin Collins was fascinating for the way in which O'Conor attempted to translate the feeling of the music into a visual physicality. The intensity of this translation exercise, seeking nuances of feeling and playing, underlined the fact that even flawless technique can never be the full story for musicians. Anyway, as a celebration, the academy can feel pleased about this one.
Nobody raised the question of the appropriateness or otherwise of the "Royal" in the title, even though, if the RUC is going to lose its "Royal", a number of prestigious institutions in the Republic are going to appear increasingly egregious. But this wasn't a documentary for such big, uncomfortable, pike v poppy questions. The music here was much more harmonious than that - especially O'Conor's contributions. Still, the bigger questions will be asked at another time. Won't they?