Politically Incorrect Night (BBC 2, Monday)
John Charles McQuaid (RTE 1, Thursday)
Timewatch (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Children Of Crime (BBC 1, Tuesday)
`Miss Korea is a studious girl and she cooks too good to be true; 37-26-35 - mathematics could grow on you," smarmed an off-camera sleazeball. The Miss World beauty pageant ("pageant", no less) in the mid-1960s used to draw more than 20 million viewers. In swimsuits and high heels, the competing women (known then as "girls") paraded on stage as the sleazeball issued quasi-military instructions. "Turn," he said and they obeyed, revolving slowly until they had their behinds to the audience. "They only work to the command of a man," asserted sleazeball with a self-satisfied chuckle.
As we know, there were more revolutionary turns to come. By 1969, feminist protesters decided it was time to attack what they saw as a cattle market. They lobbed tomatoes, lettuce and little fire-bombs at guest chauvinist, Bob Hope, creating a scene more surreal than anything you could see even if you were smoking the best Bob Hope that money could buy. BBC 2's Politically Incorrect Night opened with In Reverse Order, a documentary about the heyday of Miss World. Then it examined racism and sexism in the cleverly titled One Million Years PC, before turning on pop music in Unsound.
Former Miss World winners, presenters, protesters and judges spoke to camera about the competition. Mr Miss World, Eric Morley and his wife, Mrs Miss World, Julia, also had their say. The Morleys moralised about the money their gig has raised for poor children. But when they said that it costs $6 million to stage it nowadays (in The Seychelles) the $66,000 they gave to an Indian children's charity in 1996 - to combat fierce demonstrations - seemed as paltry as the skimpiest swimsuits on show. Really, it was the tackiness of the organisers involved, rather than any exploitation of, or exhibitionism by, the women which was repulsive.
We saw crownings, cloakings and presentations of the sceptre. Perhaps, at its best (i.e. worst) the regal rubbish of tinsel baubles and prize money of 1,000 guineas (very posh, eh?) had a kind of transcendent tackiness. Sitting on a throne, the winner was expected to cry as all the crap was placed upon her. Then she would set off along a ramp - in cloak, crown, swimsuit and high heel shoes as triumphant, Dambusters-style music struck up. "It was like a winning goal at Wembley for excitement," said former smoothie presenter, Michael Aspel. Back then, Miss World was mainstream. Now it belongs to another world.
Still, if the vulgarity of Miss World was most clearly seen in its super smarmy attempts to appear suave and sophisticated, there was more earthy stuff to follow. At the start of One Million Years PC, it was alleged that Oliver Reed had (has?) "tattooed eagles' claws on his knob". How gross! Everybody knows that eagles have talons, not claws. Anyway, this documentary went on to re-run excerpts from The Black and White Minstrels, Are You Being Served?, Kenny Everett, Benny Hill and Les Dawson shows and, of course, Bernard Manning doing "Paki", "Irish" and "Jewish" routines.
Mark Lawson spoke about "the English attitude to foreigners" which (mis)informed much of this "humour". His observation that "most humour is reactionary" has a certain truth even if Lawson didn't intend it as a defence for the likes of Bernard Manning. But the bile and coarseness of much 1970s television was more offensive than the arguably cool smugness which supplanted it. Somebody suggested that Ben Elton's hatred of Maggie Thatcher was as odious as Maggie's hatred of all points of view which differed from her own. But it's not.
When Gramsci pointed out that the real success of a ruling elite is to get the ruled to believe that the elite's agenda is only common sense, he was perfectly right. Certainly, English nationalism has been phenomenally successful in this regard. So ultra sure of itself that it doesn't even have to recognise itself, it used the "glories" and even the memories of empire to sustain a sense of superiority. In the 1970s, as undeniable realities made such an illusion harder to maintain, television's court jesters went into overdrive to reassure viewers that past certainties could be retained.
They couldn't, of course. But politics, almost always behind humour in defining the spirit of the times, threw-up the Thatcherite 1980s as a last-gasp, full-frontal attempt at King Canutism. Maggie saw herself as a kind of imperial Mrs World (the political bride of the heavyweight champion, Ronald Reagan). But they were so shrill and strident that PC humour was inevitable. By the early 1980s, even pop music had lost the plot. Watching a Duran Duran video, which featured a woman sumo wrestling in a see-through blouse, was like finding the missing link between the bygone days of Miss World and the not yet arrived days of girl-power.
In screening Politically Incorrect Night, it might be argued that the BBC was being opportunist and hypocritical. After all, how else could television show all that racist and sexist stuff again? Lawson argued that by "ring-fencing" it with condescension, the Beeb was having it both ways. Fair enough. But at least viewers could see how outrageous much mainstream television has been. The risk, undoubtedly, is a late 1990s smugness masquerading as sophistication. Still, to see and hear again the Miss World sleazehounds in action was splendid. At least most of the smarmy gits nowadays have been shunted into the ads, even if pockets of resistance remain to be flushed out from the game shows and chat shows.
The political correctness of John Charles McQuaid was of a different order. As Archbishop of Dublin during much of the heyday of Catholic power, his utter and absolute correctness - on politics every bit as much as on religion - was deemed to be ordained by no less an authority than God. In the public mind he has become an almost mythical figure: the sabre-toothed version of the Catholic Tiger. John Bowman's two-part John Charles McQuaid - What The Papers Say sought to disentangle the facts from the myths and the anecdotes. It succeeded admirably.
