Scared waiting for answers

TV REVIEW: Prime Time (RTÉ 1, Thursday) Smallpox: Silent Weapon (BBC2, Tuesday) No Tears (RTÉ1, Monday) Questions and Answers(RTÉ1, Monday) Love Bites (RTÉ1, Tuesday)

Howard Hughes would have approved, if the paranoid recluse had shuffled in his Kleenex-box shoes to the blacked-out windows of his sealed-off hotel and dared to put his head out into the air to see what was happening. We're now almost as scared as him. The places we rely on to make us well, only make us sicker. The jabs that are supposed to inoculate us from one disease only give us another. And a plague is coming any day now, to slowly liquefy our insides.

If you are already confused, this was not a good week to turn on your television. The MMR controversy - one which encapsulates this new distrust of both medicine and those who administer it - became more frenzied this week, with both the BBC and RTÉ running special reports on the matter. If the AIB fraud hadn't been revealed, it would have led the news in the UK for most of the week. Whatever the conclusions reached in all these reports - and there were few - they each provided enough questions to ensure there will be an increase from the 22 per cent of Irish children currently not inoculated against measles, and a possible rise from the 1,600 cases of the disease reported last year, and the three deaths. Jaundiced by the scandals surrounding BSE, hepatitis C and AIDS, we have become willing collaborators in our own scaremongering.

Smallpox: Silent Weapon, meanwhile, was a timely leap by the BBC on to a terrorist-unleashed plague bandwagon which had already chimed its way through the streets so loudly in 2001. A docu-drama of impressive verity, from a supposed point in the near future, it pieced together a smallpox pandemic from its outbreak in April last year to the subsequent 100 million deaths caused. The fascination of the format lay not just in its mesmerising plausibility, but in watching for the seams. How early on a Sunday morning did they rise to catch empty London streets to double as a deserted city? Was the "footage" of US rioters wearing protective face-masks actually film of recent anti-globalisation riots? And were the fat, yellow "pustules" on the faces of victims Rice Krispies? Telly is only at its cleverest when you don't notice it's being clever at all.

The film was still terrific watching. It was consistent in its execution, and focused enough on the drama to side-step any awkward questions about terrorist motive and the long-term effects such an event would have on the world economy. Instead it concentrated on the possibilities of an uncontrollable virus spreading exponentially, gas-masked soldiers appearing on the doorstep and victims dying as horribly as could be. It was Hollywood movie Outbreak remade as documentary, basically. And you don't make a film about plagues unless it's a biblical one. Who cares if the reality of the anthrax scare was more a pandemic of often irrational panic than infection. How many times do you hear people using the phrase "Best case scenario"? Of course, 20 million people have already died from HIV/AIDS. Some 40 million people are currently living with the disease. There are 15,000 new cases every day. The plague is already here; it's not just not very cinematic.

No Tears, a series which dramatised one of the more solid reasons why we now view the cure with as much fear as we view the disease, concluded this week. It has been an excellent series, a gently powerful performance from Brenda Fricker melding with the resonance of the topic to ensure that it rose above straightforward TV-movie of the day territory. As an actress, Fricker is eternally typecast as the mother, either actual or surrogate. No Tears showed why. From her first moment on screen to the affecting death scenes of her character Grainne McFadden, her maternal aura attracted an instant, irresistible empathy that was the central of the series. There could have been no better casting.

Commendably contemporary as it was, however, there is still the sense that No Tears could have been more rounded. Those on the wrong side of the fence, notably The Minister Formerly Known as Michael Noonan (played by Mark Lambert), were strait-jacketed as one-dimensional, acting purely as foils to the victims, or to occasionally move the story along. Gerry Stembridge was right when he said on Questions and Answers later that night that there should be no balance in fiction. We don't want to sympathise with the bad guy. It would have been nice, though, to have had a little more understanding of him.

Michael Noonan was due to appear on Questions and Answers this week, but declined, knowing last week that the issue of hepatitis C would be raised. It hinted at a problem with a programme which remains necessary by virtue of its basic topicality, but which has become so stale that any time the discussion gets interesting, you can see the dust disturbed on John Bowman's shoulders.

It is rigid, predictable, formulaic. On the BBC's Question Time, the direction of the debate shifts after the original question has been answered by only a couple of panellists. Neither do they get advance notice of the topics. On RTÉ's version, meanwhile, some panellists have begun to take up residency. Willie O'Dea - a man whom you know is talking when his moustache begins to dance - must keep his Monday nights clear. There is generally a legal expert, an opposition politician and a journalist. They get the questions in advance, so that it's a bit more like Fore-warned Questions And Pre-prepared Answers. And everyone must get his or her say on that same question before we can move on. It is a traffic jam of a discussion show, everyone queuing for the same exit.

RTÉ recently begaputting little ratings symbols in the top right of the screen, which kindly lets you know if it's worth hanging on for any rude bits. The one for Love Bites comes with an MA rating, which must mean that if your Ma's in the room, you'd better turn over to something else or concoct a reason why she should leave.

Although, when she does walk out, you'd better be sure you know what she's up to. If this programme was to be believed, Ireland is a country rife with swingers; normal office workers by day, partner-swapping, orgyists by night. The phrase "The Church", as you can imagine, popped up a bit.

It was presented by Brendan Courtney, a man who is not quite the King of the Single Entendre, but more a minor Earl. He met lots of people whose voices had been disguised to protect their identities but made them instead sound like Tony Fenton.

"It's not just a pure shag session or anything loike that," insisted one Swinging Tony - "Now here's the latest from Ronan Keating," he didn't add. Courtney visited a Dublin sex shop, where he met a man who may have wandered in from a comedy sketch on another channel.

He wore a leather mask and an Aran jumper. He was an example of a highly sexually-charged, 21st-century Irish swinger. He looked like a wrestling vicar.

In the end, Courtney had to go to the Netherlands (of course) to find a swingers' party, but could only show the building in which they're held and some old footage which came across like we were watching the 1977 Rotterdam Disco Dancing Championships through X-ray specs.

He made the trip with Paul, a Dutchman (obviously), and Lara, an Irish woman. The two were enlightened/naïve enough to avoid the Swinging Tony treatment and come out as unapologetic swingers, even if Ireland's vines are not as supple as promised. They've been working hard to get a club together. "We've been putting forward an agenda for a meeting in March," revealed Lara, inadvertently putting her finger on the problem when making it sound like an AGM of the local Outdoor Bowls League.

If you're at that meeting, make sure to stand well clear if someone raises a point of information.

Some months ago, The Irish Times Magazine made tentative inquiries about doing a piece on an Irish swingers' club, but was told that that any journalist covering the story could only properly reflect the lifestyle by attending a party while wearing nothing but a fixed smile and a strategically placed notepad. Being wholly professional about the matter, we sniggered like schoolboys for several days before dropping the matter, although not our trousers.

No journalist would ever be asked to go naked to a swingers' party, simply to give readers some cheap titillation over the rashers on a Saturday morning. Never. Then again, times now have become a little tougher than they were then . . .

tvreview@irish-times.ie