Cursai Ealaine Teoranta (RTE 1, Tuesday)
The Mary Millington Story (Channel 4, Saturday)
Vinny Goes To Hollywood (BBC 1, Wednesday)
The Road To Riches (BBC 2, Sunday)
The Gay Byrne Music Show (RTE 1, Saturday)
Thirty-four years after the blowing-up of Nelson's Pillar, it's hard to know if O'Connell Street's replacement monument will spike taste or taste-vigilantism. Perhaps it will spike both. Given the controversy over Ian Ritchie's 390-foot spire, art in public places is a particularly spiky subject at present. For that reason alone, Cursai Ealaine Teoranta: Public Art was timely. Directed by Tom MacArdghail, visually it was a piece of public art in its own right.
Verbally however, it was rather less striking. Posing the question "Whose Art Is It Anyway?", it elicited thoughtful and pertinent responses from artists about the politics of public art. But it never quite answered the question it posed. Perhaps the question is ultimately unanswerable. But for it to be given a fair airing, the opinions of members of the artistic community ought not to have dominated quite so much. Who, after all, has the right to say whose art it is, or ought to be? Given that the subject was public art, the public was gravely underrepresented.
A few brief and casual vox pops were included but, really, this otherwise engaging documentary could have been greatly enhanced by a well-structured survey. It's likely that public interest in public art varies in almost direct proportion to the size of the piece of art - monumentality being the dominant aesthetic. Siting counts too, of course, but to the public, size probably matters most. It's not so, or at least, not nearly as much so, with artists. For them, the criteria of worth are more complex, even though there's a not unimportant relationship between size and fee.
Fiach MacConghail, a former director of the Project Arts Centre, suggested that "ownership" of a piece rests primarily with its instigator - generally a local authority. Perhaps it does. Certainly, there is regularly tension between the ways in which artists and county councillors view a piece of work. Artist Louise Walsh complained about the frequent "compromises" forced upon her by politicians. She now believes that public art commissions are not worth the trouble and will not seek them in future.
Still, another artist, Dorothy Cross, whose glowing Ghost Ship, moored in Dun Laoghaire harbour, won both public and critical acclaim, laconically summed up the dilemma. She pointed out that, with public commissions, "design" is often confused with "art" and that seems about right. Then again, given, as a voiceover correctly described, the constraints of "inadequate budgets, unimaginative briefs and poor administration", we shouldn't be surprised that this is so often the case.
In itself, however, the documentary was imaginative. Cleverly using public notice boards to pose its questions, it framed its agenda in a manner which creatively united form and function. If only the local authorities could follow suit. We saw Dublin's airport roundabout with its large, wing-like, distorted obelisk and the piece appeared suitable in context. What we didn't see was the fact that, in terms of function, the airport roundabout is a sick joke which creates traffic jams.
That, of course, is not the fault of artists. But it is of greater concern to the public which uses it. So long as roads cease to fulfil their function, truth is, the art will remain incidental. Had the public been surveyed about such a practicality, we might have been given a more complete picture about public opinion regarding the uses and abuses of "public spaces" in Ireland. Then again, had we had a greater concentration on ethics in planning, the aesthetics would now be more relevant.
Nonetheless, this was important television. The assumption underpinning it - indeed the idea was made explicit in some of the artists' pieces to camera - was of aesthetes versus philistines. Fair enough, politicians are seldom perceptive art critics. But that is not their function anyway. The real scandal, as we know, is that, too often, their patronage of art has been nothing compared to their patronage of their paying cronies. Perhaps we do need taste-vigilantes to become outraged about public art. But the real public rage at present concerns less lofty matters than the contentious spike in Dublin's O'Connell Street.
Despite its arguably aesthetic dimension, few subjects can be less lofty than The Mary Millington Story: Sex and Fame. Millington was Britain's leading porn star of the 1970s. She enjoyed a kind of cult status until prostitution, kleptomania and drug abuse took their toll, culminating in her committing suicide, aged 33, in 1979. "Mary took porn out of the backstreets," agreed a number of her apologists. Credited, or depending on your perspective, perhaps discredited, with spreading "sex into the suburbs", Mary's gig really had more to do with sleaze than with liberation.
She was "discovered" by film-maker John Lindsay while working as a veterinary nurse. Just 4 foot 11 inches tall, she knew that fashion modelling was out of the question. Offered "glamour" (what a euphemism!) modelling instead, she accepted eagerly and rapidly proceeded to hard-core movies and "high-class" prostitution. It was difficult not to form the opinion that she was a serial exhibitionist exploited by sleazemongers for the cash her performances generated.
