Reputations (BBC 2, Monday)
The Late Late Show (RTE 1, Friday)
Witness (RTE 1, Sunday)
Described as tight-fisted with his twinkle-toed Babes, he sounded as though he was a choreographer for London's Tiller Girls or Paris's Bluebells. He was, however, manager of Manchester's Red Devils. In a week in which only Gay Byrne's penultimate Late Late Show, featuring Terry Keane's ultimate gossip-column performance, took the TV focus off namesake Roy (no relation) and his team, Matt Busby, seminal manager of Manchester United, was given the revisionist treatment.
In painting a picture to take the gloss off Matt, Reputations: Matt Busby - The Boss feigned surprise at discovering that professional football is a seriously ruthless game. Who could ever have thought that even amiable Matt was a driven man? After all, his teams (including one which was practically wiped out in a plane crash) only won a European Cup, five English League titles, two FA Cups, a rake of Charity Shields, millions of fans and at one stage lined out with three European Footballers of the Year (Best, Law and Charlton). So, Busby wasn't just the cuddly, avuncular, "go out and enjoy yourselves, lads" gentleman-manager of myth. Wow! You never can tell, can you?
Get a grip - of course Matt Busby was a hardy boy. Born in 1909, a Catholic from the mining village of Bellshill near sectarian Glasgow, he escaped the pits when, at 17, he signed for Manchester City, then the dominant team in Manchester. This was at a time too when religious sectarianism was still a nasty issue in the English game. Make of that what you will - but we can fairly safely assume that Busby could look after himself.
"Matt had a warm face but he had cold eyes," said Johnny Giles. Johnny should know. After playing in United's 1963 FA Cup-winning team, Giles, having fallen foul of Busby, was soon transferred. "He had an iron fist in a velvet glove," said former goalkeeper, Harry Gregg. "I had to sell most of my medals," said Bill Foulkes. "Manchester United bought them for their museum and now they charge the public to see them." Man U - the corporate monster of the 1990s, built on the legacy of Matt Busby? Of course.
But Busby was clearly a creature of his time and, in his time, players were restricted by the maximum wage - £8 a week, when he took over in 1945. He came from a world where people were expected to know their place, assigned not by market might but by class clout. Footballers were pretty low in that hierarchy and conservative Busby never challenged the caste system of his age. Like five-across-the-midfield, the "because I'm worth it" generation hadn't even arrived, never mind descended into the ludicrous and shameless narcissism of today.
Still, it was fair enough that Reputations should attempt a reappraisal of Busby and there certainly seems to be no doubt that his coach, Jimmy Murphy, got a raw deal. Perhaps the young team that stormed to League titles in England in 1956 and 1957, before perishing at Munich in 1958, should have been known as the Murphy Maestros instead of the Busby Babes. But life - and football is no different - always has its over-regarded limelighters and its under-valued backroomers. And certainly, the treatment of former players has long been a disgrace in football.
So, yes - there was clearly another side to Matt Busby. He probably was, as the programme charged, "obsessed with getting to the top". Nowadays, this same quality in Alex Ferguson is considered a virtue. "Football is an unreal world - when your usefulness is done, you're out," said Johnny Giles. You have to hope that Johnny, who now works in the media as a much-respected pundit, realises that that ethic is not confined to football. Perhaps given the general brevity of careers in the game, it is more stark there than in most gigs. But nobody who works for a wage (huge or tiny) should be under any illusions.
Anyway, it doesn't excuse Matt Busby's less honourable traits to say he was of his time. But it does put them in context. Chapman, Ramsey, Stein, Shankley, Paisley, Nicholson, Clough, Graham, Ferguson . . . even wily Wenger and the rest of the seriously successful managers in British football have always known that it's a ruthless game. For Reputations to adopt a tone of grave revelation that Busby wasn't just the affable man of myth did its reputation no good at all. Now, if they had discovered that "the Busby Babes" meant something else entirely, the revisionism could have been into a whole new ball game . . .
Another Boss - Charlie Haughey - whose reputation continues to undergo vibrant revising, was the subject of considerable public interest after his former mistress, Terry Keane, appeared on The Late Late Show. Keane's was, by any standards, a compelling performance in a very 1990s genre - gossip as personal confession. It also ensured that Byrne has made himself a practically impossible act to follow. Being the most famous man in Ireland and getting the low-down on the second most famous man in Ireland is a fair coup for any chat show host.
