Victoria's Secrets (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Would You Believe (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Monica Hall Never The Same Again (RTE 1, Thursday)
Relative Strangers (RTE 1, Monday)
Home Sweet Home (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Victoria Beckham, nee Adams, aka Posh Spice was discussing "celebrity" with Elton John, nee Reginald Dwight, aka Sir Elton. They discovered that apart from their each having hit songs, loads of loot and a daft number of names, they have something else in common: they have both been accused of sodomy by thousands-strong hordes of chanting football fans. Ah, fame - it must be great, eh? Imagine being so eulogised from the stands and terraces.
Still, Elton paternally assured Posh that by "living a normal life", the downsides of fame could be kept at bay. "Look," he said, "if you have other people doing everything for you, you could end up like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson or Barbra Streisand - three complete fruitcakes!" Presumably that is why Elton was shopping in an ordinary record store and buying, as it seems he does most weeks, thousands of pounds' worth of CDs. What a really regular guy.
Mrs Beckham was presenting Victoria's Secrets, an interview programme designed to show that she's not just the pouting shopaholic of popular belief. "There's a lot more to me than short skirts and a pout," she said. And of course, there is. There's the matter of all that "celebrity", a strange condition, which, like a much-desired lover, is fiercely pursued, then regularly resented when acquired.
Presumably the decision to have Posh talk to other well-known people was meant to spice up the jaded celebrity interview genre. "I'm not very good at interviewing people," she said repeatedly and truthfully. Even though not being very good at interviewing people has seldom been a handicap in the Alan Partridge-like universe of TV guff, there was at least an honesty to Posh's pronouncement. This, after all, was TV as pure PR, in which even the rookie interviewer was a "celebrity" and she knew as much. Indeed Victoria's spiciest utterance was "Naomi Campbell is a nasty cow", and even that's an opinion which hardly constitutes a very original "secret".
Apart from Elton, we saw Posh exchange words with ("interview" might breach trade description law) Blazerman himself, Roger Moore; football hacker turned actor, Vinny Jones; veteran Roman dressmaker, Valentino; motormouth brash-babe, Ruby Wax; po-faced thespian Richard Grant; the most celebrated of British TV interviewers, Michael Parkinson and finally, her husband, the much maligned ball-crosser and cross-dresser, Thongman David Beckham.
None of the celebrities said anything very interesting to their celebrity questioner. This was largely because their celebrity questioner didn't ask very interesting questions of her celebrity colleagues. It was tellingly ironic, however, that a conversation between Posh and Piers Morgan, the editor of The Daily Mirror, actually yielded something of value. "Why are people more interested in that (the anorexic-looking Posh's weight problem) than in a war?" she asked, quite sensibly.
"It's the celebrity age," said Morgan, supplying an answer which was about as insightful as a Spice Girls lyric. But the reply was valuable insofar as it indicated that even one of Britain's most powerful tabloid figures either doesn't know or refuses to discuss why he does what he does. Who has made this "the celebrity age" (whatever that's supposed to mean) other than people like Morgan and the PR types with whom he colludes?
In that sense, then, this strangely unChannel 4-like programme was more revealing than a first glance might suggest. Posh Spice, looking porcelain-delicate and smiling mechanically, rather than at obvious stimuli, actually seemed like an innocent abroad. It's not sanctimonious or moralising to point out that the grossness of the abuse to which she and her husband are subjected in Britain is not at all funny and is often genuinely shocking.
So, Posh is no raconteuse, nor indeed is she even posh. She, and more so her equally famous husband, seemed quite pleasant and almost child-like, if out of their depth among media sharks. Victoria's Secrets wasn't quite a media cautionary tale, yet in its shallowness there was a chilling depth. At the heart of this one, we could discern the old story about people being dehumanised for the dehumanising amusement of others and the profits of ruthless media proprietors. More scary than posh, really.
TWO women who have led rather less glamorous lives than Posh Spice featured on Would You Believe and Monica Hall Never The Same Again. Both former nurse Ms Hall and former nun Nora Wall received lengthy jail sentences for, respectively, the alleged crimes of murder and child-rape. If Victoria's Secrets focused the spotlight on the media and its rather grubby construction and exploitation of "celebrity", these programmes posed serious questions for the justice systems of both the Republic of Ireland and Saudi Arabia.
Nora Wall's case, being in court so much more recently, is better remembered by the public. About seven months ago, she (along with a male accomplice) was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape of 10-year-old Regina Walsh. However, her conviction was quashed within days when it was shown that the prosecution had called a witness deemed to be "inappropriate". Previously this witness had questionably accused her own father, brother and uncle of raping her. RTE's legal affairs correspondent Mary Wilson spoke to Nora Wall about the ordeal.
