The Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture (BBC 1, Monday)
Would You Believe (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Panorama (BBC 1, Monday)
Timewatch (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Sex Bomb (Channel 4, Wednesday)
`It never bothers me when people call me an elitist," said Andy Hamilton. "I just quote Racine at them." Delivering this year's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, Hamilton, co-creator of Drop the Dead Donkey, mixed irony and parody to thrash the growing fad for "real life" television. Interspersing his address, which, he said (correctly), was "more a one-sided chat than a lecture", with clips and sketches, he made splendid use of television to take the Mick out of itself.
But this wasn't mere mockery. It was sumptuous satire: telling, funny and merciless without anger. Hamilton focused on three contemporary TV genres - secret camera shows, docu-soaps and day-time talk shows - to consider if television "can be trusted with real life as commercial pressures drive producers towards exploiting ordinary people as a cheap resource". In the wrong mouth, this lecture might have been another over-earnest, self-regarding, yawn-fest (such as Fergal Keane's monumental bore for the Wheldon gig). Instead, Hamilton made it the highlight of the week.
Secret camera shows, such as Alastair Stewart's Police, Camera Action! and Selina Scott's Eye Spy, are, said Hamilton, essentially "PR for the police". Too true. Granted, there is an undeniable fascination in watching real life car chases and crashes. But nowadays, because of ubiquitous motorway cameras, there is a desensitising glut of this rubbish, invariably accompanied by a sanctimonious and cringingly moralising voiceover. Fair enough, joyriding as home entertainment is not as criminally reckless as joyriding itself, but the vicarious thrills it offers inevitably carry a smug voyeurism.
It's ultra cheap TV, of course and in presenting itself as cautionary, public service television, it's ultra hypocritical too. It has the tone of the Green Cross Code and the thrills of Bullitt. Still, beside the day-time chat shows, it is a paragon of truth. Hamilton showed us snippets of an interview with the schlock-meister Jerry Springer. "This is America. Too many people have died for free speech," said Jerry, in defence of his goon-show.
Yeah Jerry, sure! Too many people have died for free speech. Pity it's nearly always been the wrong people. Orchestrated and fired-up like a football team facing relegation, Jerry's guests are exemplars of free speech. "Ma sista slep' with ma three husbans," screeched a demonic babe in a spandex micro-mini, before launching a kick at the groin of the promiscuous sista. "Bitch, bitch, bitch," she screamed as the sisters pulled at each other's hair. The bear-pit audience yelled encouragement and Jerry, sure in the knowledge that he's a Thomas Paine for the late 20th century, felt that old, familiar ratings-rush . . . just by-the-way, you understand.
Though less prurient than either Jerry Springer or secret camera shows, docusoaps' relationship to reality, contrary to the claims of many of their producers, are no mere mirrors translated to screen. Evaluating them is more problematic. There is editing, of course, and sometimes re-enactments, and there is always the reality that the presence of cameras affects people's ability to behave naturally. They may act naturally - but they are none the less acting.
Still, in the last few years, there have been a number of excellent docu-soaps: The House (about Covent Garden's opera and ballet theatre); Hotel (with the Rottweiler manager, Eileen) and Rogue Males (focusing on a pair of unemployed, Liverpool scallies). But even with these better examples of the genre, there are serious questions. The crime scene in Rogue Males, for instance, when the lads set about stealing pallets, was arranged with the owner of the pallets beforehand. "They were going to steal them anyway, but we couldn't be accessories to a crime," said the producer in justification. Hmmm? Reality or not?
Anyway, Hamilton concluded that the three genres had three crucial aspects in common. They focus on "ordinary people"; they promote emotions over ideas; they get good ratings. He might have added that they are very cheap too. It is their cheapness and their ratings which will ensure that more "real life" TV is queuing up to gush down the cathode-ray tube. The big problem is that television is not putting things in context but is the context. The funeral of Princess Diana was the greatest example of this perversion. Hamilton's one-sided chat was as perceptive as TV gets about itself - even if he left us hanging about Racine.
Father Brian D'Arcy got quite perceptive about himself for Would You Believe, the questioning religion-programme which might have included a question-mark in its title. However, that's a small matter. The transformation of Brian D'Arcy from Father Trendy to Father Trenchant is rather more important. Talking to the off-camera Mick Peelo for this edition, awkwardly titled Hughie D'Arcy's Cub, the showbiz priest, for years synonymous with Religion Lite, appears to have crashed into raw life with a shudder.
In his now legendary Late Late Show clash with Cardinal Cahal Daly a few years back, we saw that Brian D'Arcy had more to offer than pious, vacuous platitudes. "I've changed enormously in the last five years," he told Peelo. "I think I've grown up." I think you're right, Brian. I think you're right. "I'm less fearful than I used to be. I'm less certain than I used to be," he said. "I stopped being God about 10 years ago." It was clear that Brian D'Arcy has forsaken shallow certainties and entered into the, albeit arduous, bright night of the soul.
