A Brief History Of The F-Word (Channel 4, Monday)
The Late Late Show (RTE 1, Friday)
Champagne Lifestyles (TV3, Monday)
Prime Time (RTE 1, Wednesday)
The Lounge (Network 2, Monday)
Amid a blizzard of effing, Bernard Manning, Roy "Chubby" Brown and Hugh Grant had the most offensive deliveries. Manning and Brown are studiously sewer-mouthed. Professional vulgarians, their swearing is deliberately cackling, venomous and designed to shock. Grant, in contrast, sought to castrate the f-word by snootily mispronouncing it. "Fack," he said, "fack, fack, fack," as he awoke in the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral. He was just as facking nauseating as the vulgarians.
A Brief History Of The F-Word examined the wilting taboo associated with the multi-purpose term. "Working-class swearing spread upwards during the war," said an elderly, middle-class matron, recalling that RAF Battle of Britain pilots spoke in practically nothing but foul language. Other contributors, among them Will Self, disagreed, arguing that Britain's more parasitic classes didn't need a war to blather on in language as blue as the mythical skies over the white cliffs of Dover.
Still, whichever class popularised the f-word, there was no disagreement that it is used more nowadays than ever before. In post-war Britain, use of it was, like everything else, rationed. Certainly, this was true of public discourse, and the bold word was not heard on British television until 1965. On a programme titled BBC3, described as "a remnant of the satire boom", the legendary theatre critic Kenneth Tynan made the critical breakthrough.
"I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word `fuck' will be diabolical or forbidden," he said. Well now, aristo Ken may have understood theatre but, if he believed what he was saying, he clearly didn't understand TV. Outrage ensued. Some of the tabloids went predictably wild and British opinion was split. Whatever about the alleged "spread upwards" during the second World War, Tynan's remark, coming from such lofty cultural heights, could only seep downwards.
None the less, it was another eight years before the f-word got a second airing on British television. On Nationwide, in 1973, the bizarre, ultra-royalist Peregrine Worsthorne, perhaps considering himself a kind of Tynan Mark Two, let fly. Bad move, Perry! More outrage followed and the would-be language liberator lost his Daily Telegraph column for a few months. If I recall correctly, Christy Brown had broken the taboo on The Late Late Show a couple of years earlier.
Generous in the auld Dublin way, Christy didn't confine himself to a lone, formal strike but employed a withering array of expletives in his conversation with Gay Byrne. It was probably just as well that nobody could understand more than a fraction of Christy's guff. Ken's and Perry's (Christy's too, I presume?) performances have been wiped. So, to show us extant footage, A Brief History trawled up the overused clip from the 1976 edition of the Today show when Bill Grundy goaded The Sex Pistols into shooting their mouths off.
Time and repetition - all those rock history compilation programmes have used it - have diluted the impact of the moment and it's difficult now to understand the furore which resulted. Much of it was, of course, PR-generated which is not at all surprising given that Malcolm McLaren was then The Pistols' manager. But less than a quarter of a century ago, the f-word, uttered in public, still retained an atavistic and elemental power which has now greatly diminished.
Nowadays, this documentary argued, almost as many women as men, of all classes, pepper their conversations with the term and shopping at "fcuk" stores enjoys a kind of juvenile cachet. Indeed, the f-word has lost its pre-eminence among swear words and only Bernard Manning was crude enough to utter the current number one taboo. But it was clear that, with a few exceptions, it's seldom just a word in itself which is offensive. Tone and context - especially tones and contexts which deliberately demean and belittle - are crucial to maximise offence.
Billy Connolly, for instance, it was agreed, sprays the f-word around with abandon but few feel wounded because, characteristically, he does it with self-deprecation and humour. As an aspect of the sociology of language (which, come to think of it, is generally less objectionable than the would-be objectifying language of sociology), A Brief History was engaging. It was probably the removal of the ban on Lady Chatterly's Lover which opened the effing flood-gates in Britain. Literature, not working-class "vulgarity", had the power of imprimatur. Still, facking Hugh Grant took the facking biscuit. A bowsey is at least more honest than a bowdleriser.
Within a week of the current run of The Late Late Show ending, a new RTE Authority has been installed. It may be unfair to prejudge the meanings of this conjunction but the omens are not encouraging. Pat Kenny has presided over a poor but, in fairness, by no means disastrous first season. The gig ought to have been retired with Gay Byrne anyway. But the corporate culture (an oxymoron?) in RTE, repeating the marketeers' mantra about retaining a successful "brand name" decided to roll it there again, Pat.
