War In Kosovo (All Channels, every day)
SuperNatural (BBC 1, Tuesday)
Cutting Edge (Channel 4, Monday)
Prime Time (RTE 1, Tuesday)
The women looked like Balkan versions of Peig Sayers, albeit in Benetton colours. The relatively few men looked as though they had strayed from a 1950s dole queue. The children looked like all children in distress - vulnerable and uncomprehending. Every news bulletin on Monday showed scores of the thousands fleeing Kosovo - geriatrics, cripples and babes-in-arms among them. Most people were walking or shuffling, a few were crammed into cars and more were sardine-packed on trailers towed by small tractors. Those not weeping were staring into the far distance.
As the week wore on, the context of history deepened towards myth. The images recalling the second World War remained, but the pictures also developed Biblical connotations. Out of a grey mist, shadowy figures became sharper-edged until each had a discernible face. The slow, visual humanising - individualising, really - of the refugees prompted empathy. Kosovars are among Europe's poorest people - not, by any standards, economically Third World, but poor by continental standards. Their appearances and demeanour made them seem like an anachronism. It was as if some nifty, multi-media editor had been able to inject Cecil B. De Mille colour and effects into second World War footage.
Back in the television studios, pundits were arguing the pros and cons of NATO's intervention. Trenchant support for, and deep denouncement of NATO, corresponded, respectively, to degrees of Right and Left ideological conviction. There were, naturally, some exceptions and there was, as ever, sufficient scope left for petty party politics. For the most part, of course, Irish politicians kept their heads down. But there was something faintly obscene about political point-scoring while images of a Biblical-style exodus flickered not only on screen but also in the imagination.
Even on Sky News, the channel's characteristic, gung-ho veneration of Western technology began to abate. By Wednesday, thick, low-level cloud cover was hampering the super machines. Only a day earlier, we had been hearing gushing glorification of a particularly cool plane, which, we were told, had armour-piercing guns "which could hit every square yard of a football pitch". This seriously comprehensive coverage with high-velocity bullets would take only a fraction of a second. Sporting analogies have long been a feature of war reporting. But this time, the searing drama of the pictures made the search for added verbal punch especially offensive.
Television, like other media, has largely been living on scraps of information about this war. Indeed, some news channels have been including summaries of emails in their bulletins - evidence perhaps of TV deciding to live off the Internet much as a lot of tabloid print journalism has lived off television. Even this though is mediated information - collated, interpreted and summarised by journalists. Sky told us that hackers in Belgrade were trying to disrupt the NATO website "using line saturation of the server by deploying ping strategy". This probably means sending an overload of messages to mess up the site.
And so it stumbles on . . . NATO's plan, it seems, is not working out as promised; the Serbs have increased their barbarism; the refugees face the prospects of starvation and pestilence. Certainly, there is no easy end in sight. While the TV studios become crammed with pundits focusing on motives, it is clear that results must now be the immediate concern in this catastrophe. There has been massive and sustained propaganda from both sides but the plight of the Kosovar Albanians, as they flee in their Biblical-style exodus, ought to be humanity's dominant consideration at present. The level of aid and support granted to them by the wealthy West will tell us more than all the rhetoric. Keep watching.
Repeatedly, refugees from Kosovo describe the most thuggish Serbs as "animals". Well, it's hard to blame them, even if does seem unfair to animals. Ironically, SuperNatural, a new series about "the unseen powers of animals" is, like much TV coverage of the refugee crisis, visually spectacular if verbally specious. Unless the irony drifted by me, the idea, in the voiceover's words of "nature's supernatural powers" is surely - naturally, even - a contradiction in terms. Still the extravaganza of images is, at times, awesome.
