It's the normal things that make the truly strange imaginable. The 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult who took a cocktail of stewed apple, vodka and drugs last March,then laid themselves down to die, were all dressed in Khmer Rouge style black pyjamas, with the cult's insignia stitched on the sleeve - they looked like extras from a cheap TV scifi series. Only the black Nike sneakers they all wore somehow made the whole thing seem more real.
Watching the video footage of the bodies, shot by a surviving cult member in the house in San Diego after the suicide, you half expected Mulder and Scully to pop out of one of the cupboards, but Heaven's Gate leader Marshall Applewhite had effectively blurred the divide between science fiction and religion many years before. His followers went to their deaths happily, believing they would be reincarnated as superior alien beings.
The story was covered in depth at the time of the suicides earlier this year, but it was the cult's own enthusiasm for the apparatus of the modern media that made Rachel Coughlan's Inside Story documentary so riveting. This was the most comprehensively televised mass suicide ever, with coverage of every stage of the process - the cult members putting on their suicide uniforms, their individual farewell messages to camera, and finally the footage of the bodies, their faces carefully shrouded. It all seemed so planned, tasteful and polite, like a social club outing. There was none of the violence or horror of Jonestown or Waco, a fact which added to the overall creepiness.
We are conditioned to seeing death on television in a certain way - usually violent, always tragic - but this didn't fit the bill. It wasn't murder, and if it was a tragedy, it was a strangely muted one. For Alice and Robert Maeder, who lost their 27-year-old daughter Gayle, it was clearly a dreadful experience, but most of the cult members were middle-aged, and had cut off contact with their families many years before. In a search for meaning in their lives, they had surrendered their free will to Applewhite, who they believed was the modern version of the Messiah.
The footage was clearly shot in conscious anticipation of this very documentary - one camera pan from a body lying on a bed to a picture of an "alien" nearby was obviously designed to illustrate an explanation of the cult's beliefs, but despite all that information, and the testimony of surviving members, the suicidees remained curiously opaque and out of reach. Despite their faith in the power of modern communications technology, the copious footage just made them seem weird, sad and lost.
NOT all cults are quite so dangerous, but they all have their pernicious side. Having been told to "never trust a hippy" in my formative years, I had never even heard a Grateful Dead song (or perhaps that should be a Grateful Dead "track") until this week's Classic Albums, which bent its own rules to bring us two Dead records, 1968's Anthem Of The Sun and 1970's American Beauty. The Dead were the Daniel O'Donnells of the psychedelic movement, winning a huge following through unstinting gigging and empathy with their fan base over the years. Just as Daniel's fans flock to Kincaslagh, so Dead Heads stuck flowers in their hair and made for Haight-Ashbury, where there was something stronger on offer than tea and butterfly buns.
The six-part Classic Albums series is subtitled The Greatest Records In Rock History, which caused a lot of harrumphing in this household, where Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Paul Simon's Graceland are not held in high esteem. Tellingly, the series is a co-production for the BBC and the MTV for-wrinklies American channel VH-1, but the 1960s obsession still seems strange. You have only to compare and contrast the playlists of Radio 1 and Radio Ireland to know that there are several parallel but very different histories of pop music at large in the world, and Classic Albums draws on the worst one. The whole notion of the "album" immediately evokes a certain set of sensibilities, redolent of a time when musicians had concepts instead of tunes and Roger Dean posters papered a million bedroom walls. It immediately rules out the glories of the stand-alone three-minute pop song and is usually ignorant of black music. It was good to know, though, that when it came to the music, I hadn't been missing much over the years - both albums sounded dull as dishwater.
In the end, one person's nostalgia is another's cheap, forgettable trash. Memories closer to this column's heart are mined to uneven effect in two other current series. TW Time Machine raided the archives of Tomorrow's World to bring us fond memories of the amazing gadgets of times past. There's nothing sadder and more evocative than yesterday's vision of the future, especially when it dates from the 1970s, when the idea of unstoppable progress finally went off the rails.
