TV REVIEW: Thanks to Murphy's Law, in the very week I was asked to review the week's TV, my NTL connection died. The fault appeared during Monday's high winds and it took 24 hours to get someone at NTL to answer the phone.
After hanging on the line for what seemed like hours, we gave up on the service department and got a real human voice only by calling sales, which answered right away. Twenty-four hours after we filed our complaint, the cable was still off so we called NTL sales again (services still didn't answer). We were told, bizarrely, that no fault had been reported by us. Meanwhile, I was forced to camp out in my friend's sitting room and monopolise her TV.
Liam Lawlor was also accomplished at deflecting fault, when he stone-walled Brian Farrell on Prime Time. Lawlor sat like a mildly irritated Buddha as Farrell confronted him with the information that 67 per cent of voters in the Dublin Mid-West constituency regard Lawlor as "corrupt", while one per cent see him as "most trustworthy". As Farrell marvelled at Lawlor's "neck" in considering standing again, Lawlor blamed the media for distorting public perception and stated that his own phone polling, and feedback "on the ground", was showing plenty of support.
A central tenet of belief, in the 21st century, is that the media habitually distorts reality and that all a public figure has to do is appeal straight to the people - through the medium of TV, ironically - to be accurately perceived. Denial of media accuracy is such a predictable defence for public figures under scrutiny, that it should really have a name by now. It should be called "Lawlor's Law".
The supposedly redemptive power of fame - even for the infamous - has become the new religion. It was Andy Warhol who declared this first. He knew that in post-1950s New York, celebrity was religion. In the Hello-magazine age, this idea is so familiar that we take it for granted. But in Warhol's day, this was a revolutionary insight. Warhol is the man who said: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", and understood what it meant for the medium to be the message. Being famous was a religious experience, and one which he pursued vigourously with his strange white skin, statement-making dark glasses and white and black wigs ("like road-kill", commented one museum curator).
Warhol's genius was in asking the viewer to question the medium and actively search for the message behind it. He began his artistic life as a commercial artist, creating amusing line drawings of fashion products - especially shoes - to make them appear desirable to the consumer. (Shoes were desirable to Warhol too, who collected hundreds of glitzy high-heels.)
By the time Warhol created his repetitive silk-screen paintings of Campbell's soup cans, he had decided that the viewer only understood the medium through message - "buy this soup, these shoes, this personality". If any artist defines the 20th century and its obsession with image over content, it is Warhol. His genius was in playing with surface images, yet always leaving an open space for the viewer to question content. He knew that once the viewer had perceived the selling point (be it nourishing chicken noodle or glamour), they would start to think about the image. Why soup? Why Jackie O? What do they mean to us? Are human beings products like soup?
Although, as we heard in the first part of this three-part series, Andy Warhol, the Complete Picture, it was his only idea, it was enough to sustain an extraordinary career. How weird that Warhol ate Campbell's soup every day and served it to his dinner guests. How odd that Warhol lived with his mother until her death and that this woman, who was also an artist, was so self-effacing that visitors to the renowned Factory thought she was a servant.
Warhol's inspiration came from the Catholic iconography of his ethnic roots in a remote part of Eastern Europe. He knew the secret of the repetitive but emotive message of Catholic imagery, with its predictable, yet comforting, depictions of saints and crucifixes. They may be boring - like soup - yet they continue to exert an emotional pull. All Warhol did was to translate colourful church iconography into celebrity iconography. Right time, right idea. The essence of fame.
Mario Testino: Diana's Favourite Photographer bastardises Warhol's concept. Testino can't even photograph in artificial light; he's an amateur enthusiast, whose schmoozing puts celebrities at ease. He too models his work on a Catholic childhood of gaudy iconography, turning mortals such as Kate Moss into sexually ambiguous, socially static saints. Like Warhol, he too is a commercial artist, but where Warhol elevated the concept to art, Testino is content to remain with commerce, with its shiny, superficial world of beaches, money, labels, sexually ambiguous models and helicopters on call. Where Warhol challenged perception, Testino takes pretty pictures of pretty people.
That's all. And he does it to sell things. A host of fashion gods and goddesses testified in the documentary to Testino's superficiality. Most of them seemed amazed that the National Portrait Gallery was giving him an exhibition (museums have to make money too), Testino doesn't do "portraits" he does advertisements. Testino cannot photograph unattractive people - as his Vanity Fair magazine spread on Prince Charles proves. The chickens looked better. Yet, ironically, Testino's photographs of Diana have become the iconography by which she is remembered. They are memorable, because we want them to be.
I don't think somehow, that Testino's Diana "portraits" will survive like Warhol's Jackie O and Madonna portraits have. Nor will Testino's collection of Brazilian male models survive as long as Warhol's collection of mundane objects and taped conversations, which are now housed and catalogued in the Warhol Museum, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. These objects - the roadkill wigs and Halston shoes included - are now lovingly maintained by a curator with long, stringy hair and pristine white gloves. Warhol kept everything. And now it's art. He must be laughing in his grave.
The most powerful images of the week were created by writer Jimmy McGovern in Sunday. Everyone's heard so much about Bloody Sunday recently that many people I know couldn't stomach this drama - but it was memorable, as much for its artistry as its subject. We followed the 14 victims of the massacre, getting to know each through such deft, thumbnail sketches that McGovern's light touch was nearly invisible.
BUT not to British "focus group" members, who accused him of bias and who, faced with such emotive material, attempted to come to terms with the forgotten history. They appeared in Sunday - the Debate, a piece of theatre almost as compelling as the drama which preceded it. Eamon McCann squared off with Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, the two men representing such opposing points of view that reconciliation would seem impossible. While McCann insisted that the people killed were innocent and that no shots "of any consequence" had been fired by protestors, except in defence, Farrar-Hockley insisted that British paratroopers had been defending themselves.
One focus group member concluded: "this is never going to end". Another pleaded for truth, reconciliation and forgiveness.
Yet another said, getting to the heart of the matter, that the protestors "weren't yobbos with missiles, they were children with stones". The power of McGovern's drama, was that the power of the image had made many British viewers confront the events of Bloody Sunday for the first time, even if it was 30 years later.
In an age when we are servants of the image, enthralled by superficial celebrity, McGovern made the image a servant of truth and justice.
And just as I finished writing this review, NTL arrived to repair the fault (though the serviceman then disappeared without saying anything or correcting the fault).