Revising the murky past (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Reputations (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Panorama (BBC 1, Monday)
Later With O'Leary (Network 2, Wednesday)
Over a montage of seminal scenes from the North's conflict, Maggie Thatcher and Tony Blair were making the appropriate noises. The IRA would "never" win, "democracy" and "the rule of law" would prevail. She, wannabe Churchillian, sounded threatening and triumphalistic. He, wannabe smoothie, opted for the tone of self-conscious sincerity he seeks on solemn occasions. These were public pronouncements from the top of British politics. Respectively rallying and reassuring, they were merely the routine rhetoric of the war.
Brits: The Secret War sought a grubbier reality. Following his Provos and Loyalists series, Peter Taylor's third three-parter focuses on the less high-minded aspects of the British campaign against the IRA. Opening with Loughgall, which, with eight provos killed in an SAS ambush, was a crushing defeat for the IRA, this first episode then rewound to the early years of the conflict. Loughgall had been made possible by informers, the greatest single weapon a colonial power has ever had against insurgents.
Mirroring conventional society, the British war effort was a layered affair. Suits and spooks from the Ministry of Defence and the secret services directed army officers who, in turn, used plain-clothes "operatives" and uniformed grunts to carry out the violence. Attitudes among the various layers were defining. At the top, where a right-torule mentality went unquestioned, control was paramount; for the officers, efficiency was the goal; at the really dirty end, an unquestioning belief in the caste system was obvious.
"We just came to clean up the mess and let people get back to living ordinary lives," said a soldier who served in Belfast in the early 1970s. A functionary, trained to obey orders, he clearly believed it was as simple as that. Cut from him to the MoD's Frank Cooper (probably more closely identified with Falklands War propaganda) admitting that ignorance of Ireland was endemic throughout British society. Still, even Cooper's frank admission didn't prevent the British army's former Commander of Land Forces in the North, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, from continuing to defend internment, which, like Bloody Sunday, was a clarion recruiting call for the IRA.
Taylor suggested to him that perhaps torturing internees wasn't the most noble or democratic way to clean up the mess. "The IRA must be prepared to be frightened," he replied. As a simple statement, you couldn't argue with it. As a response to a specific charge, its very evasiveness was brilliantly illuminating. Many other people, frightened by both the IRA and the British army (and, of course, by the RUC, the UDR and the loyalist paramilitaries) were tortured too. At least the European Court of Human Rights decided so. But such trivia didn't appear to concern Farrar-Hockley.
Unlike his interviews with provos and loyalists, many of Taylor's talking heads for Brits were shown piecemeal. As such, they were talking mouths or blinking eyes or anonymous haircuts. It looked like a cut from A Question of Sport and was unavoidably irritating. If Taylor couldn't get them to talk face-to-camera, he would have been better advised to shoot them all in silhouette. That way, at least, the sense of unrevealed identity would have been properly revealed. As it was, the facial strip-tease accentuated the reasonable suspicion that information and not just identity was being studiously processed by professionals trained not to tell the truth.
Brendan "Darkie" Hughes, a former IRA commander in Belfast, who led the lethal attack on the Four Square laundry spying van, recalled being arrested some time later. He was, he said, "offered a suitcase full of money" to turn informer. The British and the RUC Special Branch confirmed this. And there you had it. This was a murky story of infiltration, of eavesdropping with bugging equipment, but principally of inducing people to inform. It left the impression that while there was undeniable bravery on both sides, dirty wars can't breed many clean heroes. Deep down, the clash of world views hasn't gone away.
AT 45, Olga Korbut's face shows that she has been through more than a few of life's somersaults. With dyed blonde hair and a pair of outsize tinted shades that looked like portable TV screens, Korbut spoke to Reputations about her life before and after the Munich Olympic games of 1972. This revisionist profile/documentary was subtitled The Gymnast, Her Coach, Her Rival and the President. In order, these referred to herself, Renald Knysh, Ludmilla Tourishcheva and Tricky Dicky Nixon.
Knysh appears to have been quite a tricky customer in his own right. He was, said Korbut, "a loner, a despot, a weirdo but a brilliant coach". She claimed he forced her to have sex with him a few days before the Olympics. "Did he rape you?" asked an off-screen interviewer. "You could put it that way," she replied. Not surprisingly, the brilliant weirdo disagreed. "She is lying," he said. "As soon as you start having sex together, the sport goes down the drain." This sounded either like a principled defence of Platonic friendship or a sermon fragment from a Father Trendy.
But there the matter rested. You could believe whoever you wanted. There were no arguments, however, about the severity of the training, which saw Korbut redefine female gymnastics in the space of four days in Munich. She was 17 then but looked about 14. Her USSR teammate, Tourishcheva, was also her greatest rival. In contrast, Tourishcheva looked like a normally developed young woman. Her style was more traditional, fluent and disciplined. But it lacked the bold, dazzling acrobatics with which the elfin Korbut thrilled spectators, if not always judges, who sometimes considered her routines to be crude circus tricks.