The focus on Kenny's presenting of the big gig has been excessive. Of course, he's the central figure but there are so many other forces - prime among them an increasingly competitive media environment, print as well as electronic - which must be considered. In such a milieu, the great arbiter of value is ratings and the sad aspect of this is that Pat Kenny, unlike Gay Byrne, is at his weakest when he engages in showbizzy dumbing-down.
The new Authority seems, at least on the face of it, likely to constitute a shift to the right (time will tell) and if this is so, ratings will assume even more inflated importance than they already do. The prospect then is that Pat Kenny, who, let's be fair to him, has been among RTE's best-ever current affairs presenters, is likely to chase ratings with even more embarrassing and self-destructive abandon.
Apparently enthralled by guests with fame, success and wealth - no matter how air-headedly these have been achieved - Kenny is sufficiently intelligent to discern the ethos of any Authority. In the prevailing commercial context it's widely considered laughable and dinosaur-like to talk about "public service broadcasting". Economic realities have become practically synonymous with cultural realities. There's no point in becoming excessively snooty or prissy about this but it's as crass as a Bernard Manning "gag" not to understand that ratings and worth are not necessarily synonymous.
The recurring gripe of Kenny Live was that Gay Byrne's Late Late Show invariably got first pickings. But, if anything, with a clear field, Pat Kenny's showbiz deficiencies - though he shows sporadic improvement - are magnified. The "brand name" he inherited could brand him only as a loser or, at best, a fall-guy. He can still succeed but not if ratings, albeit undeniably important, become the sole criterion for assessment. Then again, the incoming Authority would do well to remember that in relation to all of RTE. We'll see.
IT'S doubtful if Pat Kenny would have the stomach for Champagne Lifestyles. With one of those cringingly reverential voiceovers, it focused on "India's wealthiest businesswoman". Now, given the endemic poverty of the country, India's wealthiest businesswoman, Princess Shahnaz Husain, is a reasonable topic for a short documentary. But screening this screaming PR was just insulting.
Shahnaz has made a fortune from "herbal cosmetics". Fair enough. But how about this for guff? "So many families are living off my name. They'd be ruined if anything happened to me," she said. Well now, Shaznaz, this relationship is a two-way street. Indeed it brought to mind Brendan Behan's reply to the assertion that the Guinness family have been very good to the people of Dublin. "The people of Dublin have been very good to the Guinness family," he observed. Et tu, Shaznaz.
Surrounded by deaf and dumb employees - less noise and better concentration, she said - Shaznaz spoke about "building an anti-stress retreat for high-powered, international executives". God love them. In a hugely overpopulated country of poor and often destitute people, what sort of a highpowered western wally would you need to be to jet in for a spot of anti-stress pampering? A few weeks of hunger, begging and living on the streets outside should put your highpowered stress in context.
Still, that wasn't the worst of it. It became clear that this genuinely offensive little effort was made before Barbara Cartland - Shaznaz's "brilliant, so intelligent" heroine - had died. Well, OK, Ms Cartland has passed away very recently. But when Shaznaz said that she hoped Diana Spencer might avail of the anti-stress retreat, we knew we were watching the cheapest of the cheap. Champagne Lifestyles? This was the regurgitated methylated spirits of programming. Even Bernard Manning's vocabulary would be hard pressed to describe it adequately.
In contrast, Prime Time screened A Dangerous Game, which focused on child prostitution in this country. RTE ran a number of promos for the programme and the fear was that it might be excessively cliched. In the event, it wasn't. It was appropriately moody and shocking in its own way. Some young people spoke face-to-camera, others, wisely, remained anonymous. Hard information - facts and figures - remained predictably elusive but it's to the documentary's credit that it admitted this and didn't seek to sensationalise in a vacuum.
Narrated by Keelin Shanley, it drew together the known links between homelessness, drug abuse and prostitution. In doing so, it pointed out how hopelessly over-stretched are Dublin's social workers. Quite simply, many more are needed. But with health boards having to "pay their way" (given the scale of white collar crime, the prevailing economic moralising is facking disgusting) there's little prospect of this. A telling little documentary, the subject will bear revisiting. A final point: Ms Shanley's very clipped tones contrasted alarmingly with the voices from the street. That told us most of what we need to know.
Finally, The Lounge. Presented by Deirdre O'Kane, Network 2's stand-up comedy show is, like all stand-up, variable. Likewise Ms O'Kane, but her "Dana" and, although requiring a little more polish, her "Dolores O'Riordan", are splendid. Parodying the O'Riordan trick of adding, hardening and elongating syllables, O'Kane's pronunciation of "Limm-herrrickkkk" was probably the funniest moment on TV this week. The Lounge has an f-word-rich vocabulary but on those occasions, when swearing is not used self-consciously (there are still too many of those "aren't I a boyo?" moments), it is real comedy on RTE.