Close Up (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Loyalists (BBC 2, Sunday)
Miss Ireland - A Profile (Network 2, Wednesday)
Births, Marriages and Deaths (BBC 2, Monday)
THUNDERING on about "designer dykes" and "male members" and "nymphos nouveaux", Julie Burchill became Britain's highest-paid columnist. At her peak, she was being paid a reported £2,700 a column. Some gig! Once described by Vanity Fair as "a girlier Camille Paglia with a boom-box level of prose", Burchill's characteristic, punky, rude-girl style took no prisoners: "Dear Paglia, F*** off, you old dyke . . ." is an intro of some gusto, which, whatever else, does the recommended jobs of grabbing readers and setting tone.
Close Up: Who does Julie Burchill think she is? attempted to grab viewers by getting the hitherto telly-shy Julie to appear on screen. Her voice, which is as squeaky as her prose is tough, made her sound like Pinky or Perky addressing a Nuremberg rally. "In her (Thatcher), cruelty looked like a kind of idealism," she squeaked. Well, former Marxist turned Thatcherite Julie should know. Her heyday coincided with Maggie's - when bullying, cutthe-crap, in-your-face rudeness was not just secretly admired but openly venerated.
Back in the pre-Thatcherite 1970s, Burchill took the train from her native Bristol to London. Cue the Clash's London Calling over rapid, jerky, black and white camera shots of Centrepoint, King's Cross and the West End. In 1976, the 17-year-old putative pitbull of prose was working in Boots chemists in King's Cross station. Answering an ad for "A Hip Young Gunslinger" in the New Musical Express, she became the mag's punk correspondent (even though she much preferred the Isley Brothers). She was joined at the NME by Tony Parsons, now a regular pundit on BBC 2's Late Review.
The rest is hack history. Julie and Tony had Attitude. They created New Wave waves, married each other, had a child and split. As print media realised that radio and TV were just too damn quick with breaking news, editors began seeking columnists to flog newspapers and magazines. The hour of the overpaid controversialist was at hand and Tony and Julie were duly absorbed by mainstream papers. She has since penned her pugnacious prose for the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday and, more recently, the Guardian.
Even given her xenophobia and Damascan about-turns, she's certainly worth reading. Her best stuff belts along as an exquisitely crafted tirade. Like dynamite encased in a Faberge egg, it's bursting with style and power. It's full of depersonalising, street-tough labels, raw pronouncements about sex and has rhythms with the energy of wild, frenetic rumpo. It is, of course, designed to shock and the malice is seldom playful. Julie kicks for the groin every time. Whenever she lands a blow, she kicks right in the same spot again, cackling away at the delicious maliciousness of it all.
"I'm a one-trick pony," she told Close Up, "but I do it well." Fair enough, I suppose - a pony with prose that kicks like a mule. The trick is not short of longevity either. She's been firing verbal dum-dum bullets for 22 years now and even if, at 39, there are signs that she may be past her literary prime, she still maintains an arsenal of invective and insult (typically using low-blow adjectives such as "ugly", "smelly" and "dirty") which gives many readers the frisson they seek.
The programme argued she paved the way for "slightly hysterical, overconfident female journalists" (who, in fairness, just displaced some of the puffed-up-with-gravitas, overconfident, male journalists). It's true. Julie Burchill has been endlessly imitated but never quite equalled for the manic elegance of her verbal sadism. Of course, columnists such as Julie, who recycle their own lives as material, risk being insufferably egotistical, pompous and shallow. Manipulating the masks is a necessary skill. At heart, it's about entertainment not soul-searching.
Anyway, Burchill, partly because she has led such a high-profile life (loot, lovers and lesbianism) but mostly because she can make words simultaneously sing and spit, is able to cut the mustard. "It's a horrible thing to say," said Toby Young, whom Julie wanted to axe as editor of Modern Review (the self-proclaimed "Low Culture For Highbrows" mag - or, in her words "Leavis and Beavis" - she mostly funded), "But if she'd been killed in a car crash about five years ago, that would have been perfect." Yes, Burchill does annoy some people.
Young meant that by hanging around, Julie risks becoming a parody of herself. Maybe so. There was a sense in this profile that it's the inevitable end of the highly individual, ultra-tough columnist to betray all allegiances and confidences. Observers of Irish journalism should recognise this syndrome.
Ultimately perhaps, Burchill may even betray herself, juggling just too many masks. Certainly the person on screen was alarmingly at odds with the persona(s) in print. Still, in her various guises as bitch, babe and all-round badmouth of her generation, Burchill embodies the cult of the individual as ideological butterfly.
GRAVER matters were at the heart of Peter Taylor's Loyalists: No Surrender. Having examined the Provos for his last series, Taylor got the loyalist paramilitaries between his cross-hairs. They seemed surprisingly willing to comply, with the result that viewers were left balancing the moral merits of honesty and repentance against the memories of unspeakably vile murders. This was a discomfiting programme - the first of three episodes - which you just had to hope is not a premature attempt at history.