The film opened with scenes of "Mary Millington fans", Vicky, Simon and John, at her grave. Vicky, Simon and John could not have been more than toddlers when Mary committed suicide and their devotion - they had stacks of magazines and videos - seemed strange. They were particularly appreciative of Mary's `topless outside 10 Downing Street' picture: a novel form of public art, I suppose. Anyway, to counter such weirdness, "social historian" David McGillivray was interviewed. McGillivray's specialist interest is "sex in the suburbs" - isn't academia expanding these days? - and he spoke of the iconic importance of Millington in her heyday.
He and others agreed that she had "a Marilyn Monroe complex" (citing the shared MM initials) but, sleazy and all as Hollywood can be, backstreet Soho is in a considerably less glamorous league. Where Monroe competed for Oscars, Millington won such awards as The Golden Phallus at The International Wet Dream Festival. This achievement was spoken of as candidly and non-judgmentally as if it were a Feis Ceoil triumph. You could see how porn industry insiders view their product as legitimate commerce and even art. Nobody even laughed at the title of the award.
What was most deeply disturbing, however, was the fact that nobody involved professionally with Millington took any responsibility for the corrupting nature of her gig. She was portrayed as a free spirit, vehemently dedicated to legalising pornography in stuffy Britain. That others were profiting from her behaviour was never really discussed. All her films made money and even though all of Britain's sex shops closed on the morning of her funeral, it was clear that her industry saw her more as a product than a person.
There were occasional revelations about her psychology. She never knew her father was bisexual and as her downward spiral progressed, she became increasingly paranoid. The conservative establishment, using the police, did, it seems, rather hound her. Cocaine took its toll, cost her her looks and ended her career in the sex industry. Her suicide predictably prompted more comparisons with Monroe but Millington's was an even sadder story. All those consulted agreed that she was neither brash nor hard and you realised that, this being so, she was easy meat for the sleaze-meisters who ran the show. It would be hard to imagine a more unglamorous career in "glamour" modelling.
Another unlikely icon chasing celluloid fame is Vinny Jones. Formerly a thug footballer, Vinny received very encouraging reviews for his performance as Big Chris in the small-budget, big hit, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. His ambition now is to be nominated for an Oscar. Arguing, with some persuasion, that if Wimbledon could beat Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final, an Oscar is not an unrealistic ambition, Vinny certainly has screen presence in the mould of the pitch presence which began his notoriety.
Big and bullet-headed, he is naturally menacing and is set to feature in two more films: as a character called the Sphinx in a $150 million Hollywood effort titled Gone in 60 Seconds and as Bullet-Tooth Tony in Snatch, the follow-up to Lock Stock. He may well succeed and certainly, the unusually invaluable PR he received from this BBC profile won't hinder him. The larger picture, of course, tells us much about the coarsening of popular entertainment and the relationship between fame or notoriety in one arena transferring, brand-name like, to another. "Public" matters more than "art" when commercial culture is the paymaster.
Still, Vinny faces obstacles, prime among them his English accent. We saw him taking lessons from American voice coach Robert Easton. Hearing Vinnie Jones grapple with a Yank pronounciation of "There's something rotten in the state of Denmark" provided one of the funniest moments in a television week dominated by the grimness of Orange and loyalist disorder. How all those aspiring RADA-trained actors feel about the rise of Vinny Jones is another question. Like genuinely skilful ball-players roughed out of football by hacking thugs, they'll appreciate that, in the commercial world, ability will get you only so far.
LESS populist, though its title could be for the most vulgar of gameshows, is The Road To Riches. Presented by the BBC's economics editor, Peter Jay, this new 10-part series about humanity's journey from hunter-gatherer to wealth creator is really an economist's version of The Ascent of Man. Beginning with chimpanzees "trading" empty peanut-butter tubes for bananas, we were introduced to the prehistory of barter. After that, the development of farming made homo economicus an inevitability.
That, at any rate, is Jay's theory. This opening episode spent most of its time in the Middle East. There, archaeologists with Nike caps dug the burnt earth and an executive of Visa International, sponsors of a dig in Turkey, claimed that a volcanic stone called obsidian was "the first credit card". Even in serious documentaries nowadays, pep talks from sponsors appear unavoidable. The next episode deals with the rise and fall of Greece and Rome and ought to be rather less laborious. By the time we get to stock-exchange hucksters, the ways of money will have left a trail of progress and barbarism.
Finally, The Gay Byrne Music Show. There's not a great deal that can be said about this other than that it features Gay Byrne and a muster (or whatever is the collective plural) of musicians. Certainly, it provides variety and some quality - Mary Coughlan, Ronnie Drew and Eleanor Shanley, Jack L, Catherine Coates, Phil Coulter and Davy Spillane were among those featured. It also gives the RTE Concert Orchestra a television gig and that's fair enough. Perhaps its main problem is the scope of its variety. It can remind you of plugging-in to the variety music channel on an Aer Lingus Jumbo jet going to America in the early 1980s. Public art was ever thus.