"I think I would be a lot happier being a married priest, but I still need to be a priest," he said. Later he added that he has been in love for years although he has continued to eschew a sexual relationship. He complained that seminarians used to be brainwashed by the Catholic Church, although he qualified this assertion by adding that "nobody did that on purpose". Well now, it can certainly be conceded that many of the brainwashers were equally brainwashed themselves. But even in a thoroughly hierarchical organisation, there has got to be a place for personal responsibility.
The weight of history and tradition is formidable but even the Catholic Church cannot claim dispensation from tackling the ethical problem of means and ends - even if those ends are fervently believed to be about the saving of souls. Still, the post-Eamonn Casey, post-Michael Cleary, post-Brendan Smyth Brian D'Arcy has an authentic human voice. Whatever launched him on his current trajectory - and that is his business - at 52, he appears to have recaptured his mind from the brainwashers.
This was an inexpensive little programme although it did include pertinent location shots - D'Arcy's native Fermanagh, Mount Argus, the offices of the Sunday World - and it was about a real person talking to real viewers. It's ironic, perhaps, that a high-profile, synonymous-with-showbiz cleric should be its subject. But TV3, leaving aside ratings and catwalks and allegedly sexy form and content and all the rest of the "marketing mix" could make similar programmes. No big deal, nothing Earth-shattering - just reasonably real TV, albeit through the unavoidable, but possible to minimise, distortions of the camera. This was good stuff.
APPALLING stuff - brace yourself - featured on Panorama's The Cruelty Connection. The contention of the programme, a simple piece of common sense, though it was presented as remarkably insightful, was that violence against animals makes people capable of violence against humans. Wow! There's genius and intuition of Einsteinian proportions. Who would ever have guessed? What a connection to make! Humbling, eh?
Not that Panorama's ludicrously dramatic tone of revelation is the crucial point. No, not at all. There was video footage in this one which showed more American gun-brats getting their kicks. One shower of these kids stalked a Yorkshire Terrier dog, a little ball of fluff called Scruffy. They made a video of their hunt, complete with a running, giggling commentary. They shot the little creature and when he was wounded, they put him in a bin liner, poured lighter-fuel all over their package and set the dog on fire.
Oh, budding Tarantinos to the core, they took their time, pausing to get zoom-shots of the incapacitated, dying Scruffy's face. This provoked their loudest laughter. What do you do with human excrement like that? Well, in Colorado, they changed the law so that they can lock them up, on the grounds that such sadism shows a propensity to do the same to people. Animal "rights" is an ethical minefield but if any creature has the capacity to suffer, surely that's enough to warrant a conviction for needless cruelty.
Yes, we know that the abused are more likely to grow up to be abusers. But the chief Tarantino in the Scruffy case, 20-year-old Lance Arsenault, though sullen and moronic-looking, had not, it appears, suffered greatly as a child. "We did it because we was bored," he said. And why did they video it? "So we could watch it in case we was bored." Right son, I'm sure something stimulating could be arranged to banish your boredom. Your 22 months in the local nick gives everybody a chance to come up with ideas.
Five out of six American brats charged with schoolyard shootings have previously been cruel to animals. As a child, Jeffrey Dahmer used to cut off animals' heads and put them on sticks. Jeff's Da saw this as evidence of "interest in a medical career". Anyway, the principle of a link between violence to animals and violence to humans is now being adopted in many parts of Britain. In cosy little Ireland, domestic pets and wildlife are subjected to burnings, stabbings, mutilations, shootings, being thrown out of windows and being attacked with fireworks. With Hallowe'en almost upon us, we should give serious thought to discouraging the sadists - young and old. Bored are you? Tough!
Finally, Timewatch. BBC's history programme has a gentle but firm iconoclastic strain. This week The Pilgrim Obsession set about debunking the New England Pilgrims, white America's supposed founding fathers. Though the Pilgrims landed their ship, the Mayflower, in 1620, their myth did not begin until the 18th century and has been steadily embellished since, particularly romanticised by the racist solidcitizens of the 1900s.
Without the English-speaking Squanto, a brave of the Wampanoag tribe (he had been captured by earlier Britons from whom he escaped), the Pilgrims, it appears, would have starved to death. He showed them how to use herring as fertiliser. With good reason, many native Americans have mixed views about Squanto. But, the myth of the fortitudinous founding fathers has been too attractive and has passed for history. Yup, too many Americans died to give the likes of Jerry Springer free speech. Most of them were there long before the Mayflower.