After a week which included a controversial "trial" by BBC television (Panorama), a couple of congenial RTE retrospectives (Who's That Standing Beside John Murphy? and Reeling In The Years) and the convivial consolation of a Channel 4 comedy (Black Books), it's time for me to conclude. For more than 12 years, I've worked as the television critic of, first, the Irish Independent and later, The Irish Times - about six years for each.
The verb "worked" may provoke sniggers and that's understandable - most people, after all, watch television for relaxation, information or simply because, Godot-like, it passes the time. Certainly, watching television is not work in the sense that digging holes for poles or thinning turnips or driving a double-decker bus around the car park that used to be Dublin is work.
In truth, compared to almost all other jobs, the watching part is scarcely work at all. Writing about what has been watched is another matter, but even so, it's not graft comparable to an eight-hour shift shovelling concrete or even one hour suffering a workplace Hitler. Still, like all other work, watching television is time-consuming and when it's being done for a few quid, it's as well to pay close attention, because some hawkeyed viewer always will.
Leaving aside the time involved and its restrictions on a night life, the main drawback in the gig has been watching and taking notes on programmes I'd never watch by choice or, at any rate, not more than once. Some of these are TV staples - hardy annuals such as the Eurovision Song Contest, The Rose of Tralee, The Hollywood Oscars or official bore fests: live state "occasions", New Year's Eve "specials" and the opening ceremonies of major sports events.
Others are new series, watched and reviewed simply because they're new. Usually such newness means new personnel with reworked gimmicks in old formats, though sometimes it means old personnel with reworked gimmicks in new formats. Occasionally, very occasionally, there is genuine innovation. As the number of channels has mushroomed, scores of new programmes have become increasingly heavily hyped. Many of these demand reviewing because TV advertising and press PR will have termed them "blockbusters", "major" or "unmissable" or, more likely, all of these. Inevitably such advertising provokes public curiosity and sometimes even genuine interest.
It's often said, and not always unreasonably, that there's no such discipline as television criticism beyond the fact that every domestic zapper-czar is a true and ruthless critic - a Nero on a sofa - one thumb down and it's annihilation, sucker. Zap! Unlike specific arts criticism - drama, literature, music, film, fine arts, dance (and their various status-ridden subdivisions) - TV criticism is an amorphous business.
Critics of television critics regularly argue that a medium which promotes human inactivity by showcasing an almost limitless compendium of human activity is beyond criticism in the usual sense of the word. Maybe so. It's not an argument that interests me greatly. "A television critic would have to know everything," the legendary theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once quipped. Perhaps a proper one would and that's what makes the term contentious.
But whatever television criticism, as pursued by newspapers, is in practice - reviews for the record, inter-media parasitism, barely disguised polemical essays, cabaret turns for entertainment, print's revenge on TV - it is often resented by would-be rigorous-minded arts critics because it is frequently more widely read than all the forms of arts criticism put together.
This is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of television, its inevitably populist bias and the vastness of its viewership. It's clear too that many people like to compare their own opinions with those which have, if nothing else, the cold imprimatur of print. There's also a tradition of caustic writing in TV reviewing which, though not always justified, is in tune with the natural schaden-freude that the anonymous feel towards the publicised.
Even though familiarity with television (and the fragmentation of its audience because of the increasing number of channels) ensures that television in the year 2000 seldom confers the degree of celebrity it did in its early years, the sheer power of TV continues to grant undue ego validation and even status to legions of mediocre talents. If fame is your goal, it's better to become a game-show host, a soap star or a newsreader than a brilliant biochemist. Television criticism is often allowed its acerbity because, consciously or otherwise, most viewers understand and resent such disproportion.
ANYWAY, almost 600 columns and 900,000 words (about 10 or 11 average-length novels) later, it's time to let fresher eyes gaze at the small screen in future weeks. When you can't even remember if you're repeating your own repeats, you know you've seen and said more than enough.
Whether you see the flickering box as a mirror or a lamp, generically the main content of television is images of popular culture. In middle-age, the urge to keep up with and try to make sense of all of those begins to dim. It seems to me that to continue criticising TV risks pushing personal levels of public narcissism to Ally McBeal proportions. Unlike Ally, I have neither the desire nor the legs to try.
With digital television and the Internet promising an interactive orgy of electronics, TV is entering an era in which the quality of its technology will soar far ahead of the general quality of its content with increasingly few and much-copied exceptions. I very seldom want to go shopping, far less go shopping with a zapper that has more buttons than a warehouse full of Levi's 501s.