Insisting that she has "no ill-feeling" against her accusers, Ms Wall sounded either saintly or inhuman. How do you think you would feel towards two people who got you locked up for a crime you didn't commit? Ill-feeling wouldn't be the half of it. Homicidal would probably be nearer the truth. But this case also raised questions of witch-hunting clerics and ex-clerics because of the awfulness of the paedophile scandals of the 1990s. There can be no doubt that many offenders, as is the case in civilian life, have escaped justice. But wrongful convictions are a grave risk too.
It was back in 1986 that Monica Hall was accused, along with her husband, Peter, of the murder of her friend Helen Feeney, a Roscommon-born matron at a Saudi Arabian hospital. She has always insisted that she and her husband were tortured into confessing and she spent three years of an eight-year sentence in jail. Ms Hall's life has been marked by family difficulties and tragedy and, like Nora Wall, she often resorted to drink to make living feel bearable.
The undeniable problem for both women, of course, is that once mud is thrown, some almost always sticks. For programme makers, the stories of Ms Hall and Ms Wall have obvious appeal but whether they can ever achieve the ends desired by the principals involved is another matter. Notoriety, like its more desired cousin, fame, falls on all sorts of ears and many are not the most sympathetic or compassionate. On balance, the women were probably as well to agree to these TV programmes. But the case for shunning all publicity could be almost equally compelling.
Being ludicrously feted or routinely traduced by the media is one thing. Ideally, of course, we shouldn't have to suffer such a constant barrage of disproportion and distortion. But compared to being a victim of the law's mistakes, media inequity and unfairness seems like small beer. Both of these programmes made for uncomfortable viewing and both demonstrated the fact that, feminism's less subtle propaganda aside, it wasn't only married Irish women who typically led martyred lives which made them flinty.
Both Would You Believe and Monica Hall Never The Same Again were testimonies, not just to individual lives and stories but to the kind of Ireland which produced such women. As ever, there were individual psychology's and experiences to be considered, but Ms Hall and Ms Wall did seem characteristic of a kind of, albeit financially independent Irish woman, who would rather have done something else in life. Perhaps they used to be happy but it certainly didn't seem like that. Sad, sad stuff.
YET more sad stuff for women in Relative Strangers, RTE's new four-part drama series. Brenda Fricker and Lena Stolze feature respectively as the unknowing wife and liedto mistress of a businessman who dies leaving them all facing financial ruin. Ms Fricker plays Maureen Lessing, an Irishwoman living in Germany with a teenage son and daughter. Ms Stolze's role is as Liza Becker, an Austrian living in Bray with a five-year-old son, who, like Maureen's teenagers, has been fathered by the dead man.
As drama, it's all nicely observed but rather slow moving. Certainly the central performances are praiseworthy but the emphasis on naturalism is, at times, too extreme. Beside this one, the naturalism of say, Coronation Street, could seem like Arnie Schwarzenegger melodramatics. Still, though at the expense of pace in the plot, this does build up generally strong characterisation. In that sense, it has an almost quaintly old-fashioned, character-driven tempo.
With just one episode screened, I'll say little about the plot except that its tugging at heartstrings is likely to appeal to more tender, if not mawkish, tastes. Produced by Little Bird of Dublin and Tatfilm of Dusseldorf, with German, EU and RTE financial backing, it's a co-production which, in spite of its strong production values, may find it difficult to secure any prime-time slots outside of countries with immediate involvement and identification. Giles Foster, probably best known for Hotel du Lac, directs with thoroughness, if - so far - little inspiration.
FINALLY, Home Sweet Home: First Steps. The opening episode of this six-parter provided a splendid slice of Irish social history. The story of public housing in the 26-county state since independence is of even greater significance than the more celebrated story about land. The house, not the field, was the focus closest to home for a far greater number of Irish people in the 20th century. It still is, of course, but before the age of estates of million-pound mini-mansions, houses were worth something a lot more important than money.
Back in the 1930s, Dev realised the social necessity and political wisdom of house-building and it's ironic now to think that Fianna Fail, the party of Charlie McCreevyism, had a mild socialist hue at the time. Despite the hideous mortality rates in the tenements, the Catholic Church was unhappy about the prospect of "red barracks" and sexual promiscuity developing from the communal living in blocks of flats. But the flats got built anyway.
In the week that the film version of Angela's Ashes opened in Dublin and Limerick, the notorious slums of both cities were again brought to mind. In providing television which is wonderfully antithetical to the ubiquitous "celebrity" tripe, producers/directors Ken Lynam and Jack Talbot, have shown that the medium can still be as good as people want it to be . . . even in, spare us, "the celebrity age".