As the pivotal figure in church-state relationships (though, in his case, church-state synonymity seems a more appropriate term) McQuaid enjoyed and exploited the fact that the State ceded so much power to him. The first episode opened with evocative church music, but unlike the recent Faith Of Our Fathers collections, Bowman's documentaries supply analysis and not mere nostalgia. Using standard documentary techniques - interviewees, commentary over archive footage and appropriate music - Bowman's great success is in allowing his perspective to take cognisance of the spirit of the times.
This is a necessary corrective to the glaring irony of today's liberal "certainties". Such rigorous contextualising does, however, risk relegating timeless perspectives to a minor role. So, McQuaid can be seen in terms of Irish history (Catholicism ruthlessly wresting power from a weakened, if previously ruthless Protestantism); in terms of European history (he was a Cold War warrior deeply opposed to socialism); in terms of De Valeran ideology and so forth. But authoritarianism is not only defined by its historical and political contexts. These may allow it to flourish. But there is also a personal dimension to bullying.
In fairness to Bowman, he did address the nature as well as the nurture of McQuaid. From rifling through a fraction of the 700 boxes of McQuaid's papers, he decided that the late archbishop had been "elitist and authoritarian" but also "kind", or, at any rate, capable of kindness. Such apparent contradictions should not surprise us, of course. Few despots are without some redeeming qualities. Anyway, as an example of research being made narratively coherent and engaging, this was as good as RTE (or most other channels, for that matter) has achieved in many years.
Hearing McQuaid's pronouncements about The Beatles (wrong); Ballymun flats (right); television in Ireland (wrong), supplied the kind of populist relevance necessary in prime-time TV documentary. The archbishop was, it seems, a keen aesthete, yet capable of enforcing a scandalously illiberal theocracy, albeit with the compliance of sycophantic politicians. Tellingly, McQuaid, academically very bright, realised how the less servile perceived him at the time: he once chided a group of journalists who arrived in his Drumcondra palace by telling them they had come to see "the ogre in his den".
The second programme dealt with later years of McQuaid's 32-year episcopacy, which lasted from 1940 to 1972. His attitudes towards television and the universities were trenchantly illiberal. But he did, Bowman pointed out, maintain, albeit always on his own terms, "a commitment to social reform and social justice". Not that it stopped him obstructing cultural life - railing against a football international between the Republic and Yugoslavia and lobbying successfully to have a theatre festival cancelled. When a Bunny Girl recruitment drive was planned for The Late Late Show, he had that cancelled too. No harm.
Like J. Edgar Hoover, J. Charles McQuaid ran a small army of informers. Even the young Charlie Haughey of the 1960s bowed to his wishes. Still, by then the writing was on the wall. The abiding sense of these programmes is of the holy Ireland led by J. Charles giving way to the materialist Ireland led by Charles J. and his ilk. Bowman, though careful to stress that it's "too early for a definitive verdict" on McQuaid, did, like any good critic or tally man, discern the pattern from the boxes which he opened. A fine job indeed, though again, we should be careful not to be smug about the past. Substituting bankers for bishops and credit cards for rosary beads does not mean that authoritarian abuses have stopped. We've just swapped cassocks for pinstripes.
Finally, two BBC documentaries on children aged about 11. Neither Timewatch: Grammar School Boys nor Children of Crime: The Case Of Mary Bell were quite sermons. But moral issues and an undeniable symmetry lay at the hearts of both. Their unifying message was that upbringing and background shape us all - hardly a novel notion - but hammered home in these cases with compelling force. Mary Bell strangled two male toddlers in the slums of Newcastle in 1968. By all accounts, she was an uncommonly bright child. However, given her alcoholic father and prostitute mother, academic achievement was a rather low priority in the Bell household.
In contrast, all the former grammar school boys interviewed (these included Neil Kinnock, David Puttnam, Kenneth Clarke, Will Hutton, Colin Welland and Barry Hines) agreed that they were, at least in part, products of their parents' ambitions. Geneticist Steve Jones, a former grammar school boy, described the 11 Plus exam, which split 11-year-olds between grammar school "successes" and secondary modern "failures", as akin to eugenics. The system lasted from 1944 until the late 1960s and the state grammar schools aped much of the public schools' snobbery.
Welland wondered why class 3A needed to be called class 3 Alpha. Schools were divided into houses and tacitly encouraged idiotic initiation rites to impress middle-class parents. Still, most of the 11 Plus "successes" did well career-wise. Getting to Oxbridge was deemed to be the highest achievement possible. There, however, the reality of Britain's poisonous class system struck the brightest of them. "Public schoolboys and their ineffable confidence aroused feelings of primitive aggression in me," said grammar-school boy turned High Court judge, Harry Ognall. You had to hope that his experience fostered empathy for those thoroughly crushed by the injustice of class tyranny.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Mary Bell case, in which she was convicted of manslaughter, was how different media coverage of it was from that of the James Bulger case 25 years later. Back in 1968, the BBC and ITN did not even mention the story in daytime bulletins. Mary Bell served 12 years in an approved school and an open prison. Severed from her parents, she was rehabilitated and now lives under a new name, her identity protected by law. It seems that she learned her behaviour from seeing her mother engage in sado-masochism with male clients. With a different background bright Mary would probably have gone to a grammar rather than to an approved school.