JON'S wife, Tracy, buys him saucepans for presents. Tracy is a sales executive for Faberge. Jon is a former hod carrier turned househusband. Instead of carrying backs, he now carries his infant daughter, Tess. As he pureed kiwi fruit for Tess's lunch, he gazed wistfully into the speckled green sludge and lamented. "I miss the crack down at the greasy spoon caf."
But the loss of the crack down at a greasy spoon caf with a gang of builders seemed to be Jon's only regret. Modern Times: House husbands opened by telling us that "in one in five British households, a woman is now the major breadwinner". Major breadwinners don't come much more major or win much more bread than Tracy. They don't come much more patronising either.
"My husband can do practically everything... except make money," said Tracy. Cut to her pulling out of the couple's Surrey driveway in a silver Merc. Jon, with baby on the shoulder, where a hod used to nestle, waved goodbye. In fact, he blew a kiss with the fingers of his free hand. Nice touch, Jon. The lads in the caf would crease over their grease at that one. Cut again Tracy alights from Merc and begins a purposeful, executive stride to chair a business meeting high powered, no doubt. Jon returns to his saucepans.
"You can call me an inverted sexist, if you like," said Tracy, indicating that she considered her granting of permission for people to make up their own minds an act of the most noble largesse, "but I really believe men should be doing physical work tilling the soil, that sort of thing. Maybe that's because I'm university educated and have read too much D.H. Lawrence.
Maybe, indeed. "I really need my down time and my space," she continued, although it was hard not to think that D.H. Lawrence might have avoided the executive speak and settled on the English language terms "free time" and "privacy" to describe Tracy's stated needs. Anyway, Jon, feeding time and supermarket shopping over, readied a blouse and power suit for Tracy. He was happy thinking of buying her a set of spanners for Christmas.
Up in Glasgow, another househusband, who used to work on an oil rig and still does a spot of boxing, was minding his infant son. "I used to push the pram with one arm to pretend I wasn't really with it," he said. "Now, I've no problem and I'll feed and change him in public, anytime.
No bother." Clearly, this house husbandry is a progressive condition. None of the lads are breast feeding yet, but give evolution a few generations .
For the third couple featured, though, house husbanding was more strained. Nick is a former banker who was hit by redundancy and house repossession. His wife has taken to making wedding dresses to bring in money. He does the cooking, ironing, cleaning and has rediscovered an old interest in, eh, "drama". He plays damas in pantomime during his down time. His wife is not impressed.
"You're always dressing up as women in pantomine" she spits. Together since 1970 when she was 15 and Nick 18, they now live as "friends" under the same roof a Suffolk cottage. Her daddy though, was a "war hero". We saw pictures of his medals and moustache to prove it. Nick, in drag, is out of his depth with this sort of macho stuff. His wife, still a daddy's girl, big time, does not feel "secure" with her transvestite househusband. "We live in a confused time," proffers Nick, philosophically.
Indeed we do. Gender role reversal is not easy because identity can disintegrate. It would seem that putative househusbands need to have solid macho-cred before their wives can accept role swaps. Hod carrying and boxing are cool. Alligator wrestling, eating raw meat, fighting sharks with your bare hands, a spot of kicking the crap out of dockers and rugby teams in savage pub brawls, are even better. The CVs for successful househusbands should drip with testosterone.
Poor Nick. He lost his job, his money and his house. As a result, he started wearing dresses and now has lost his oats. Nothing short of nude bullfighting or giving Mike Tyson a good hiding for being offensive to women can save him now. Even that might not be heavy enough to see off the ghosts of a war hero daddy.
American fiction writers have travelled this route before. Think of Hemingway or Mailer and a long list of other designer hard cases since the time of Jack London all excruciatingly aware that a pen is not a penis. It seems that for all their liberation, 1990s women want to be able to believe in their men's capacity to be macho, so long as they don't actually have to deal with to much of the brutishness involved. Same as it ever was.
SAME as it ever was too with The Liver Birds. Oh, Sandra (Nerys Hughes) and Beryl (Polly James) are now cast as 50 and 51 respectively. But their lives continue to revolve around men, or, at any rate thoughts of men. Carla Lane's 1970s sitcom has been revamped for the 1990s. But while they sit has been updated, the corn is now 25 years out of date, for here we have a bizarre inversion of dinosaurs descended from Birds rather than the other way around.
The pair meet while attending anti fat (Sandra) and anti stress (Beryl) classes in the same building. Sandra is as pretentious as ever, Bery, as common. (At least, in the 1970s "common was the word). Within 10 minutes, they are again sharing the same house or, living space in 1990s speak. Sandra's snobbish mother (Mollie Sugden) objects to "common" Beryl getting the flat upstairs, but money is money and so the scene is set.
