TV Review: 'You're the top!" wrote Cole Porter. "You're my thirst, you're my drumstick lipstick,/ You're the voice in the Irish sweepstake." Actually, Porter sang "swipstick", mangling the word to fit the rhyme, but the point was made.
If Cole Porter name-checked you, then you were very famous indeed. The Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes, as Hidden History's If You're Not In, You Can't Win! reminded us, was very, very famous. It was an Irish lottery run on a global scale. From the wireless, Bart Bastable's voice and a woozy Hammond organ piped the Sweepstakes programme into living-rooms across the planet.
Back in Ireland, a couple of times a year the draw took place amid a blarney gras of showgirls and floats, nurses and guards. In a given week, winners might come from South Africa or Alaska. Italian emigrants to London became millionaires overnight. It worked pretty much the same way as your office sweepstake on a horse race, except that it took two days just to mix the tickets. For the 1932 Grand National the prize fund was £2.3 million. In modern terms, that works out at about €151 million. If this weekend's Lotto had a prize fund of €151 million it would trigger a breakdown in society.
The Sweepstakes funded the construction of the Irish health system. It also, it turns out, fattened the coffers of the IRA and the pockets of both mailmen in Canada and politicians in Dublin. Its success was based on a scam. Gambling was banned in the UK, the US and much of the rest of the world, so the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes developed a network of smugglers and fix-it men to ensure that tickets were sold and the counterfoils made it back home in time for the draw. In the US, the postmaster-general was in its pay. Crusading journalist Drew Pearson spent much of his time revealing American political corruption, some of the rest as an undercover agent for the Sweepstakes and whatever time left over deciding quite how to spend his $30,000 annual kickback for doing so. The Reader's Digest, not a publication known for wanton evisceration, described the Sweepstakes as "the greatest bleeding heart racket in the world". The Irish, of course, take that sort of thing as a compliment.
Tickets were sold illegally and then returned to private addresses such as houses, businesses and churches. Much of the legwork was done by the remnants of the old IRA so that, as the Sweepstakes funded the hospitals here, it may also have part-funded a 1939 bombing campaign that killed five people in England. The rough stuff was filed under "expenses".
"You couldn't print in the audit accounts an amount allocated to smuggling or bribing," explained a former worker.
The government acted dumb, pointing to the fact that the sweepstake was run by a public limited company. Meanwhile, for the three families behind that plc, every draw brought in riches as it developed ever more sophisticated methods of ensuring that the plc itself had a stake in winning tickets. We saw interviews with the then chairman, Patrick McGrath, and all he needed was a ring of cream around his lips.
Liam Wylie's programme was fascinating in what it did reveal but also made you curious about what it mightn't have been able to reveal. It was the Sunday Independent journalist, Joe MacAnthony, who finally broke the silence and story surrounding the Sweepstakes. On Tuesday's Morning Ireland Charlie Bird suggested that MacAnthony now lives in Canada because he was subsequently forced to leave Ireland. Bird and Michael Heney, meanwhile, spent two years making a programme about the Sweepstakes which was never broadcast. This documentary was seven years in the making; a strange thing for a tale that is so compelling.
Prime Time Investigates returned with a thoughtful and insightful report on juvenile crime. It was presented by Keelin Shanley, a journalist who no longer needs to prove how good she is and is now setting about emphasising that.
Hers is the voice of modern malaise. Sometimes you feel she has taken voice coaching from George Lee. She also represents the new aggression of Prime Time, its unerring nose for a story, and its impressive skill at telling it.
Here, she brought those from the margins into the centre; interviewing kids around bonfires, waiting for them outside the children's court and crawling into the derelict flats they squat in. It was straightforward, hard-working journalism, but its simplicity was deceptive. It was edifying and depressing, but it also refused to surrender its optimism. The answers are not easy ones, but at least they are obvious. That the programme later became a topic on Questions and Answers may have smacked of self-indulgence except that Prime Time's investigative reports now invariably become Tuesday morning's headlines. That Dermot Ahern explained that there will always be troublemakers in society suggested that, unlike Shanley, there will always be those who can't resist the invitation to be glib.
The Clinic completed its first series this week. Among the staff alone there has been drug addiction, alcoholism, illegitimate children, affairs, death, stalking, malpractice and sex in alleyways. The Clinic: twinned with the Betty Ford.
The conclusion had the look of an episode written when no-one could be sure if there would be another one. It began with a mass psychological breakdown among the staff before calm was restored and it walked everyone gently into the credits. The Clinic, however, has surfed the melodrama with hardly a wobble.
It has been witty and engaging, and the lines have been delivered by an ensemble cast who seem most delighted to be there. It borrows from many places. The music liberally swipes from American Beauty; its sting before the ad break is very ER. The Clinic is just another medical drama; but at least it is a very good one.
You will learn little from The Importance of Being Famous and you will do so without even finding the entertainment value implied in the title. In this series, the editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan, conducts a masterclass in disingenuity. He is attempting to back-engineer fame. What is it? Where did it come from and where is it going? Why do people want it? This week Morgan became upset about the changing nature of fame. Now that it's been neatly portioned into 15 minutes per person, it is leaving little room for the grafters, for the ones who achieved it through hard work, perhaps by having the ability to hold a note or to sleep with the right person. "Real celebrities are being squeezed out," he pined. "Real celebrities can't get the attention their talent deserves." They shall not grow famous as we grow famous . . .
It is the sort of programme in which journalists describe "historical fissures" when all they are talking about is Take That. The boyband, Morgan said here, proved that people could achieve fame without the burden of talent. They did it, he did not say, 15 years after the Bay City Rollers had proven the same thing.
"At the time of Take That I didn't know that I was living through a period of celebrity history," said Morgan. It is quite incredible to believe that in the early 1990s the human race went about its business unaware of how people would soon be obsessed with Jason Orange's hair. Since then, the notion of fame for fame's sake has grown exponentially. That Morgan examined this topic without fully examining the role of the newspaper as a vessel for the ambitious was quite an achievement.
"I'm getting increasingly angry about this. I don't want to sell my paper with these talentless nobodies," he said. The morning after the programme, his paper, the Daily Mirror was weighty with the real stories. Spice Girl Emma Bunton's on-off romance with former Damage front man Jade Jones is back on. Kelly Osbourne says: "My sister sickens me." Sophie Ellis-Bextor's mother is not surprised her daughter is pregnant. Pop Idol Darius's father is suing someone. Tom Cruise kissed his girlfriend. Knowing how difficult it is for Morgan to put such stories in his newspaper makes his penance all the more noble.