"He feels the electricity grow between them," says the voiceover in a legitimately playful moment. On screen, a giant male ray hovers inches over a giant female ray. The bloke ray is making shapes like a steamrolled Barry White. The babe ray is trying to look cool but there is, literally, electricity between them. Enhanced sound and photography shows it crackling and blue - all brilliant and zippy-zappy - like the captured lightning that kickstarts Frankenstein's monster to life. Sex on the sea-bed makes even the most libidinous of landlubbers seem like pale imitations. When these fish get randy, sparks really fly.
The series is a sumptuous, retinal assault by equally highly-charged images: sharks reacting to blood, human electricity and inaudible (to us, not them) distress signals; insects and birds as point-of-view characters (apparently we look fuzzy to bees and bright yellow to king parrots); plants, caterpillars and wasps in a macabre menage a trois; bull hippos scrapping underwater; urine stains made visible to a predatory hawk, so that the more a mouse "marks" his territory, the more at risk he becomes.
One scene showed caterpillars feeding on a plant. The plant, understandably resentful, emitted a chemical which attracts parasitic wasps. Aroused, the wasps began to arrive. Angry as ever, they saw the fattening caterpillars and promptly injected them with eggs, which, fatally for the fatboys, would develop and hatch. Close-up shots of the buzzing wasps spearing the soft, gelatinous caterpillars put the notion of human "precision bombing" in its place. In fact, the sight recalled that chest-bursting, birthing scene in Alien. Then there were the hippo physicists: able to exploit the time difference between the speeds of sound in water and air in order to communicate. Again, it put our pride in our new communication systems in perspective.
Still, spectacle aside, there was a grating corniness to some of the hooks. Shark-attack scenes, a la Jaws, were spliced throughout the programme. Of course the tension mounted as dramatically as a randy ray. When human blood flowed and distant sharks sensed dinner, we were into thrill movie territory. But it seemed a cheap and overused hook and suggested that the producers were not sufficiently confident in the series' central appeal - its visuals. It didn't need added melodrama. Doing so, in fact, was like getting, say, Bruce Forsyth, to read the news - distracting rather than enhancing.
We were shown, too, how the "sonic power" of elephants, hippos and rhinos can literally make the earth move. Stomping on the ground, an elephant can apparently effect a kind of seismic communication which can be received by another elephant 50 kilometres distant. Courting rhinos make use of a similar routine. "The more we discover about plants, the more like animals they seem," said the voiceover. So, we saw people stroking and talking to plants. Sound vibrations, the argument went, can stimulate plants to produce self-nourishing chemicals. Maybe so - but when you considered what humans were doing to each other in Kosovo, kindness to plants seemed from another world.
Indeed, when you saw what "home-improving" humans are capable of, you realised that humanity is a broad church - or even a broad hell - indeed. Cut- ting Edge's DIWhy?, didn't quite, despite its clever title, hit the nail on the head in its examination of the appeal of DIY. It wasn't a shapeless piece of work but it did lack balance - perhaps a better spirit-level should have been used. Certainly, the selection of DIY fetishists appeared rather random, a fact which jarred with the programme's attempts to offer a sociological analysis of a condition which can be, it seems, addictive.
Excessive DIY enthusiasm usually elicits condemnation about "nerds" and "anoraks". The fact that most of this vitriol is uttered by thought-challenged clones desperate to exhibit their usually unearned cynicism doesn't detract from the fact that too much DIY is rightly considered uncool. So, DIWhy? found a 25-year-old, blonde, Belgian ex-model, Marjam Debevere. Marjam has a peculiarly intense interest in louvred doors. "I would love a Black & Decker Workmate," she sighed. Looking at her, it was hard to imagine that she wouldn't have a choice of workmates. Then again, Marjam, like NATO's apologist hacks, was longing for super machinery.
Chris McCormick was a more standard DIY-er. After 17 years in the British army as a bearskinwearing Grenadier guardsman, he's out and has become a DIY maniac. He showed us his home with its patio, gnomes, birdtable, arches and Spanish tiles. He had a lump hammer in his hand and was itching for his wife to go shopping, so that he could attack a wall between his bathroom and his toilet. By programme's end, after Chris had had his way with the wall, he exclaimed in triumph that his wife was well pleased. "I haven't seen her so pleased since I did the tongue and groove on the staircase," he said. Hmmm, very good, Chris.