There is much guff between the pair about their intervening sexual adventures. Sandra married a boring vet, Beryl a randy git, who introduced her to the true meaning of "shag pile" carpet. The jokes are like that. The reunited duo make jokes about each other's breasts, and words like "shitty", taboo in 1970s sitcoms, are meant to indicate a 1990s flintiness in the script. It's watchable, but the girlish focus on men and sex seemed contrived.
Then the script took a peculiar twist. Beryl, who had denied having any children, is shown visiting a vilely vacuous, teenage son in a young offenders' institution. He was caught joy riding. Leaving, she says in a low voice "You're destroying my life." But he doesn't hear he's been wearing a Walkman throughout. The final scene shows Beryl crying hysterically on her new bed. The change of mood from giggly girly sex jokes to real, adult brokenness, seemed as much a comment on the times as on the characters. It has set up a balancing act which won't be easy.
THE past was also the focus of Postcards From The Country, which, in its opening episode, focusing on Kent, provided a splendid evocation of an England gone forever. It is generally believed that Ireland has undergone much greater change than Britain in the second half of this century. But on the evidence of this, British villages have not so much changed as died and been taken to the taxidermist.
Now, Kent villages are stuffed, with wealthy business types, who have mummified English folk tradition. Stockbrokers in designer smocks, playing at Morris dancing Maypole malarkey, have in the name of English heritage destroyed Kent village and turned it into a sanitised, antiseptic version of itself. Old villagers' memories and film library footage showed that, back in the 1950s, much Kentish life was more vitally connected to the preceding centuries than today's Kent is to 1950s.
Villages in the Weald of Kent used to three or four duck ponds. Fruit fields, hop gardens and chestnut coppice woodlands surrounded village greens. Thousands of East Enders would arrive at fruit picking harvest times. Now, EU "initiatives" are causing a massive digging up of the land. An old style skittle alley has become a karaoke bar. Farm workers' cottages are being (are you ready?) "gentrified" by commuters. A beautifully made series, full of admissible nostalgia without the awful sentimentality of stockbrokers in smocks.
BACK on RTE, Alan Gilsenan's Home Movie Nights put Sara Berkeley's home movie footage to her poetry. This was risky, but the result was as evocative as that achieved by Postcards From The Country. There wasn't too much poetry, but the effect of the better lines was to universalise personal memories. Ms Berkeley's Raheny childhood was far from extraordinary. Indeed, the dominance of that home movie staple seaside holidays emphasised its extraordinary ordinariness.
But a sparse and poetic script, 59 unusual on RTE, and old Beatles songs enhancing times and places (before they became known as "spaces") seamlessly linked the past to the present in a way that national heritage "initiatives" or interpretative centres never could. Ms Berkeley recalled willing herself to remember forever a little yellow flower. Thirty or more years later her recollection of the moment of wilful remembering carried a rare, triumphal poignancy. Lovely stuff a sort of Rock `n' Roll Years on a small canvas.
IN contrast, Prime Time addressed more prosaic, but no less engaging, aspects of ageing. Euthanasia and its legal and ethical implications were discussed. It's a fraught subject, of course, and medical ethics are intrinsic to thinking on the matter. But medical ethics, though they deal with life and death, are merely a branch of ethics and are not, in themselves, the highest moral authority on the subject.
A lot of doctors don't seem to get this, though. Dr Bill Tormey was scathing about Dr Paddy Leahy, who has helped people, who wished to do so, to end their lives. In this debate, people are either for or against Paddy Leahy and, while recognising that there are very serious dangers and complexities involved, it is hard not to side with the humanism of Dr Leahy.
Owning the knowledge, or even, as the Hippocratic Oath (that bit about passing the knowledge only to other initiates) appears to want it, owning (or appropriating?) the right to knowledge, which can save or heal or enhance life, is not the same as owning life itself. Interpreting a professional duty as a right, or indeed a duty, to override, in all cases, another's wishes, seems either tyrannical or, more charitably perhaps, messianic. Either way, no professional code of conduct can morally condemn any of us to suffer excruciating pain and humiliation against our will. This debate will occupy a lot of TV time yet. So it should.
FINALLY, The Den Is Ten. Looking back on a decade of The Den, there were many terrific moments. Zig and Zag, long gone in the transfer market, were icons to the programme's first generation. But The Dustin generation has been no less well served. Watching him back down in front of Mary Robinson, for suggesting that she had smelly feet, was a great TV moment.
His election policies of the DART for Dingle and the Olympics for Termonfeckin" were classics too. A gurrier with attitude, Dustin has been, quite simply, one of the great Irish television characters. Perhaps he has a bit to go to top Gay Byrne, but there's time yet. It would be good to see him married to Tracy. Even D.H. Lawrence could offer no advice on that.