Sleaze TV

THE gormless looking youth is brought out from the sound proof booth and reunited with his girlfriend for the big question. "We asked her what she thought was the most uncomfortable sexual practice what did she say?" The boyfriend beams he definitely knows this one. "Anal sex," he replies confidently. "Anal sex is correct!" squeals the presenter. The audience cheers and the happy couple hugs. Welcome to Carnal Knowledge, one of a range of "saucy" programmes showing in the early hours of the morning on UTV.

Watchdog organisations in Britain have expressed concern in recent months about the increasingly explicit contents of late night television programmes. Most attention has been directed at Channel 4 offerings like The Girlie Show and Eurotrash, post pub entertainment targeted at twenty somethings getting home around midnight, with Tory newspapers describing Channel 4's Michael Grade as "Britain's pornographer in chief". But things get even trashier as the night wears on.

For some reason, radio and television adopt diametrically opposed programming techniques for the insomniacs, shift workers and general neerdowells who make up their audiences between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. While radio lulls its listeners with dreamy ballads and smoochy presenters, television (or more specifically, ITV, the only terrestrial channel that currently offers a 24 hour service) seems to get more and more manic between two and five in the morning. Programmes such as Carnal KnowLedge, The Good Sex Guide and God's Gift all have cheap production values, garish sets, and salacious subjects. This is Gazza TV booze, birds and belly laughs on minuscule budgets. The presenters are well aware that they're not exactly on the fast track to success in these graveyard slots. "To think, I have a degree," whines Carnal KnowLedge presenter Maria McErlane as she surveys the competing couples squirming around on the studio floor in search of "the most unusual sexual position".

When ITV went all night for the first time, it set out its stall with The James Whale Show, an unabashed Page Three style programme in which the female breast loomed large both in the camera lens and the rotund presenter's imagination. This was traditional British tabloid subject matter translated directly to the small screen, complete with the obligatory busty blondes and yob humour.

It was Channel 4, however which put a sharp spin for the 1990s on voyeurism with shows such as Eurotrash and The Girlie Show adopting a supposedly gay or post feminist" perspective. When Jean Paul Gaultier twirls his tartan mini skirt and gives his little pout on Eurotrash we know the item about Spanish porn stars is meant to be taken ironically. ITV has quickly latched onto the idea, shown by The Girlie Show that you can get away with a lot more if you reverse the usual gender roles. The publicity blurb for God's Gift tells us that "five men humiliate themselves in front of an all female audience, competing to win an unforgettable date". It's a formula which is creeping in a more sanitised form into new prime time ITV shows such as Man O Man which have been criticised by the Broadcasting Standards Council in the UK, for humiliating contestants.

It's widely believed that television standards are on a slow, inevitable slide into junk. But if middle of the night telly is being used as a laboratory for new kinds of cheap, trashy product for the multi channel digital future, there's little sign that mainstream audiences are biting' at peak times yet the new Saturday evening programmes on UTV have been ratings disasters.

No such problems at RTE, though, where from Sunday to Thursday it's test card time after midnight. "I consider it is a bad practice to take people off the normal track of living to keep them up late at night and to disturb the usual routine of life Unduly," said the Postmaster General, J.J. Walsh, to the Dail, defending his decision to close down at 10.30 p.m. every day when the first Irish radio station was established. Seventy years later, our, main television channel, RTE 1, has advanced that deadline by 100 minutes. From Sunday to Thursday, the sternly titled A Prayer At Bedtime hovers either side of midnight (when the Dail is in session, the station offers a superb drug free service to insomniacs in Oireachtas Report). The implication is clear we'd all be much better off tucked up in our little beds or reading a good book than rotting our brains in front of the tube. For once, they might just be right.