Modern Times (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Coronation Street (ITV & RTE 1, Sunday)
Reputations Special (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Against The Odds (RTE 1, Thursday)
An Bealach O Dheas (TnaG, Wednesday)
Looking like thirty-something versions of Enid Blyton's Famous Five, the friends were out hill-walking. They wore big woolly pullovers and had a dog, of course, and a kite. "My generation were Thatcher's stormtroopers," said one. Trying to sound pally and wistful, he sounded pompous and self-dramatising. Clearly, friendship is not easy to film. Overlapping dialogue, private jokes, casual swearing and those big pullovers only go so far before they become embarrassing cliches.
Modern Times, yet again, had found a group of exhibitionists. Wednesday's episode was titled Friends and while, mercifully, it didn't quite emulate the cloying cutseyness of the American sitcom, it showed that for many Thatcherite children, the teenage years now stretch from 13 to about 35. A continuity announcer had promised that the documentary would be "an expose of work, sex and play in the '90s". It was apt for these life-as-consumption "stormtroopers" that this sounded like a reworking of a Mars bar ad, with "sex" substituted for "rest".
Sex was a major concern for the friends. Their individual interests in rumpo ranged from "porn movies" to "records which meant a lot" to them. When we saw the friends playing favourite records for each other, the scene didn't so much seem caring and altruistic as smug and self-satisfied. Perhaps this kind of group openness about sentimentality is emotionally healthy. But such public proclamations about intimacies made the group seem, not open, but emotionally retarded.
This was the heart of the problem. Surely the point of having close friends is that you can talk to them on levels of intimacy that you would not provide for a camera crew. In that sense, what we witnessed seemed, at least partly, a self-conscious performance. Friends, you might feel, offer sanctuary; appearing on television provides quite the opposite. The result was that this fly-on-the-wall (or, subliminally, fly-on-the-fly) documentary was just like another group game for the overgrown teenagers.
Convening at a country cottage (as outsized as the pally pullovers) the friends didn't just talk - they got into a steady rhythm of hugging and kissing too. Most of them, to be fair, kept individual hugs and kisses sufficiently brief and casual. But Sarah (who previously had been coupled with Carl) and Gerrard were different - at least with each other. Under Carl's nose, literally, Sarah and Gerrard performed a revolting floorshow of lovey-doveyiness. Very friendly, indeed . . . eh Carl?
Now that the members of the group are mostly in their mid-30s, gender tensions are increasing. The women (though, again mercifully, none of them said anything about ticking biological clocks) are keen on marriage and children. The men are mostly trying to hang on to fading youth. Laura complained that the men's behaviour showed a lack of individuality. She was right, of course, although it didn't help that her polemical perception sounded like selfishness on her part.
As a moody saxophone wailed over soft-focus shots of London's West End by night, Laura said that the world of "bars, clubs and restaurants" was, for her, wearing thin. Fair enough. There was something real, almost plaintive, about this assertion, coming as it did, squeezed on all sides by friend cliches about "being there for me" and "almost like a family". Time was when much emotional dysfunction stemmed from an inability to cut the apron strings.
For this group, the inability, or at least unwillingness, to cut the cliches which bind them, seemed claustrophobic. Most of them had successful careers and money (although their almost unanimous self-regard for their own "creativity" seemed misplaced). "But life is more about what you have that you can't buy than what you have that you can buy," said one of the men. In a documentary about contemporary Peter Pans, at least this nugget of anti-Thatcher wisdom was promising. By the time these friends are 55, they might even be thinking about growing-up.
Emma Hewitt's film didn't quite capture what holds them together. Then again, it can't be easy to film the fact that the kind of friendship, which is necessary and healthy between the sexes in the teenage years, inevitably turns to emotional arrestment when it has run its course. Louis Armstrong's normally wonderful Wonderful World just added to the huggy smugness as the credits rolled.
What friends has Deirdre Rachid now? By jailing Dreary Deirdre, Coronation Street has produced not just another soap "event" but fomented a classic media irony. The Sun, always beaming when it's presented with the chance (saves having to invent it) to write about fiction as though it were reality, is leading the campaign to free Dreary.
