Imprint RTE1, Sunday BBC1, Monday Leargas RTE1, Tuesday The Weakest Link BBC1, Tuesday, €1, Tuesday Inspector Morse UTV, Wednesday
Unusually for RTE, it has decided to bring back into the schedules a successful books programme. Imprint, like many others before it, views books and reading as a pleasurable, accessible experience. Hosted by the authoritative Theo Dorgan (who is about to step down as head honcho of Poetry Ireland), Imprint is easily one of the better books programmes our national broadcaster has carried. Its basic brief might be clear-cut and simple - reviewing books surely couldn't be anything but - yet it does it in such a way that it deflects the usual accusations levelled at similar programmes: that it's boring watching people chatting about books that most people would prefer to lease via a library ticket rather than buy; and that the people who present it and watch it are poetry-loving, Roddy Doyle-baiting academicians with a degree in Literature and No Fun (the concept, that is, and not The Stooges' song of the same name. Obviously.)
The three constituent elements of the programme are Theo, who diligently guides the reviewers through a few books, reporter Liam Mackey who takes up the reviewing slack, and a between-reviews short film from various film makers. Usually, Imprint is a wholly invigorating breeze through the latest published books. Equally, the short films are cogent, well-structured and bereft of gristle. Last Sunday's episode was, most unusually, one of the weakest I've yet seen. While it was normal plain sailing for Dorgan and Mackey (the former mixing greying gravitas with informed interjections, spurring on the dialogue of brief reviews as natural as spring water; the latter a punchier, pacier element, smart, spruce-looking and witty), the reviewers did their best to dull proceedings with overly earnest, please-the-teacher commentary. To make matters worse, the short film (by Art O Briain) on war poets was just the type of soft-focused reverie to give book programmes a bad name. Ponderous, pretentious and awash with cliched birdsong imagery, it was too reminiscent of a visual essay on war poets as seen through a Bord Failte lens. While no one (least of all me) is suggesting that the works of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon be intoned over Spielbergian movie dynamics, there is a case for a tad more bite. Too gentle, too academic, too rarefied and whimsical, it benefited neither its topic nor Imprint. Perhaps tomorrow's mini-movie (a look at the work of Russian writer Boris Pasternak, by Donald Taylor Black) will make amends.
Another arts-related programme, BBC's Omnibus, gave its somewhat more expansive biographical treatment to film composer John Barry on Monday. Now in his late 60s, Barry (born John Barry Prendergast, the son of a Cork man) was raised in and around cinemas in the north of England. His father was a projectionist in the silent movie era and ended up owning a small chain of cinemas, which Barry Snr and Jnr regularly visited. In his teens, Barry soaked up the soundtrack work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann, spent a couple of national service years in the British army and graduated towards the burgeoning post-war youth pop market with an outfit called the John Barry Seven. From there, he moved to television (BBC's Drumbeat) and to youth cult movies (Beat Girl), his music informed as much by soundtrack composers as by Duane Eddy and Dizzy Gillespie. From there it was a lifestyle of champagne suppers and starlets as Bond movies ("He's part of the DNA of Bond," said Barbara Broccoli) paved the way for somewhat more serious films such as Midnight Cowboy, Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves.
It was a touching portrait of Barry. He came across as a pensive, private individual with a deeply spiritual base far removed from the so-called glamour of the movie industry, a notion bolstered by his latest project, a score based on John O'Donohue's Eternal Echoes. He was drawn to it, says Barry, by the fact that his father was a Corkman, and that he's finally connecting with his past through his Irishness. For once, this seemed a more plausible reason than the usual financial ones.
Speaking of connecting with the past through a sense of Irishness, on Tuesday Leargas doffed its hat towards a social relic of times gone by - the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. Founded by Father James Cullen (and, noted the programme without an iota of humour, four women), the Pioneers is the largest organisation of its kind in the world. One could easily scoff at the notion of a Catholic society such as the Pioneers saving sober souls for God (especially, as it was pointed out, the loneliness of the priesthood engendered its own tragic level of tipplers) but in the latter part of the 18th century and the first few decades of the 19th, the numbers of both alcoholics and people with drink problems rose into the hundreds of thousands. As the Catholic church targeted schools with all the power of a Force 10 storm, membership of the Pioneers rose to half a million around the country. Now, of course, numbers have diminished exponentially with the rise of a secular and commercial community, and the association is feeling the pinch.