The difficulty with TW Time Machine lies not in its basic, unashamedly exploitative premise, but in the over-fussy presentation, chopping up the programme into innumerable different segments - a fan's memory here, a "where are they now?" there, culminating in a grotesque aberration called "Raymond Baxter's Rock 'n' Roll Years". Raymond was seen to far greater effect in a clip from 1965, introducing Tomorrow's Girl, resplendent in nylon hair, plastic clothes, and earrings that are "tiny transistor radios - Light Programme for one ear, Third for the other - every taste catered for".
More nostalgia in Match Of The Eighties, a cheapo schedule-filler designed to whet our appetites for the new English football season, and introduced by the thoroughly obnoxious Danny Baker. This week, it was 198283, yet another one of those years when Liverpool had the title wrapped up by Christmas. More importantly, there were significant sartorial changes in the air. It seems hard to credit now, but the BBC threatened to stop broadcasting matches if teams allowed sponsorship on the new shiny shirts which acted as grim harbingers of that quintessentially 1980s phenomenon, the shell suit.
The difference between shows such as Match Of The Eighties and TW Time Machine on the one hand and the Grateful Dead programme on the other is more than just generational. The reverential Classic Albums never once invited us to chuckle at the group's LSD-fuelled musical noodlings, or at the pretentious waffle that surrounded them. 1970s and 1980s nostalgia may be self-indulgent and shallow, but at least it doesn't suffer from the preposterous self-importance of the 1960s variety (and Jerry Garcia was never as cool as Raymond Baxter). Like everything else, nostalgia keeps rolling on - the 1970s have been transformed from Supernaff to Ultracool in a few short years. If we've now reached the stage when we can be nostalgic for pin-striped, shiny football shirts, can the Kevin Keegan bubble perm revival be far behind?
Not many people would willingly spend hours of their time in the overcrowded hell that is Heathrow Airport, but paradoxically, Airport, the BBC's documentary series set there is one of the channel's biggest successes this year. As the series has progressed, some airport workers have attained star status, particularly Jeremy Spake, the genial Aeroflot employee who this week was trying to track down eight Russian schoolchildren who had disappeared beetween the check-in desk and the plane. Among the other storylines was the arrival of a phalanx of diplomats and politicians for a conference on Bosnia, and a special charter flight to inspect the Hale-Bopp comet from a little closer.
The attractions of this well-made, very watchable series are two-fold. There's still a risdual glamour attached to the notion of air travel, despite the mundane and dismal reality of the process, so all the protagonists seem a little more excited and exciting than usual, even if all they're doing is coping with snarled-up queues at the baggage check-in. Heathrow sees a non-stop flow of pop stars, drug dealers and international bigwigs, and there are specialists employed to welcome them all.
More importantly, the huge airport is a perfect location for "real life soap", one of the biggest growth industries in television. At its worst and cheapest, this can take the form of voyeuristic Sky "reality" shows such as cops, where the video camera just hovers in the hope of something awful happening. At its best, as in Airport, the format provides an opportunity to develop character and plot, bringing many of the characteristics of drama to the documentary series (and delivering bigger audiences). It's an increasingly popular strategy among programme-makers in the UK, although it's only really been tried here once, on the excellent 1995 hospital series WRH, shot in Waterford Regional Hospital. It's a shame - this is exactly the kind of relatively low-cost documentary programme-making that could play to Irish strengths and reach a large audience.
The received wisdom about television comedy these days is that Americans do it best, but the first three episodes of Platypus Man (trust me, you don't want to know), an alleged sitcom starring Richard Jeni as the Priapic host of a television cookery show, laid that myth firmly to rest.
Jeni is a single guy in the big city - he's always "dating" (that good old American euphemism) attractive women, which is a little hard to believe about someone who would be hot favourite in a Joe Pesci lookalike competition. Even after three shows, it's clear that this is silly season garbage, bought in a job lot by the BBC to fill the summer schedules. Shame on them - after all, if we wanted substandard American trash, we could always watch RTE.
`There's nothing sadder than yesterday's vision of the future, especially when it dates from the 1970s'
