Wrestling C4, Sunday
Nine O'Clock News RTE1, Tuesday
Would You Believe RTE1, Thursday
Timewatch BBC2, Saturday
Blizzard of Odd N2, Thursday
It was the week of the big knockout match. And television had a huge role. Say what? Who? What confusion? I'm talkin' about Road Dogg versus Gentleman Jeremy Hardy. Wrasslin' is hot, both here and in the U S of A. If yew don' know, then mebbe you ain't bin talking to yer kinfolk. The half-growed variety, becaaaaaws they LERVE rasslin'.
And there is an overlap between wrestling and politics: both of them live and die by television. Some practitioners cross over, with Jesse "The Body" Ventura now governor of Minnesota (and quite a good one by all accounts). For many Americans, the contest between Al "Gore the Bore" and George "Eloquent" Bush could never be as gripping as the lurid antics in and around the rasslin' ring. These days, American wrestling is a soap. You don't just get the beefcakes taking a run at each other and feigning agony on the canvas while the crowd squeals its bloodlust. You get the personal angst and love lives of the stars as well. Satellite channels are showing it in all its totally synthetic glory, but Channel Four is also obliging on Sunday afternoons.
At the moment, a fight-to-the death between the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) and the World Championship Wrestling, which grunts in Ted Turner's stable, has been absorbing the vast number of fans. On Monday nights, when the two organisations go head to head on cable TV, around five million American homes are tuned in to the antics of The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, gorgeous pouting Chyna and the like. Channel Four's version of the "highlights" showed one fan with a big sign which read "The Hardys reek of awesomeness", the Hardys being a pair of brothers who are hot in the ring as a tag team.
THE Gore-Bush fight could have done with at least one contender who reeked of awesomeness. The only thing that is truly awesome about the American presidential election is the reflection that, with around 250 million of them, that's the best they can do? The lead-up to the grudge match between the two rich white guys consumed many television news hours in Ireland, if not up to the staggering figures of CNN and the US networks. When it came down to the bewildering rollercoaster after the vote the satellite channels were absorbing viewing, although TV3 also kept up for a while on Wednesday morning.
Mark Little's tour of some of the US heartland states on Primetime the Thursday before the election was a good contribution. Produced by Angela Daly, this was a valedictory for Little, who is soon to end his Washington correspondent term and be succeeded by Carol Coleman. Their team went to some small towns USA in a tour that was perhaps inconclusive in the didactic television tradition, but all the more revealing for that.
On election night we had Mark Little on RTE going head to head with Bryan Dobson to discussing the still inconclusive voting. The two, looking like a pair of bookends, had a fine chat on the Nine O'Clock News. Why, when reporters are interviewing each other, can't they look at the audience? If a "real" person is being interviewed it is fair enough for them to look at the interviewer, who is mediating for the viewer. But when it is two reporters conversing I get the feeling that they may as well be in the pub, and I may as well be looking elsewhere.
Watching George Bush address a rally in the twilight stages of the campaign it was edifying to notice his campaign team had employed the wrestling device of getting the crowd primed to join in to chant key phrases. When George W. got to "you ain't seen nothing yet", the stooges behind chorused the refrain, rasslin' style. Perhaps if either George or Al had worked on the pecs and specs and got a shiny big cummerbund belt, there wouldn't have been the chassis of indecision.
FROM presidents of the temporal domain to priests aiming to straddle both - a summation of the role Father Gerry O'Hanlon suggested for the Jesuits in his Would You Believe interview on Thursday night. Father Gerry is provincial of the Jesuits in Ireland. He has 225 priests of the Society of Jesus under his direction, only 35 of whom are under the age of 50.
Responding to Gemma McCrohan's question about the image of the Jesuits from their schools (Clongowes, Gonzaga, Belvedere) as being something of a toffs' order, he pointed out that around 50 per cent of the Jesuits' pupils are not fee-payers, and the priests feel it is important to have, as it were, a foot in both camps. "We recognise that the elite is going to have the power, and we prefer to have doctors, lawyers, professionals, with compassion," he said. This wasn't the strongest WYB, but its simple style of allowing people to tell their own stories is highly effective.
I MUST ask Lara Marlowe, The Irish Times France Correspondent, if the French have a word for such as Aime Deude . In English, we might call him a "character" or perhaps a "drama queen" if not something less polite. Those of you who have seen the Steve Martin film Father of the Bride II and recall the hyperactive wedding designer might have identified in Deude the possible original of that character. His description of the angst that went into his creation of the platform constructed at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower for the 100th anniversary celebrations of the famous edifice in 1989, was the high point, if you'll excuse the pun, of BBC's Timewatch programme on Saturday, Tales of the Eiffel Tower. This charming film was narrated by Samuel West and written and directed by Jonathan Gili. It included extensive interviews with two grand-daughters of Maurice Koechlin, the actual designer of the tower, but e Deude was the star of the show.
Wearing his beret, his lovely snowflake-patterned waistcoat and a suitably proletarian shirt and tie, he told us of the weeks leading up to the lavish centenary spectacle. "I hardly slept any more. I'd turn up at 5 a.m. every day, I would go and have my little coffee and my little croissant and then I would get to know the tower a little more so I could give her a baby." Ooh la la! e Deude confided: "although I can be as nice as pie, I can be a real monster when I need to be." A star was definitely born, and I expect e Deude to be taking over from the ubiquitous Antoine de Caunes as the French media-homme of the new millennium. Just as charming, but in a much more down to earth way, was Michel Chevaillier, who had the misfortune to park his brand new Renault Dauphine de Luxe below the tower one day in 1968, when, alas, a young lady chose to fall 57 metres from the first platform on to it. Because Chevaillier had left the windows open, the car acted as an air mattress to break her fall and save her life. But it was a write-off. "I had bought it just three days before," said Chevaillier. "It only lived as long as a rose." Oh Lara, you are so lucky.
COLIN Murphy, the presenter of Network 2's new Blizzard of Odd on Thursday nights, has a strong and confident television presence and could turn into a John Kelly/Dave Fanning-type cult character. And that is about the best I can say of this cheap and derivative programme. I hate to knock, but what can the poor guy do without a team of writers and extensive research to pad out his show? Murphy sits in an armchair in a darkened set, with overtones of the little Ronnie telling his interminable anecdotes out of the Two Ronnies of yore. A groovy lava lamp is placed beside him. TV clips of varying age are placed for him to introduce. The prepublicity suggested that this would be a media review show, on the button and, ugh, irreverent.
In the first show, a few excerpts from a short film, The Longliners, obviously about 20 years old, were truly fascinating, but as the programme makers are going for a quick laugh the story behind the film and what possessed its creators, were not dealt with. There were a few clips from a movie called The Beach Girls and the Monster, which was distinguished by music from Frank Sinatra Jnr. But what was truly excruciating was the "new" segment called Bus TV, in which Murphy and a film crew jumped on a bus and hoped for the best. These sort of exercises depend on the presenter either getting hilarious locals to give craic in spades, or have to resort to making fun of the innocent punters (pace Don't Feed the Gondolas). The punters in this case were schoolkids caught in the spotlight like petrified rabbits. It would have been better to leave it out.
Quirky and eccentric as Blizzard of Odd self-consciously was, it couldn't compete with my personal favourite TV moment of the week: TV3 newsman Alan Cantwell up a ladder in Fermoy in his sodden overcoat, interviewing through a window a member of a family marooned in their own house due to the floods which afflicted so much of the country. Yet according to the footage a moment earlier, there appeared to be a whole half inch of water on the roads. Alan, with that style you could be next president of the US. Awesome!