Revisiting a gym, Korbut described how she had learned to treat the few-inches-wide beam "as a floor". This was achieved through thousands of repetitions which, inevitably, included falls. Her father, Valentin, spoke of the injuries - concussions, fractures and dislocations - which she sustained. Suspicions that she had been given drugs to delay puberty remain unproven. "I don't know what I was given," she said. Whatever it was, along with her talent and interminable practice, it made her a global icon. We saw a still of her meeting Nixon. It reminded you that Elvis had beamed for Tricky Dicky too.
Six months after the Montreal Olympics of 1976, where the women's gymnastics were dominated by the even more elfin, "10-out-of-10" 14-year-old Romanian, Nadia Comaneci, Korbut retired. She had a son, Richard, in 1979 and moved to the US in 1991. She first settled in New Jersey but her gymnastics training methods were too rough for Yank kids. She now lives in a suburb of Atlanta. Her seven years' training for four days in Munich changed female gymnastics forever. There are no grown-up female gymnasts anymore.
As revisionist profiles go, this one was unusually on the side of its subject. It was clear that Knysh (whatever about the alleged rape, he did admit hitting Korbut) resented his creation's worldwide fame. It was clear too that Korbut had attitude. "I just played with them (the spectators) and when I finished I knew the world was mine," she said of her legendary floor exercises routine at Munich. In a sense, she was right. But her lined face (Tourishcheva, champion of the fuller-figured, has weathered much better) and prickly extroversion suggested that Reputations, like Brits, vaulted over some aspects of an intriguing story.
From the history of gymnastics to the future of football - Panorama: The Two-Billion-Pound Ball Game reported on the forthcoming auction of television rights to British football. Back in 1991, Rupert Murdoch's Sky paid £304 million for five years' TV rights. By 1996, Sky was forking out £670 million. Now, with football for sale again, it seems that £2 billion will be required to win the rights to the game for just three years. It wasn't exactly investigative journalism to let us know that fans will end up picking up most of the tab.
Sky and its emerging rival, NTL, are busy buying shares in Premiership clubs. Murdoch's outfit owns 9.9 per cent (the most allowed by law) of Manchester United and Chelsea, 9.1 per cent of Leeds and 5 per cent of Sunderland. NTL has 9.9 per cent holdings in Newcastle and Aston Villa and 5 per cent in Middlesborough. Granada has bought 9.9 per cent of Liverpool. Though the media sharks deny it, everybody knows that these shares are being bought to exert influence on clubs' decisions regarding TV rights.
Reporter Paul Kenyon, his hands waving like a flapping goalkeeper's, breathlessly informed us that television now runs English football. Well, well, who would have thought? As the final FA Cup Final at old Wembley takes place today, it's clear that sport as business is inexorably moving towards maximising profits - the true trophies of commerce. There is, of course, a relationship between success on the field and success on the stock exchange. But, where profits are concerned, marketing managers are more prized than team managers. This applies even to the likes of Alex Ferguson.
Still, a pecking order established by financial clout cannot but become too rigid for the long-term future of football. With England's Premiership in danger of becoming as tedious as Scottish football (in terms of seriously viable contestants) there is a grave downside to football's financial revolution. Already, Premiership rights have saved Sky - a former Sky chief executive admitted as much - but there's now too much live football on TV. The glory game could yet go the way of televised snooker.
Finally, Later With O'Leary. Joe Mulholland, Geraldine Kennedy, Liam Fay and Patrick Cooney were assembled to discuss journalism and sundry media matters. The usual suspects - RTE's timidity; opinion journalism's cheap trenchancy; the relationship between politicians and political correspondents; the libel laws; the questionable ethics of using sly means (deceptions, hidden cameras and mikes, sting operations, etc) to break stories - were tackled.
Media civil wars are invariably nasty affairs and there were spirited, if predictable, exchanges between the five. But without any representative from the reading, viewing or listening public it was, inevitably, rather incestuous. The true subject was media competition, with each pundit defending their own patches and practices. Against media people's expressed orthodoxy, Mulholland feared that any relaxation of the libel laws could lead to greater abuses by gutter journalism. Normally, that's a lawyer's argument and it does hold some water.
But, wild for profits, the gutter proprietors and their hired guns are already holding the more responsible media to ransom. Sleazy comics pretending to be newspapers while pandering to prurience are the problem. They, along with the vested interests of the law and the powerful, keep the libel laws restrictive and make valuable journalism difficult. Perhaps the greatest irony of the evening, however, was that while RTE's missing of such stories as the beef and Brendan Smyth scandals was being deplored, British television was screening yet another major series on the North. Neglect of big-picture documentaries on this biggest of all Irish stories has been RTE's greatest-ever scandal. But nobody in studio seemed to mind.