Reputations (BBC2, Tuesday)
Spotlight Special (BBC1, Tuesday)
Voyage (RTE1, Tuesday)
Behind Bars (BBC2, Monday)
Champions League Final (Network 2 & ITV, Wednesday)
Beaming a cheesy smile that surely flashed "lock up your sons", Walter Liberace camped it up more than a troop of boyscouts. In spangles, fur and feathers, the ivory-flashing ivory-tickler didn't just look gay - he looked delirious. Yet his fans were overwhelmingly female or, to be more politely specific, as a voiceover said, "women of a certain age". That age certainly had nothing to do with the first flush of youth. But still, to millions, Liberace remained a heterosexual sex symbol.
Reputations: Liberace - Too Much of a Good Thing is Wonderful stripped away the elaborate cloak of deception. Once "the highest grossing entertainer in America", the state took possession of his body after his death in 1987. The opening scene showed a hearse, filmed from a helicopter, travelling across the desert from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. In the coffin (alright then, "casket"), the shrivelled remains of Liberace were about to undergo an autopsy. The coroner's examination showed that the star had had AIDS.
The stark 1980s equation of AIDS equals homosexuality or IV drug use or unfortunate victim of a blood transfusion no longer holds. Even so, though that point should have been made, it seems incontrovertible that Liberace contracted the disease through engaging in sex with men. But to come out of the closet, he would have had to admit to perjury and would have alienated practically all those midwestern matrons of a certain age. In a typical showbiz psychodrama, the real Walter Liberace was sacrificed to his surname-only stage persona.
Back in 1956, Liberace visited Britain. Homosexuality was still illegal there (until 1967) and the Daily Mirror was not only lively but literate. Its renowned columnist Cassandra (William Connor) wasn't impressed with the ostentation of Lib or his gig. "He is the summit of sex - the pinnacle of Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She or It can ever want," he wrote. "This deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time."
Well now, that's axe-man criticism as florid as the target of its attack. Risky too. Liberace sued. The case attracted huge coverage. "Are you a homosexual?" the judge asked the fragrant Walter. "No, sir." Had he ever indulged in homosexual practices? "I'm against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society." So that was that then. Cassandra lost the case and Liberace won damages of £8,000 (with costs of £27,000). The closet was padlocked, nailed shut and sealed after that particular performance.
But in the 1980s, Liberace's final lover, Scott Thorson, let it all hang out. A former "dog-handler in the film industry", Thorson was instructed by Liberace to undergo plastic surgery to remake his face in the pianist's image. So he had chin implants inserted, work done on his cheek bones and his nose reshaped. From the surgeon's well-stocked medicine cabinet, Thorson developed an addiction to cocaine and muscle relaxants. Eventually his drug habit grew so bad that he was evicted by force from Liberace's Los Angeles mansion.
Hell hath no fury like an evicted man sculpted in his gay lover's image and likeness. Thorson sued for palimony. Still, Liberace denied everything. In the meantime, he too visited the plastic surgeon. Thorson recalled the doctor working on Liberace's face while snorting cocaine and drinking vodka. "The guy ruined Lee's face. He left horrible scars up through his hairline." The job was allegedly so badly done that Liberace used to sleep with his eyes open. People who saw this often thought that he had died.
There was something creepy about this tale. The autopsy, the plastic surgery and the open-eyed sleeping were a part of the creepiness, of course. But there was a sense, not of a remodelled Frankenstein, but of a soulless vampire behind the fancy cloak and trademark candleabra. What it must have been like to be Liberace - permanently in denial, permanently on guard and permanently acting - can scarcely be imagined. To his army of matronly fans, he was America's brightest star. To most critics, he was the man who stripped the class out of classical music.
Recent reappraisals have cast Liberace as prefiguring glam rock. Certainly, there are obvious parallels between him and say, Elton John. But "glam castrated classical" is a dodgy genre and, even allowing for the obscene cheesiness of Liberace on stage, there was always something pathetic, something more eerie than mere showbiz, about the artifice of his act. In fairness though, he was a creature of his very certain age. The US of the 1950s wasn't likely to be receptive to a gay man "coming out". Showman Liberace understood this and castrated his true identity along with the music. The best Reputations in some time.
Giving a performance as bizarre as a Liberace outfit, Ian Paisley lost the run of himself on Spotlight Special. With the crucial UUC vote due today, the programme had invited John Hume, David Trimble, Mitchel McLaughlin and Paisley to answer questions from presenter Mark Carruthers and a studio audience. The respective positions of the SDLP, UUP (both the pro and anti-agreement wings) Sinn Fein and the DUP are well understood. But ageing now, Paisley seems to have lost the plot.