Sun petitions, car-stickers and T-shirts are demanding justice. Dreary is lucky she's fictional. Were she real, like so many innocent people in British jails, The Sun would not shine for her. Instead, we could expect a full-frontal, "best-in-the-world" defence of British bobbies, lawyers and judges. Indeed, with a surname like Rachid, "Arab-lover" Dreary could easily find herself on bum raps of plotting genocidal anthrax attacks, Lockerbie and possibly even arming the IRA.
Mind you, the nonsense of treating soap characters as real people is not confined to the tabloids. Millions of punters seem to want to play this game. Sure, soap offers vicarious life in an addictively dramatic form and, even yet, no soap does it better than Coronation Street. But the willingness of fans, not just to suspend disbelief, but to believe with a religious fervour, is alarming.
Of course, British miscarriages of justice have been so numerous in recent years that jailing Dreary has become not only possible but attractive as a soap plotline. Good. But soap opera is ultimately a romance in which evil will always be punished. The community will respond ("there for each other", you see), conman Jon will get his comeuppance and wronged Dreary will be freed with a chance to get compensation.
Another character who found out that friends don't always last forever was Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space. Reputations Special screened Starman, a profile of Gagarin which suggested that he didn't always need a rocket to get completely out of it. It was hinted too that Gagarin's death, at age 34, just seven years after he went into orbit, was sinister. Now bits of his body lie sealed in metal drums - apt really, considering that his fame all sprung from him lying in a sealed metal capsule on April 12th, 1961.
Gagarin's greatest rival to become the first human to leave the Earth's atmosphere was German Titov. Indeed, Titov was the favourite to be chosen but, in a delightful example of the old USSR's reverse snobbery, Gagarin's peasant background swung the issue. The odds on his surviving the mission were rated at 5050 because nobody was really sure what was going to happen. Anyway, Gagarin became an international celebrity, who, in time-dishonoured form, took to drink and sex. His role as a roving ambassador for Khrushchev's communism didn't best please many jealous military generals.
So, when big K got the big E, Yuri's days in the sun were numbered. Banned from space, he returned to flying planes until one of them crashed in 1968. Like the Aer Lingus Tuskar Rock accident of the same year, there is speculation about "another plane in the area" but nothing has been proved. Certainly, documents investigating the crash have been rewritten but, the programme conceded, probably to conceal official error rather than political intrigue. After hints that sinister forces had conspired against Gagarin, the trajectory of this documentary meant that it, like its subject, crashed to Earth.
Back on RTE, Against The Odds screened The Children Of Bucharest. In an expanding volume of documentaries focusing on the horrors faced by growing numbers of the world's children, this one was typically distressing. We saw children who live in sewers, children who had been savagely beaten and children who are almost perpetually hungry. As ever with such programmes, it generated a depressing sense of individual impotence. What, really, can you do?
Steven Doyle from Finglas was prompted by an Anneka Rice Christmas special to go and help out at a small medical facility in the city. You had to admire him and the other care workers but when he said, near the end of the documentary, that he badly needed a break, it was difficult not to conclude that the problems are overwhelming. Made by Horizonline Films, this one showed that TV is not just about trivia. It was rightly depressing but like Starman it had to conclude without answers.
Finally, An Bealach O Dheas. Scheduling Dermot Somers walking the cliffs of Slieve League against the stars of the Champions League can't have helped TnaG to maximise its potential audience. Still, as a kind of Walks With Wainwright as Gaeilge, this is fine stuff. Somers mixes snippets of folklore, geography, history and personal experience in his monologues. This is fine but a slower delivery might make it more appropriately contemplative.
It might too be a good idea if he didn't rock-climb in a soft hat and he should leave out further Woody Guthrie impersonations. But it is an engaging series, even if its placing on TnaG makes it as remote as the gullies and cliffs which Somers seeks. TnaG still needs to win more friends even though its schedules, especially its sports programmes, deserve praise. An Bealach O Dheas is part sport, part armchair travel. It was also the most engaging bit of hillwalking on TV this week.