Former UFF man John White, now with the UDP, admitted his involvement in the murders of Senator Paddy Wilson and his Protestant friend, Irene Andrews. "He was stabbed 30 times," charged Taylor. "Absolutely," answered White. "His throat was slit from side to side," said Taylor. "It was certainly barbaric," said White. There was a toughness in this information that was on a different planet to the toughness of Julie Burchill. We were, of course, on Planet Murder, where the sheer savagery - from the different sides - reminded you of just how evil the conflict in the North can be.
Intercutting close-up, face-to-camera interviews with archive footage made disturbing television. Scenes of the aftermath of bombings by both sides' paramilitaries, of loyalist murders and of the Provos' Bloody Friday (including a burnt body being shovelled up off the road) had a nightmare quality. For their part, the UVF, UFF and Red Hand Commando men just held up their hands and said that, at the time, they believed their "any Catholic will do" programme was the most effective way of carrying the war to the IRA.
It's an ethical and ideological minefield, of course, ascribing degrees of ruthlessness and sectarianism to the various sides. The Provos did, long ago (but long since lost), claim a revolutionary chic, that the loyalists, as arch-defenders of the power structure in place, could not. But in the matter of motive and result, dead bodies resulting from "liberation struggles" and dead bodies resulting from naked terrorism look the same . . . especially to bereaved relatives. With most people now agreed about the similarity of result, it is motives which need understanding: enter the politicians.
Ian Paisley continues to refuse to accept that his words may have fired-up young loyalists to carry out horrific crimes. The premise cannot be proved, of course, but we can agree that people, especially politicians, have a moral duty to take responsibility for what they say. Taylor said as much to Paisley, showed links between some early Paisleyites and violence (which the Big Man didn't deny). "I can't be responsible for everybody," was all he said. It's true - but you still had to wonder if he has been sufficiently responsible for himself.
Loyalists is discomfitingly engaging as well as plain discomfiting. Between them, the UVF and the UDA have killed about 1,000 people, nearly all Catholics. With some (if not all alleged) "security force" collusion, the real figure is perhaps some hundred higher. The IRA has killed 1,800 or more. Some of the trigger-pullers and bomb-planters from the different sides are now out in the open. Maybe Taylor's series on these people will help to heal wounds. In the meantime, the story (well, some of it anyway) of the Shankill Butchers will be told. TV doesn't come any tougher.
BACK at RTE, where even the idea for documentary series such as Provos and Loyalists, would not be countenanced, Network 2 screened Miss Ireland - A Profile. It wasn't, of course, a profile in the normal sense, that interested or knowledgable parties (pro and anti) get to have their say. Miss Ireland - A Promotion would have been a more accurate title. But there you go. Miss Ireland 1998, Vivienne Doyle from Galway, couldn't be blamed for the programme's misnomer and she seemed a pleasant woman.
Cast as an oestrogen-fest celebration of girl power and female bonding, old feminist arguments (or, sorry, not to be ageist, feminists' old arguments) about such gigs seem to have died out now. Well, again, there you go. The swimsuit in stiletto-heels section appears to be the sole casualty of PC thinking. Still, for all the overt stress on "personality and charm", the finalists all looked like fashion models. Must be that, in Julie Burchill-speak, ugly or even plain women lack personality. Produced by ShinAwil Productions, shinawil to that minefield.
FINALLY, onto something safer -Births, Marriages and Deaths - the Beeb's latest drama series. The opening episode of this fourparter, in which three middle-aged Cockney geezers (two married) go awol on the stag night of the single single one, was a peculiar blend of comic laddishness and tragic consequences. On the town, the geezers visit massage parlours and the home of their once feared headmaster. In his dotage, he dies from the fright and they discover that he has been living with his dead wife's decomposing body.
Grim stuff - even by stag night standards. Written by Tony Grounds and featuring Ray Winstone, Mark Strong and Phil Davis as the geezers, it is thin on plot but thick on heavily stylised scenes - all dark shadows and rich, primary colours. Darkly garish, it does explore the differences in behaviour between men together and men with their wives. This is a universe (unlike the sitcom version) in which behaving badly does carry consequences. Still, the comedy saves it from becoming a sermon.
"I've never 'ad it with anyone I 'aven't paid," Winstone tells his aggrieved wife in defence. Well now, there's marketplace morality for you - pay as you go and you'll be alright. She's not impressed however. She's known that he's been visiting massage parlours for some time. But now (because of unlikely revelations at the wedding of the third geezer) it's common knowledge, he claims that it's primarily the public humiliation which is upsetting her. Anyway, it's getting darker and promising. As with all dark deeds, there are issues of responsibility to be resolved.