Perhaps the least surprising news of the week was that TV3 is to broadcast the home international soccer matches an hour after the final whistle. Not that the FAI's decision was anticipated, it's just that the time-lag is becoming a TV3 speciality.
The station increasingly resembles a digital channel, repeating series recently shown on prime-time UK television. Since Granada Television took a substantial share, TV3 has become a warehouse for that producer's new programmes and old stock.
Coronation Street was the advance army; Emmerdale, Heartbeat, Bad Girls, Footballers' Wives, Cold Feet the settlers. There is already a digital channel called Granada Plus, but the Irish viewer is more or less getting it free. If you're into seeing programmes you can already see on another channel, you're into TV3.
Decent US imports get buried among the flotsam. If you're also into formulaic US dramas, you're into TV3. If you're into predictable TV movies starring Shelley Long, you're into TV3. If you're into original Irish programming . . . well, you know how to use the remote.
The station recently announced its autumn schedule, and the only new home-made series will be Matters of Fact. This will be a sharp mix of Irish and international news affairs, presented in a magazine style and . . . Wait just a minute.
That "ping" you hear sounds like the microwave warming up the corpse of 20:20, the previous sharp mix of Irish and international news affairs. If you're into a rehashed version of one of the few semi-original series made and then cancelled by TV3, you know the drill.
The station is hitting its target percentage as far as its Irish programming is concerned, but hasn't even taken aim at choice. The daily schedule is wearily familiar: Ireland AM (lifestyle, news, entertainment, crazee weatherman, sport), three news bulletins (news, entertainment, crazee weatherman, sport), and Sports Tonight (a useful show which, however, misses the input of a crazee weatherman). Humour has been choked on the starch of Trevor Welch's shirt. The Champions League coverage suffers the same problem, adding to a steady drip of the bland and inane. For those who will have forgotten to bring their clocks forward, and will rely on TV3's coverage of the internationals, they can look forward to analysis that flows like a dry riverbed.
Elsewhere, The Weakest Link is an unsatisfactory version of an idea Irish viewers were already over-familiar with.
Haunted House will haunt everybody involved with it. The excellent Agenda will return, but is a fig-leaf covering TV3's nakedness as a serious broadcaster. Obviously, the station is buying up the proven ratings- winners to nab established viewership and advertising revenue. It is also heading towards profit, thanks to its parsimonious approach to commissioning and because it hangs on the coat-tails of one of Britain's most successful television companies. It is not a station, though, which inspires loyalty, and it is building its identity on quicksand. When the money finally comes in, TV3 will need to invest it in something aside from other people's successes.
If Shipman were one of those American TV movies that infect the TV3 schedules, it would have had the kind of title that also doubled as a plot summary. "Death Made House Calls", perhaps. Or "Healing Hands, Murderous Heart", that sort of thing.
That it didn't should not distract from the fact that this was the kind of drama about which the British continually sneer at the Americans. The presumption is that no sooner has the dust settled on a disaster, or the blood congealed on a celebrity body, than the US networks have a script in development and Shelley Long signed up. Shipman was given a very British approach - it was cautious, reserved, and wary of allowing melodrama to ransack fact. Just because it treated the subject with restraint, however, doesn't absolve it of being crass.
Anyone coming to Shipman looking for insight would have found a dusty well. It was a drama that seemed to have been developed from a magazine feature. There was nothing here to suggest that this was anything other than piggybacking on one of history's worst serial killings. The cast - with the exception of the measured James Bolam as Shipman - performed like actors in a room full of other actors.
But that was because the script asked them to. Nobody read in silence. Bolam had to read a death certificate aloud - "no unusual cause of death" - in case somebody at the back didn't get the terrible irony involved. When a solicitor picked up a letter, he read it to the room ("I leave all my worldly possessions to Dr Harold Shipman"). And every so often, someone would stop everything and ask: "Hold on. Just what are you trying to say?" At which point, an update on the plot so far would be given, with the only thing missing being the actor delivering it straight to camera.
Shipman hobbled through the opening hour, knowing that it would eventually find safety in the actual recorded police interviews with Harold Shipman, chunks of genuinely disturbing transcripts that reached parts the fictionalised script couldn't. But by then it was a drama flailing about in search of credibility, and which had long found itself out of its depth.
TO BEST enjoy the experience of Frontier House, it may be worth watching the remaining episodes from your favourite chair, with the heat at the right level and a glass of wine within reach. This is the latest in a burgeoning genre in which television recreates a period setting, chucks an eager-but-naïve group into it for a few weeks and observes the consequences. How many variations can there be? Well, how many periods can you think of? We can all be television producers on this one.
"Famine House", "Dark Ages House" - it's only word association. "Neolithic House", "Underwater House" - it's getting silly now, but you get the point.
The BBC has tried it, most notably with the appallingly misjudged The Trench, in which volunteers dug in for a long, hard winter only yards from the film crew's catering van. Things also hilariously backfired amid the wattle of Surviving the Iron Age, in which the volunteers took a wild diversion from historical accuracy, downed torcs and went on strike.
It is Channel 4, however, that has fashioned the genre to its sharpest point. It has already had 1900 House, 1940 House, The Edwardian Country House - all very modish, pandering to modern nostalgia with a little ratings- grabbing edu-tainment. These programmes also exploited the appeal inherent in watching people step out of their bubble-wrapped, microwave-able, fat-free lives and crumble in the face of domesticity without IKEA and Marks & Spencer.
In Frontier House, three American families began six weeks of life as pioneers in the wild west of the 1880s. They lived up to their end of the bargain immediately, their collective reaction to the slaughtering of a chicken suggesting that they are exactly the right sort of people. That is, they are the sort of people who will look at a chicken and wonder why it's not shaped like a McNugget. The women are not allowed to wear make-up, as only whores and actors wore make-up in the 1880s. The participants hadn't even set off for their houses when the trauma of that rule broke one woman's spirit like a bread stick in an avalanche.
By the end of the opening episode the animals had lived up to the deal too. Runaway horses almost killed a volunteer, a pet dog went for one of the kids. Judging by the trailer for next week, nature will soon live up to its contractual obligation too, by dumping whatever it can muster on these people.
In fact, about the only thing not living up to the deal is the history stuff. When the road was washed away by the rains, a JCB turned up and flattened 120 years of credibility. The clothing worn by the girls has so many layers that it could offer handy storage space for contemporary contraband.
Meanwhile, there will be a black father and son living alongside two white families. In the 1880s, these men would more likely have been pitifully cheap labour for the white folks, who would have replaced them with the next and cheapest Chinaman to come wandering down the track. It's probably just an honest oversight on the part of the producers.
Whatever idea they come up with next, let's hope it's not "European Parliament House". To Be the President was a documentary squirrelled away late on Sunday night, when most people would rather enjoy the dying embers of the weekend than be faced with the inner workings and political machinations of Brussels.
The programme focused on Pat Cox's election campaign for the presidency of the European parliament and it confirmed everything you fear about the EU. Not the control or homogenisation or centralisation, but the brain-jellying greyness. It wasn't that intrigue and connivance didn't exist, it was just that it was blanched to the point where it packed all the suspense of a Dáil sub-committee voting on when to take its lunch-break.
It truly was the straight banana of documentaries.