The programme interviewed a family of non-alcohol drinkers, focusing on their feelings of social distancing by virtue of their, er, virtue. Other equally important points were highlighted as to the loosening of the association's importance and grip: drink companies' sponsorship of sporting events, the fact that it failed to make a political impact over the years (why ever not, I wonder aloud to no one in particular?), and perhaps the most important reason of all - that any question of licensing hours was a secular one. It had an eerie context to it, even in the year 2000, as if drink is somehow a liberator, when, to many people, it is clearly an oppressor. Although too brief a programme to delve into the subject in any constructive way, Leargas nevertheless shed light on the issue of non-drinking, which is all too often looked upon as a joke and as a social disadvantage.
The mere mention of being looked upon as socially disadvantaged leads us neatly into The Weakest Link, BBC1's quiz show which doesn't sort out the men from the boys, but the supposedly stupid from the so-called intelligent. Hosted (actually, make that commanded) by Anne Robinson, the show pits people against each other for a relative pittance. Arranged in a semi-circle, the contestants, ostensibly a team, are thrown questions by a clearly salivating Robinson who, at the end of each round, delights in humiliating those who answered incorrectly, sending them off on their spotlit "Walk of Shame" with a tight-lipped, clipped goodbye. These are just some of the comments she made after each lacklustre round during Tuesday's enthralling programme: "Hang on to the wide awake, ditch the ditherers"; "Who's not delivering, who made a mistake being here this evening?"; "To be rich you need to be ruthless" and "Ditch without delay".
Speaking in a tone of voice you've not heard since your primary school teacher withered you where you stood for not getting a really, really simple maths question right, Robinson's special technique of dishonour and humiliation makes for great, unsympathetic television. Thematically, The Weakest Link is a far cry from the rather more academic Mastermind or the homely, our-survey-said, fun-filled Family Fortunes - there is absolutely no goodwill or hail-fellow-well-met camaraderie here. Despite the notion of teamwork (a thorough abstraction, as it turns out) it's contestant against contestant in a win-or-lose situation. It's an eminently watchable programme, yet its subtext of "only the strong survive" leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The programme included a contestant called Paul, a man with an esprit de corps aesthetic and a self-confessed veteran of Management Team Leading weekends. His mantra-like raison d'etre for voting out as many of the weaker contestants as possible was that they weren't acting as a team, yet there he was - shafting left, right and centre to win the princely sum of a few thousand pounds. God knows what he might have done if he'd had the chance to win a million.
Which leaves us with Inspector Morse on UTV. Being a staple diet of solid middle-class television for the past 15 years (and global television, at that) is no easy thing to either live up to or say goodbye to. John Thaw as the titular, classical music-loving policeman effortlessly grew into the role over the years, a rare act in quality TV. The final episode, punningly titled The Remorseful Day (based on Colin Dexter's final Morse book), saw the Chief return to work, despite obvious ill-health and even clearer warning signs of his imminent demise, to dive headlong into an unsolved murder which holds special interest for him. Solidly scripted by Stephen Burchett and skilfully directed by TV veteran Jack Gold, this was classic, erudite Morse: birdwatching to a CD called Classical Charisma, claiming that he doesn't drink for pleasure, reflecting on Wagner's compositional principles of "life, death and regret", rolling his eyes to heaven at his faithful retainer Lewis's description of sadomasochistic sex as "kinky rumpy-pumpy" and T.P. McKenna as a pervy surgeon lusting after nurses.
Plot-wise, this was lean and clever with all the loose ends tightly-knotted in a pretty bow, and as Morse slipped away in front of our eyes to the strains of Faure's Requiem, you detected a distinct feeling that one of the best long-running television series of the past 15 years wasn't going to go away at all. Repeats, Lewis, repeats.
