Friends (Network 2, Monday)
The Voice Of Generations (RTE 1, Tuesday)
As Others See Us (ITV, Tuesday)
Just One Chance (BBC 2, Monday)
Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Fast-forwarding half a century from now, how might Friends be remembered? As monumentally boring as Peig seems to recent generations? As canonical as, say, Pride and Prejudice? As a laughing stock? Who knows? Whatever the outcome, it is probable that only a small minority of media/culture/history students will bother with it. Certainly, Friends says much about the 1990s, just as Peig says much about the ancestral Irish voice. But the world's most popular sitcom is rather more insidious than that.
Given its awesome popularity, with the fifth series hitting our screens this week, it would be fatuous to be sniffy about Friends. It would, however, be doubly fatuous not to see its alarming hypocrisies. Ostensibly, given its title and subject, the series is about mutuality and right-on, feel-good, sentimental "I'll be there for you" altruism. Up the yard . . . because, in truth, it is about precisely the opposite. It is about narcissism - unexamined, cloying, whingeing narcissism for the "because I'm worth it" generation.
Oh, it has evident attractions: some splendid one-liners, a snappy pace and an undeniable screen chemistry between its hunks `n' babes. But it is also revoltingly cutesy, self-atisfied and in the dominant tradition of American sitcoms. From the 1960s' I Love Lucy, through the 1970s' The Brady Bunch and even the 1980s' The Cosby Show (so representative of black life in the US), a major conceit of these shows has been their taken-for-granted material comforts. The result has been that, like Friends, they have acted as a global shop-window delivering front-line propaganda for the American way, just as Peig was commandeered as front-line propaganda for the Gaelic Irish way.
So, it's only a sitcom, after all. Sure, but it is also the apex of popular culture - Mills and Boon with a dash of wholesome, Zeitgeisty smut added. And it is clever too. As society becomes atomised, Friends sells a sense of community, a nostalgia which is also the core of so much soap opera. The great irony about soap and its re-created sense of community is that it is television which has destroyed much of the snugness of community which its most popular genre offers vicariously.
Friends then, with its mix of community, relationships (ugh!) and one-liners is a shrewd soap/sitcom hybrid - a package of soppy soap, soft sex and stand-up comedy. This makes for a powerful ratings combo and good luck to it. But it's difficult not to want to give its characters a hefty kick in the arse. This week's episode took up precisely where last season's series ended - in the middle of the London wedding of Ross and Emily.
Ross has already blurted out "Rachael" instead of Emily at the "I take thee . . ." bit. Wow! There's originality, eh? Anyway, Ross recovers and the ceremony is completed. Immediately afterwards, Emily, quite understandably, freaks, while Rachael seeks significance in the Freudian (?) slip. Meanwhile, a running sub-plot sees Monica and Chandler repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to engage in renewed, rabbit-frequency rumpo.
This comedy of frustration is overcooked though. So, she's "hot" and he's "cute" but they are so appallingly narcissistic that it's impossible to believe they are other than (I think a more polite word is) onanists. And that is the essence of Friends. In this age of disconnected individuals - of loners, really - the series is little more than an inflated version of the traditional children's "school chums" yarns, for tossers embarrassingly old to be so emotionally immature.
Still, it is extremely popular, most notably with teenagers - people in transition from cosseted, restrictive, family life to fully-fledged individuality. But most of them absorb its narcissism as desirable and it's difficult to see how this can be healthy for either individuals or society. Young lads nowadays, their voices hardly broken, their acne still ripening, want an abdominal sixpack (there is even a bizarre machine being advertised allegedly able to develop this) and more and more teenage girls seem to believe that the world owes them "because they're worth it".
Friends feeds and fattens off this market. Sure, there are worse scourges in young people's lives - drugs, bullying, snobbery and all the rest. But, far from promoting individuality, the thrust of much of the nonsense is to promote conformity. Friends is the advertising industry with laughs, its slickness providing a veneer for the vacuousness and superficiality which are the enemies, not the friends, of young people. An episode in which all the principals get a taste of destitution and/or a nasty dose of the ruthless reality of twenty-something relationships in New York is needed to wash the strength back in - if it was ever there to begin with.
Anyway, back to poor oul' Peig. To mark the 40th anniversary of her death on December 8th, 1958, RTE screened Breandan Feiritear's hourlong, semi-revisionist drama-documentary, The Voice of Generations - the Story of Peig Sayers. Its first half was principally a history with reconstructions, its second more analytical. Peig, it seems, was a fabulist, more a poet than a reporter.
