From the Rock to the Wall (RTE1, Monday)
New Klan (Channel 4, Monday)
Love in the 21st Century (Channel 4, Monday)
Jack of Hearts (BBC1, Wednesday)
`We have our critics, and criticism, when well researched and well founded, is positive," said Joe Mulholland, managing director of RTE, recently. Well, here goes . . . Based on my research over the last week, RTE's summer schedules are a disgrace and an insult to the people who pay the licence fee, which is supposed to fund a year-round television service. With the honourable exception of the sports department, which was working flat out last week on GAA, golf, showjumping and Formula One, the channel has abrogated its responsibilities in nearly every other area of home-produced programming. They haven't even bothered to put on one studio-based entertainment show this summer, unless you count the lottery programme Fame and Fortune, which I don't (and how exactly is that financed?).
The powers-that-be at RTE seem to feel that we'll all be happy on a diet of repeats and cheap imports for two months of the year, but they'd better think again, and think fast. This summer, Channel 4 has started promoting its programmes more vigorously in this country. Like it or not, TV3 will continue to increase its share of the audience. ITV is already a significant player, and Sky has its teenage niche. RTE had to do a quick rejig earlier this summer when advertisers started pointing to the dreadful viewing figures the channel was achieving. The stop-gap solution was to run repeats of the likes of Amongst Women and Falling for a Dancer, but RTE1 and Network 2 will have to stop presuming that we'll still be there every September when they deign to start showing us some home-produced programmes again.
Contrary to what some people in Montrose seem to believe, most critics derive no great pleasure from having to bang on and on about RTE's shortcomings - it's rather depressing to write an Irish TV review and find there are virtually no Irish programmes to write about. In the spirit of goodwill and objectivity, it should be acknowledged that RTE's output of documentaries and factual series has improved enormously in the last three years, and that it has some interesting-looking documentaries coming up in the autumn. But the station will have to take a look at its policy on arts documentaries: the Irish arts documentary as a genre is far too cosy with its subjects, often to the point of hagiography. There's too much reliance on the elegiac tone and softly-softly approach, too many over-reverent commentators, not enough humour, scepticism or polemic.
Having said that, From the Rock to the Wall was a different beast altogether, and really quite bizarre. A documentary following the traditional musicians Bru Boru from their Cashel base as they embarked on a tour of China, it focused on the pleasant, if rather bland, performances of the group in venues ranging from the Great Wall to a modern shopping mall. Perhaps in homage to the free-speech traditions of the People's Republic of China, the style and presentation were like something from a film you'd be forced to watch in a re-education camp. There was little or no sense of the interaction between the performers and the Chinese. Instead, we were treated to speeches from dignitaries at the sort of tedious receptions which go with this sort of turf, and by rights should be the first thing to end up on any self-respecting editor's floor.
Back in the mists of time (around 1965), most TV documentary-makers decided that this kind of stuff was patronising, boring rubbish, and that they would try to capture some sense of the real people involved, rather than slavishly record the speeches of the Great Leaders. Not here. At times we caught glimpses of the off-duty Bru Boru-ers cavorting in the streets of Beijing. They seemed to be having a great time, but you wouldn't have known it from the programme, where their participation was restricted to their performances and a few anodyne soundbites. Rather, most of the comments came from the hovering apparatchiks of both countries, and boy, were they boring.
The platitudes rolled in like fog off the sea. How were the Chinese reacting to their first taste of Irish music? "Music, song and dance are the universal language," we were informed, in a grave tone which implied that this was something we might not have heard before. Was there any natural connection between Chinese and Irish traditions? "We are both ancient countries," we were solemnly told - unlike, presumably, all those shiny, brand-new European and Asian countries like Italy, France, Thailand or Japan. One of the apparatchiks, from the Irish Trade Board, actually made an interesting point; that Chinese audiences might find Bru Boru's music more congenial to their own musical expectations than American rock'n'roll, but this connection wasn't fully explored, and nor was the collaboration between Irish and Chinese musicians. The oddest sight was of all was one of the show's set-pieces, a tap-dancing pantomime horse - well, it looked more like a donkey, actually, presumably a reflection of our "ancient" culture.
After that, it was a relief to see a real documentary. In New Klan, journalist Jon Ronson travelled to Arkansas to meet Grand Wizard Thomas Robb, who is trying to make the Ku Klux Klan more media-friendly and attractive for the soundbite age. The KKK has been in the doldrums in recent years; there's more competition in the right-wing loony market these days, with new, improved brands like Aryan White Resistance nibbling at Robb's market share. The Grand Wizard has decided to fight back by modernising the Klan, using the language of pop psychology and self-discovery. Klansmen were issued with multiple choice questionnaires to find out what their "personality type" was. One question asked them to tick one box from four: "angers easily", "aimless", "argumentative" or "alienated". A lot of good 'ol boys were chewing their pencils over that one.
