OPINION:A yelling TV six-parter dramatises nothing but an outdated misreading of its target demographic, writes Quentin Fottrell
OUR BENEVOLENT State broadcaster is currently half-way through a raunchy six-part kitchen sink drama, which it must hope has all the right ingredients. Rawis set in a Dublin restaurant.
The characters have mouths like sewers, and indulge in break-ups and fisticuffs, all-night parties full of ne'er-do-wells where strangers wander in off the street followed by grumpy members of the Garda Síochána, who have received complaints about the noise, and where angry young things have nose-to-nose combat and throw cabbages at each other. At least, it could have been a cabbage. It might have been a lettuce. It's difficult to keep up. Whatever it was it broke the guy's tooth. Maybe it was just out of the freezer.
God bless RTÉ. It is once again trying to capture the public imagination in the way the BBC did with This Life, the 1990s drama about lawyers sharing a house in London. It has been doing its best to capture the zeitgeist for years now, which has proven about as elusive as The Planter's Daughter, who would now probably be selling derivatives in an updated televised version of her life.
I'm not sure if the folks in Rawwould use words like "ne'er-do-well" or "folks" or make bad puns about dishing up the right ingredients, but I consider myself part of Raw'starget market. This is drama for the "twirties", the lucrative twenty- and thirty- something demographic. (That's me, suckers! By the skin of my chinny-chin-chin.)
Like the characters in Raw, I shared a rambling Georgian house in Dublin with friends and had house parties where passers-by would wander in. We would take Polaroid pictures of them, stick the photos on the fridge and wonder who they were the next morning. That was one flat rental and two social life-killing mortgages ago, or seven years ago in real time, 49 in dog years, and, using the calculation of the doorman in The Dragon, 30 in gay years. (He asked to see my "bus pass" last weekend, which puts my age at 65.) Whatever age I am, I know Rawhas a pretty screwed-up view of Young Ireland. They/we don't drink out of wine bottles at parties. Tumblers, plastic cups, mugs, maybe. But we are not complete savages.
Orla Tinsley wrote a timely piece in these pages a few weeks ago about how college students are misrepresented in the media.
"There is a clear lack of self-esteem in college students," she wrote. Is it any wonder? Research by the UK-based Young People Now Positive Images Campaign, among many others, has shown that young people believe they are portrayed as anti-social in the media, as a group to be feared and not trusted, which helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a TV advertisement features a young pup who wants to sell his granny, it's called ageist. It is. But ageism works both ways. And yet the other side of ageism rarely gets an airing when there is such a negative view of anyone 35 or under.
Bring back Gidget. I miss her. Young people aren't as grim as the media would have you believe. There are fewer and fewer young role models on TV. Aside from news items on young entrepreneurs and young scientists or inspiring features on Nationwide, young people on television are drug addicts or alcoholics, or loony tunes with anger management problems.
Without conflict, there is no drama, but television writers are trying to court an imaginary audience who they think are impressed by all of this. It's not that they have a duty, it's that they're missing their mark. There is a lot of sensitive, intelligent grey matter in between.
TV3's reality show The Apprenticegives the other extreme of Irish "twirties". As delicious as it is, the suits vying for the €100,000-a-year job are only marginally more appealing than the fictional bowsies on Raw. I don't like to fail," said one female contestant, "I generally never do." A guy exclaimed, "I don't take crap from anyone!"
That kind of unfettered self-confidence leads to government bailouts of financial institutions, and deluded kids making a holy show of themselves on X Factorbecause they think they can be stars on the carbon neutral hot air of chutzpah alone.
Alas, it is also an insight into the maniacal self-entitlement of a certain section of our society that believes the world owes them a favour.
Before The Apprenticeand Raw, before bitchy MTV reality soaps like The Hillsand Laguna Beach, there was Beverly Hills, 90210. It featured the midwestern Walsh family who move from Minnesota to the plastic fantastic, status-conscious world of Beverly Hills where it's all about what car you drive and how you look. (Not unlike what happened to Ireland in the last 10 years, if you think about it . . .)
It was a guilty pleasure when I was in University College Galway in 1993 and we lapped it up while eating our Supermacs curried chips.
Unlike the sexed-up, backstabbing updated version of 2008, the early episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210were tidy little morality plays. Compared to what's on television now, it was positively realistic.