I've seen the shopping channel and, in a supreme act of self-denial, I've managed to resist the seduction of being able to write with the "unbreakable Penalli pen", while suspended upside-down "working out" with the "Ab Isolator" designed to "motivate my butt". As I was suggesting, mid-life brings a certain staidness.
Already it seems to me that there's too much TV - with even too much football (though as recently as a few years ago, I would never have thought that). For years, the Brits boasted - and, for a change, with good reason - that they had "the best television in the world". Well, if they had, or maybe even still have, we had all of that and more in Ireland.
The more was RTE, now in decline (primarily because of successive governments shamelessly sucking up to corporate culture) but none the less the most important, if often most infuriating, agent in Irish cultural life from the early 1960s of semi-State glamour up to the lying-in-state of Gay Byrne's career in 1999 and its opportunistic resurrection, which begins next week. To have been allowed to write about all of that has been a privilege, even if it seldom felt like it as weekly deadlines inexorably and incessantly approached.
Television is now competing with the Internet in much the same way that newspapers 40 years ago began to compete with television. The relationship is mutually parasitic (or "complementary" in media-speak) and the recent success of Channel 4's Big Brother marked a moment when the Net delivered a coup de theatre - the expulsion of "Nasty" Nick Bateman - before television screened it.
Still, TV remains the Goliath of world media. It will not do so indefinitely, of course, although - unforeseen Davids aside - it seems certain that, at least for a few decades, it will remain a major player in the emerging multimedia scene. Like Ireland itself, television will be integrated into increasing interactivity. Big Brother and other docusoaps, game-shows and hybrid genres already stress their "interactivity". Technology will probably show them to be little more than a baby's first steps.
Anyway, back to the present, in which even the most avid viewers (and I've never been more than dutiful), can watch only an increasingly small fraction of all that is broadcast. For that reason, there's no point in pretending to discern any unifying macro trend throughout the entire medium's output over the past 12 years. That would involve knowing everything - or at least everything from the semiotic significance of The Morbegs to an Open University module on applied statistics.
Still, as some of the changes in television since 1988 need no greater research than personal observation, perhaps a few, albeit less than original, reflections are permissible. There's more of it; it's more fragmented and niche-driven; using sex, sleaze and hysterical dramatics, it increasingly targets prurience and calls it liberalism; it holds fewer mysteries for viewers than it once did (at any rate, many viewers delude themselves that this is so); profit, always important, is now practically its god.
It would be idiotic to pretend that the period between 1988 and 2000 - though it sure had its moments - formed any "golden age" of television. Such an age, if it ever existed and is anything more than nostalgia, is most often said to have occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Certainly, TV, having by then become almost ubiquitous, was doubly fortunate in still being fresh yet also being the developed world's most influential medium.
But as there is endless rubbish (as well as treasures) on the Internet today, there was also dreadful dross in the TV schedules a generation ago. Sure, Charlie's Angels was the swimsuit section of feminism, The Rockford Files was golden California grown wistful and The Forsyth Saga was British costume drama with early sex appeal. But there was unspeakable and risible junk too, which is best left to rot in peace.
Throughout the 1990s, TV has become Murdochised and not just by Big Daddy Rupert but by more and more profit-seeking mini-Murdochs. It seems to me that this ceding of civic culture to corporate culture has been television's (as well as the world's) defining trajectory in my time reviewing it. It strikes me as sad, in every sense that word nowadays suggests.
Finally, the week's programmes. All four mentioned at the top were first-rate. Black Books, written by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, managed to make filth a fit, not a filthy, subject for comedy. As Bernard, Moran is a dissolute second-hand bookshop owner whose accommodation at the back of his shop is a slag heap of half-eaten food, cigarette butts, grease, grime and dust. He and his sidekick Manny (Bill Bailey) have to move out while the place is being fumigated by a distastefully super-clean sanitation expert.
But it's not plot which makes this one superb in spots. It is its intelligence and its targets: sanitised life, not just sanitised surroundings, and wine-snobbery (after the filthy pair move to house-sit for a wealthy friend) were splendidly parodied. The Moran character, gruff and moody, can be rather relentless, but his combination with Linehan augurs well for Irish comedy, even if, as usual, it's Irish comedy being produced in Britain.
Not surprisingly, Panorama's Who Bombed Omagh? has been the main headline-grabber this week, even though the media's brusque focus on the programme's legal and ethical implications seemed a shade insensitive and almost indecent. When you saw again and heard about the core of the matter - the utter horror of the savagery - the notion of "lest we forget" came to mind. Then again, that's the amnesia-inducing busyness of the media - including television - for you. It's also my last look and severance quibble, so I'll switch off the set and maybe get a life. Click!
Next week Eddie Holt begins a new column in Weekend