Underpinning it all however, was an extraordinary sense of "right-to-rule" on the part of Ms Keane and her former lover. This resulted in a peculiar mixture of prurience and condemnation on the part of the audience. Naturally, they wanted to hear about the relationship/affair but they were in no mood to be fobbed off with bizarre attempts to defend Haughey. Late Late Show audiences are usually quite representative of middle Ireland (that's why Byrne's characteristic appeals to populism almost always work for him) but if their fury and disgust are indicative of the general mood, then there is hope for the future.
As told by Terry Keane, her involvement with Charlie Haughey sounded like an epic story of romantic love. It was the sort of stuff you might expect of a Jeffrey Archer yarn, in which well-heeled but patently average people aggrandise their own actions and their senses of themselves. Of course, there has been righteous anger about the extravagance of Haughey but there was something rather sad and sordid in the story as related. There invariably is, when you witness a person publicly so out-of-synch with popular feeling towards her own love affair.
But there were other issues in Keane's Late Late Show performance. She lashed out (just as tenaciously as her namesake Roy will at Wembley today) at former colleagues in the Sunday Independent. Describing the column penned under her byline as having become too hurtful to others, it really was a little late in the day for this kind of conversion. There can be a fine line between vibrant journalism and poisonous journalism and it cannot be that simple for Terry Keane to extricate herself from some of the excesses that have appeared down the years in her column.
Perhaps some good may come of it all. Does anybody seriously believe in the idea of a wealthy, powerful, cultured, talented, beautiful, debonair, intellectual, refined superclass running around Dublin (or anywhere, for that matter)? Common sense and any titter of wit at all will tell most people that it's all codology. Certainly, there are many people with some of the traits desired of gossip columns, but really . . . is it not embarrassing? Watching Terry Keane recount her love for a rogue, former-Taoiseach - and all on a variety show - was certainly compelling.
It was so because it compels people to grow up, to look at those who would be our leaders and to realise that the later heyday of States Of Fear was in full swing while Haughey and his set were living the high life, often at taxpayers' expense. It's too easy to moralise about the contempt towards ordinary people inherent in all this. For his part, Gaybo, who bowed out last night, will be remembered for a quite sensational penultimate programme (not in its revelations, but in the fact that a prime participant was doing the revealing). As ever though, we were subjected to an insulting form of PR, based on the premise that "money talks".
In its defence, however, The Late Late Show did, with this programme, add, in the phrase of a Terry Keane column, to "the gaiety of the nation". Mind you, it's been a bloody expensive laugh for the general population who funded the nonsense. There are more immediately hurt victims too. Maureen Haughey, who may be a saint or a dragon (I don't know), can hardly have deserved this sort of stuff. And Judge Ronan Keane, Terry's former husband? What has he done to have matters of such personal sensitivity to him discussed on national television? If the whole effort weren't so hideous, it might pass as pantomime.
There was a rather more subdued contribution to a discussion on the state of Ireland by former Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Victor Griffin. Talking to John Bowman on the opening episode of Witness, he recalled being labelled a "Lundy" and a "Fenian-lover" by angry Northern unionists. He was born in Carnew, Co Wicklow, where his father, he said, was "a grocer, a motor engineer, a farmer, a funeral undertaker" and also had a motor and wireless business. "My father had no regard for money," he added, "but my mother was from Monaghan . . . "
Ah, well that's that cleared up, I suppose. Anyway, central to the discussion was the role of those Protestants in the Free State/ Republic, who didn't leave with the Union Jack. Victor Griffin's opinion was that most Protestants who remained felt themselves to be "in the state but not of the state". Given the dominance of the Catholic Church during the period, this sounds true, although it was light years from Ian Paisley's charges suggesting virtual genocide of Protestants in this Romish state.
In fairness to Victor Griffin, he recalled that Irish unionists traditionally stressed the Irishness of their position, while remaining true to their desire to stay linked to London. "But it's all changed since then," he said. It certainly has. The growth of pluralism and tolerance in the Republic and the churches coming together are, he said, the great plusses which have occurred in his lifetime. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, along with the drugs problem, are, he believes, the great minuses over the period.
"Authority must be seen to be credible," he said. As he said it, it was difficult not to think of the second last Late Late Show; States Of Fear; The Keane Edge; church, political and business scandals; legal, medical and media malpractice . . . and so on. Witness is not a bag of laughs, nor is it compelling in the Terry Keane confessional manner. But its opening night was engaging in spots. Maeve Binchy, Anthony Cronin and Margaret MacCurtain will have their say in future episodes. As all of these are eh, experienced talking heads, we are unlikely to witness it covering any new ground.