In his pursuit of mid-market respectability, Robb has also banned the use of the word "nigger" by his followers, and only allows them to wear their robes and hoods once a year, at a special cross-burning ceremony (the phrase "cross-burning" is just more liberal media propaganda, apparently; the correct description is the much nicer "crosslighting"). Whatever you want to call it, the preparations for cross-burning looked like a harmless sort of event for grown-up boy scouts, until Ronson started talking to some of the Klansmen, who weren't quite keeping to Robb's script, using "the N word" with some relish. When night fell, the cross was lit, and the chants of "White Power" were chilling, despite the presence of a cherubic little girl singing You Light Up My Life.
As Ronson pointed out, Robb knows what he's doing, in a way. Hoping to tap into the half-covert racism of many Americans, he sees the KKK as a powerful brand-name and plans to revitalise it through modern marketing techniques. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for the rest of us, the mask slips very easily. In a risible but strictly-policed rally in a Michigan car park, he was so put off his stride by a couple of half-hearted hecklers that he ended up foaming at the mouth about the "faggot slime" who run the media. Whoops!
Even more seriously for him, he's discovering that his "media-friendly" tactics don't actually interest the media, who prefer their Klansmen old-style, like momma used to bake 'em. A rival Grand Wizard, who preferred the more traditional slogan of "We hate niggers, we hate spics, we hate faggots and we hate Jews", made it on to coast-to-coast news bulletins and was a regular on The Jerry Springer Show, which agreed to run a contact number for this particular Klan across the screen. "The phones went nuts for days," we were told. In the world of racist politics, as in everything else, if you aren't on TV, you just don't exist.
Love in the 21st Century is billed as "a series about love, viewed from a female perspective", although it actually seems to be about sex. The third from six one-off dramas, Toyboys was the tale of Sarah (Clare Holman), a seemingly contented member of the Volvo-driving classes whose marriage to fellow teacher Alex (Ray Stevenson) is seriously lacking in the passion stakes. Her eye starts wandering in art class and falls upon tall, dark, handsome, 15-year-old Ryan (Matt Kennard). Before you can say: "See me after class", the pair are swapping bodily fluids behind the bike shed (these are half-hour dramas, so there's not much time for foreplay). The gag here is that Sarah falls hook, line and sinker for Ryan's adolescent chat-up patter ("I really love you, you know," he mutters as he tries to engineer his hand under her blouse), finds herself coming out in hot flushes to pop songs on the radio, and starts planning to run away with her teen dream. The punchline comes on a school camping trip, where she finds Ryan in a tent with another girl - and flees, weeping, into the arms of another pupil, with the final shot freezing on his wicked grin over her shoulder as he comforts her.
From Lolita to Manhattan, there has been no shortage of movies and dramas which played this particular scenario out with the genders the other way around, and the fetishisation of female adolescence is one of the keynotes of modern pop culture, but one still wonders what the reaction would have been had this been a comedy about a naive thirtysomething male teacher and a sexually rapacious 15-year-old girl. No matter what the law says, we continue to think differently about male and female sexuality during adolescence. Love in the 21st Century, made by the same producers as the similarly mischievous and stylish Queer as Folk, was well aware of all this and made sure it remained resolutely tongue in cheek throughout, but it still depends which tongue and whose cheek.
The thorniest issue for the writer of serial drama is always that darned opening episode. With all that scene-setting to do and characters to introduce, it risks being as interesting as watching paint dry, losing you half your target audience in a few minutes. Jack of Hearts tackled the problem head-on, opening with a pre-credits melodramatic flourish, a suicide attempt atop a rain-lashed railway bridge, and a phone call in the middle of the night. Taking the call, our hero, probation officer Jack Denby (Keith Allen), promptly charged off to help, only to be stabbed and tossed off the bridge himself. It was Die Hard on a budget, and it could have been deeply silly, but it worked because of Allen, an actor who has specialised up to now in playing minor bad guy roles, but who gets a welcome chance here to expand his repertoire.
You've met a lot of types like Jack before in TV dramaland - he's tough, he's damn good at his job, and he doesn't care much for authority. Ho hum. What was more interesting was his tricky home situation - his foundering relationship with girlfriend Suzanne, who wants to move back to her native Cardiff. "She's applied for a job abroad - Wales," Allen gloomily tells a colleague, in one of those lines which probably had the scriptwriters chortling, and therefore didn't work.
As this is a BBC Wales production, we know that Jack will be following Suzanne into exile (the Welsh have clearly cottoned on to BBC Northern Ireland's cunning strategy of getting the decision-makers in London to notice them by writing central roles for English people, a la Ballykissangel and The Ambassador), but the twist is that he's drawn more by his feelings of responsibility for her six-year-old daughter, Katie, than by his relationship with Suzanne.
In that difficult first episode, Jack of Hearts shifted uneasily at times between comedy and drama - Suzanne's over-protective parents are like characters from a Welsh One Foot in the Grave - and there's a whiff of desperation in its attempt to find a new angle on crime drama through the probation service, but Allen has a crackling presence, and it's worth watching for him alone. BBC Wales has made one glaring faux pas - the title song by Bonnie Tyler (remember Lost in France?) sounds like a cat being disembowelled, and should ensure that a nation (sorry, four nations - or is that five?) reaches for its zapper as soon as the end credits start rolling.