To a Ry Cooderish score, we saw the Greek taverna that Robert and Nicole Sutton built in their back garden. Another family opted for more eclectic architecture, combining "Greek, Georgian and Victorian themes" in their house. Others went for the full-frontal approach, concentrating on the outsides of their homes. One retired schoolmistress made window-boxes full of lights; a younger woman, all ditzy and eyelash-fluttering, built a snowman out of loft-insulation and placed him in her front-garden. She lives in a terrace on an Elm Street.
Taste-vigilantes would, of course, dismiss most of the DIYers' efforts as abominations. Certainly, some of the more gung-ho improvers sounded like they'd love the opportunity to pebbledash Trinity College and paint it a deep pink. But there was an appealing eccentricity to some of them. Marjam said that in Belgium almost nobody does DIY, adding that there is only one tiny shop in all of Bruges catering to Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts. The argument that post-second World War austerity prompted the British to attempt jobs often better left to experts had some merit. But didn't Belgium suffer war damage and post-war penury too?
Anyway, at a time when television is showing more than enough home-improvement programmes, it was instructive to see the results of some of the more dedicated amateurs. There was quite a lot of guff about "creativity" and "satisfaction". Perhaps some of the efforts were aesthetic nightmares but there was a life to them that is increasingly snuffed-out by aggressive bourgeoisfication. Beside constipated, Sunday supplement notions of what passes for "good taste", some of the DIY was, at least, vibrant. More of it, of course, was quite shocking.
Back on RTE, one of the week's more emblematic scenes was screened on Tuesday's Prime Time. A pair of republican muck-stirrers had ascended Carson's statue at Stormont and were waving a Tricolour, to the annoyance of the DUP types below. The Tricolour was green, white and yellow (papal yellow!) but Ian Paisley was incensed anyway. "Get the rag down," he growled, losing the rag. "Get the rag down." Sure, the flag was deliberately provocative. But you had to wonder what the reaction to somebody calling a union flag "a rag" would be - even in Dublin. Paisley, it seems, is still allowed, unquestioned, a degree of vitriol and vulgar abuse denied to all other political leaders.
"Has the statue moved yet?" shouted Ian Paisley Junior. Well, to be fair, there was some wit in this. But, given the source, you could also read the mindset: Irish Catholics are medieval primitives, given to idolatry and peasant superstition. It's an image which DUP politicians and supporters desperately need to nurture. But the real world and real history is against them. When the pair eventually came down from Carson's perch, they were led away by the RUC. As scenes on TV go, this little vignette of semiotics said more about the North than many hour-long, in-studio guff-fests of propaganda.
Finally, RTE sport. Perhaps of all departments in RTE, sport has consistently fought the good fight in the last decade or so. For that, it deserves praise. But why does it persist in getting simple facts wrong? There's an ad for Network 2's The Premiership running at present. It's a bold, brash, loud effort - suitable, really, for its subject. But then it tells us that Chelsea is chasing its first English League championship in 55 years. Seeing as Chelsea won the League in 1955 (famous for the fact that it had the lowest-ever winning points total) we're talking 44 years.
There's also a suggestion that Manchester United have won five Premiership titles in seven years (they haven't - they won four in five). This one might be defended on the grounds that United are chasing a fifth title in seven years (the wording is ambiguous). Either way, it's not terribly satisfactory. And then . . . Sunday's sports results after the 6 p.m. news continue to amaze. One of last week's National Football League games (Cork v Dublin, I think?) was given two different results. A reader read one score while a different one was shown on screen. Look, beside the pictures from Kosovo, this error is nothing. But it is sloppy and irritating - and unfortunately the kind of o.g. that's quite regular in RTE sport.