As the scourge of secondary school students, her name has become a synonym for tedium and dullness. Well, it's hardly surprising. In the official imagination (if that's not an oxymoron) of the Ireland of the Catholic Tiger era, Peig and the Blasket Islands were presented as a kind of microcosm of the Gaelic Dream: insular (big time!), frugal, self-sufficient, pious and preserving of traditions from the mists of time. Little wonder then that Peig - or rather the propagandist version of Peig - has also become a spawner of some sharp, native satire.
To paraphrase Jennifer Aniston, here comes the history bit. Concentrate. Born in Dun Chaoin in March, 1873, Peig was the youngest of 13 children, of whom only four survived infancy. She hoped to emigrate to America but was let down by her friend, Cait Jim Boland, who reneged on sending home the fare. Following an arranged marriage to Blasket man, Padraig O Guithin, she gave birth to 10 children, seven of whom survived infancy. Clearly, Peig and her partner knew, every bit as well as the Friends narcissists, how to keep warm on long, Blasket winter nights. She lived on the Great Blasket for 50 years - until 1941.
Feiritear's programme sought to reposition Peig within the oral tradition. Mairin Nic Eoin made the point that the autobiographical mode - the form which has bored a million schoolkids - was unsuitable for a traditional storyteller such as her. It was a fair point. Peig, whose words, as Robin Flower observed, "could be written down as they leave her lips and would have the effect of literature, with no savour of the artificiality of composition" was indeed a creative artist.
Other contributors remembered that she would interpret and drag out her stories, never getting worked up about them. Peig was no tabloid hackette. She understood rhythm and technique and according to Bo Amlqvist (former head of the Irish Folklore department in UCD) was, perhaps, the world's greatest folk-storyteller ever. If so, it is fitting that her place in Irish history and art received this revising. Though only 40 years gone from us, distant centuries whispered through her voice.
It appeared, though nobody quite said it, that Peig Sayers could be quite a formidable, indeed sometimes quite narcissistic, drama queen. So what! After half a century living on a big rock off the coast of Kerry, Peig's self-indulgences, unlike those of the whingeing Friends, were human, justified and bloody well earned. Having been used as a Peig on which to hang the De Valeran ideal, she deserved this eulogistic, revisionist hour - because she's worth it!
The North - apparently another great bore to the Friends generation - featured in As Others See Us, Just One Chance and, as a comparable reality for the Basque/Spanish conflict in Leargas. Talking heads from the Republic, among them Nuala O'Faolain, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, John A. Murphy and the now assimilated Sam Smyth, recounted their perceptions of the Province/Six Counties/Ulster/ Northern Ireland for As Others See Us. In previous weeks, exiles, settlers, journalists and Americans have had their say.
There was little new or dramatic in the perceptions disclosed. There did, however, appear to be a consensus that Northern women are almost barbarously domesticated; that "fashionable" Dublin sees Northerners as country cousins and that a large proportion of people in the South would like to see the North just float off into the Atlantic. So, the view from the Celtic Tiger is condescending, smug and apathetic? Yes, that seems pretty true - but what else could you expect?
Nuala O'Faolain, having spent the best part of a year living in the North, praised aspects of its society but concluded, quite emotionally, that the place "is far more sectarian and anti-Catholic" than she had thought. Her observations were particularly damning towards the well-heeled, middleclass unionists of north Down's Gold Coast. They were "boring, rich, heterosexual, complacent, smug people," she said. Amazing then that they can't find fellow-feeling with the Tiger class of this state.
The PUP's Billy Hutchinson featured in the final episode of the education series, Just One Chance. Jailed for his involvement in killing Catholics, Hutchinson now sends his son, Christopher, to an integrated school. He has lost Protestant friends because of this and the great pity is that, like so much else that is taken as a given, so many people need extreme experiences before a turnaround becomes possible. Particularly against integrated education are the Catholic church and the DUP - forces that are not likely to change their minds.
Finally, Leargas. Mairead de Buitleir reported from the Basque region, where about 800 people have been killed in the conflict since ETA was formed in 1959. Similarities between the strife there and the hostilities in the North were lucidly explained: there have been atrocities and horrors all round. Now, however, Herri Batasuna (the Sinn Fein of ETA) is keen to replicate the North's peace process and you've got to wish it well. For a programme which often featured contributors speaking in Spanish, voiced-over in Irish and with subtitles in English, it was admirably clear and a welcome antidote to the usual, international propaganda about such conflicts.