TV Review: That pale old moon keeps rising, bobbing up and down now for 47 long years. Forty-seven years of lukewarm virginity, flat notes, hairspray and comhairle, of jigs and reels and didgeridoos, of weeping mothers and jet-lagged grandfathers kicking up the auld sod after 60 years in Adelaide or Toronto, who look like they've been sewn into their dress suits by a taxidermist.
The Rose of Tralee is still blooming, and if you thought the pageant had bitten the bust, think again: on Monday night, when Ray D'Arcy introduced the first 15 of the 30 "lovely girls" competing to be this year's Rose, he had viewing figures of more than 850,000 people, that exceeds 60 per cent of the audience share.
"The lads and lassies" of the band of An Garda Síochána were unambiguous in their choice of intro for each contestant, vigorously belting out Molly Malone or New York, New York as an Atlantic gale stirred the tassels on the contestants' discreetly cut frocks.
D'Arcy is interesting, and without doubt the competition's most successful presenter since Gaybo. Fondly asexual in his approach to the contestants, he looked neither bored nor overwhelmed, an extraordinary feat given that he had to endure a seemingly endless parade of former Irish dancing champions, a shaky synchronised ice skater, a skydiver with "sensory overload", a self-conscious samba dancer, an exhausting Philadelphian plying her spot-cream remedies and 60 identically and alarmingly sparkling eyelids.
The Dubai Rose (who is actually Rachel, a flight attendant from Castleknock) couldn't pronounce her Dutch boyfriend's name.
"What do you call him when you want him?" asked D'Arcy.
"Yo-Yo," replied Rachel in an arrestingly unwholesome fashion.
"And does he know," inquired D'Arcy, as if butter wouldn't melt, "that a yo-yo is a thing that goes up and down?" The "moral integrity" the festival prides itself on, with its echoes of the well-scrubbed comely maiden with imperfect teeth and a meaty shank, is tottering prettily on its kitten heels, and maybe that is now the show's allure. We tune in to watch an all-singing, all-dancing anachronism, an emigre's vision of modern Ireland. But these chivalrous escorts and personable lasses are a whole new seed and breed: they are well-educated and erudite, they are public relations consultants and TV wannabes, they are physicists and scientists, they are the moneyed progeny of successful parents, and their real story is what they get up to when they let their hair extensions down.
After many, many hours, the bookies' favourite, Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, from Carnacon, in Co Mayo (which she described as "the centre of everything in the middle of nowhere"), won through. With her easygoing demeanour, her guitar and her honours degree in theoretical physics, she epitomises the hybrid that is the modern Rose of Tralee. Forty-seven and counting . . .
Wrong ideas have toxic consequences, concluded a young German named Joseph Ratzinger during the rise of Nazism. Born in an Alpine village, Marktl, in 1927, to devoutly religious parents, the future Pope Benedict XVI was obliged as a child to join the Hitler Youth movement and, at the age of 16, was conscripted into the German army, where he witnessed at first hand the rounding up of Hungarian Jews. The pejoratively named documentary, God's Rottweiler?, traced Ratzinger's meteoric rise through the Catholic hierarchy and attempted to examine the consequences of his election as Pope last April.
As one of the architects of Vatican II in the 1960s, Ratzinger, at a time of great change and optimism, was originally deemed a radical. However, a spell lecturing at Tubingen University in Germany with his former friend and fellow theologian, Hans Kung, quickly altered his views. Ratzinger does not enjoy chaos, having witnessed its devastating consequences, and, after the student riots of 1968 and turmoil in the theology lecture room, he concluded that the liberalisation of the church had gone too far. He wanted, seemingly, to return to the certainties that had sustained him during his Bavarian childhood.
The programme was not short of Ratzinger detractors: there were many, we were told, who lost sleep after the election of an individual who had spent 23 years at the helm of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Inquisition. Among those who spoke was Father Bernard Lynch, known for his ministry among gay men, who remembered young New Yorkers refusing the last rites on their deathbeds, abandoned, they felt, by a church that called Aids "a natural result of an unnatural life". Female priests, homosexuality (described as "the elephant in the Roman Catholic parlour"), liberation theology in South America, the scourge of paedophilia and the growth of fundamentalism are among the huge issues the new Pope has to face.
This far-reaching, over-extended documentary, which was crying out to be a series, concluded that Ratzinger was elected Pope because he was intellectually undaunted by such challenges, and also that he would focus his energy on a smaller but purer European church, a watchdog guarding "the beauty of a modern faith" against the threat of encroaching secularism. Where that would leave Lynch and other liberal Catholics remains to be seen.
There is in this world an International Federation of Competitive Eating (there are also paper doilies and appendixes and antimacassars, so who are we to judge?). What you've got to work on, apparently, if your "love of mastication" is so intense that you end up on a podium in Coney Island with one million people watching you, beside a Japanese guy called Kobayashi who can eat 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes, is how to get your sausage in. Kobayashi eats them two at a time, meanwhile soaking the buns in water to make them easier to swallow; it's difficult to see, as the narrator told us with untrammelled excitement, where the dogs end and his fingers begin. The Big Eat followed British hopeful (hopeful for what?) Rob Burns on his American eating odyssey. Burns qualified to eat in the Coney Island contest by chomping his way through 18 pork pies in 12 minutes at a modified car rally outside Wolverhampton (and you thought global warming was depressing).
"Noisy cars and a flatulent sideshow!" vociferated George Shea, the American MC and competitive eating enthusiast, who was attempting to infiltrate Britain with his nauseating entertainment. Pork pies, we learned in the course of this insanely informative documentary, are actually trotter, eyelid and ear in pastry, and require intense "jaw capacity".
"Elvis has left the building," roared a delighted Shea, as one of "Baby Face" Rob's rivals ("the Four Horsemen of the Oesophagus", as they had earlier been described) threw up all over someone's bull-bars. Shea, who one feels is in some appalling existential crisis, is devoted to the mission of making competitive eating an Olympic event.
His unique philosophy is that there is "a false barrier" between the masses and those whom the masses watch (ie sportsmen), and that this "sport" (shovelling hot dogs down your gullet like an anaconda dealing with a sheep) brings down those barriers. Reinforce them, I say, block out the light.
On the day (which was the 4th of July), witnessed by more than a million television viewers, "Baby Face" Rob balked at the scale of the challenge he faced. The "unique championship hot dog" (the greasiest dog he'd ever had the pleasure to masticate) was more than he could cope with. Kobayashi took gold with 49 dogs, Rob came last with a miserly 10. Europe can be proud of his failure. Never again.
COMEDIAN COLIN MURPHY has cast a wry eye over the BBC Northern Ireland television archive and has strung together a four-part series looking back at some of the innocent and awful television that the beleaguered North has had to endure over the last few decades.
"There are cows here with Equity cards," Murphy complained, bemoaning the lack of celebrities which led to years of Ulster television being populated by thepopulace. From a 1976 Ulster in Focus edition on binmen, where a "hump the bin" contest was mooted, to the somnambulant offerings of 1980s magazine programme Ye Tell Me That (Murphy suggested it should have been called "Euthanasia Monthly"), which examined the concrete variations on the bridges of Craigavon, there was a surfeit of riches for Murphy to plunder. With luck, arms decommissioning and a bit of imaginative TV commissioning, there's a chance that Murphy won't become a victim of his own parody.