His many political opponents may argue that, to begin with, he never had the firmest grip on the plot. That, of course, depends on what you take the plot to be. Certainly, as a battling politician, Ian Paisley has shown remarkable resilience. This week, however, he looked and sounded like a spent force. The problem really was that instead of toning-down his typically belligerent style, he went way over the top. Seething and blustering, he just ignored Carruthers and his questions and opted to pulpiteer in a TV studio.
The result produced strangely mixed emotions. Not least among these was embarrassment. Paisley's performance was such that, even if you oppose his position, it was more embarrassing than satisfying to see him in action. When questions from the audience displeased him, he just refused to answer. Repeatedly, he bared his teeth, flashing not a cheesy Liberace grin, but a vision of sheer anger. Age hasn't mellowed him and for all but his staunchest supporters, his anger must have been mortifying.
Most pointedly of all, there was no way through to him. He was not there to answer questions but to hector and berate to his own agenda. Politicians routinely answer questions they are not asked or deliberately focus on a minor point to obscure an uncomfortable issue. But Ian Paisley's performance was of a different order. Deliberately exclusionist, it was addressed exclusively to his hard-core faithful. This time, however, even the energy and animation which have made him compulsive in the past, seemed grotesque and pathetic.
Perhaps in the more charged atmosphere of the North, the Paisley performance still cuts the mustard. He does, after all, win huge votes in the Euro elections. But he seems now like a man from another age, an ageing dinosaur full of sound and fury. The vehemence of his crusade against Rome, even bearing in mind that Rome had and has serious questions to answer, was invariably too bitter. But when Spotlight Special turned the spotlight on Ian Paisley this week what we principally saw was an old man ranting: nothing more, nothing less.
THE contrast between Ian Paisley's sermon and Dick Warner's Voyage was as stark as the craggy cliffs along the coast of Connaught. Although Warner's clockwise voyage around Ireland from Dublin began three summers ago, he was heading for Co Sligo this week. At Malibu (that's what he said!), he sought out those who engage in the "cult of the wave-worshippers": surfers. The "awful lyrics" of the Beach Boys' Surfin' USA wouldn't leave his head but Surfin' Sligo was a sight to behold.
Aboard white waves on a gunmetal ocean, the surfers did their thing. The scene lacked the dazzling sun and brilliant blue associated with Californian beach bums. But it looked exhilarating nonetheless. Then it was on to Inishmurry island, "an eerie place" where Warner felt "the birds were watching" him. Ominous music struck up, suggesting shades of Hitchcock. With no people living there for more than half a century now, guillemots, fulmers and shags are in control. They watched.
But it was industrial collapse, nothing supernatural, which had depopulated the island. Poitin-making had been its biggest industry and a wartime shortage of sugar meant economic ruin for the distillers. It wasn't just the story but the mood laced through it by Warner's script which gave richness to its telling. Voyage is a gentle series but it is seldom mere PR. Fine camerawork - undersea and from helicopters - add to its measured delights. Set to a good script, it's plain sailing after that.
As rough as Voyage was gentle, Behind Bars: Holloway was depressing. Inside "Europe's largest women's prison", we heard inmates screaming and even saw one woman mutilate herself with tacks. In the 1960s, the existing jail, which had been originally designed to hold men, was pulled down and a new one built. Reinvented as a "hospital", intended to cure rather than just punish, the makeover has been a spectacular failure. In the old prison, women spent about 12 hours a day in their cells. Now, typically, they spend 23.
One unfortunate poked out her own eye. It was sitting on her cheek when prison officers discovered her. Bullying - staff to staff; staff to inmates; inmates to inmates - became endemic in the new jail. Suicide has occurred. Doubtless many of the incarcerated women are hardy specimens but the Dickensian horrors were profoundly distressing. Given the problems of drugs, mutilations and suicide in Irish prisons, it seems fair to ponder the relationship between these and the legacy of the criminal class which the tribunals is uncovering. Depressing indeed.
Finally, the Champions League Final. Most pundits agree that there's just too much football on TV now. There is. Two nights a week during Champions League group stages, quarter-finals and semi-finals have introduced a yawn into a previously riveting competition. Despite Liberace's parroting of Mae West's dictum that "too much of a good thing is wonderful", we know that, almost always, the reverse is the case. Overkill results. Even the TV panellists know that they're being increasingly overplayed as the football seasons practically merge into each other. Next up: Euro 2000.