A beano with Keano

TV REVIEW: Roy Keane: The Sunderland StoryTV3, Monday World Cup Qualifier: Italy v IrelandRTÉ2, Wednesday Would You Believe RTÉ1, Sunday

ON THE EVE of the G20 summit in London this week, the radio reported that banker types (busy pinstripe legs, portly tummies tucked under primrose-pink shirts and expert tailoring) might like to consider dressing down a little, in order not to incur the wrath of those protesting against the system. It really cheered me up. I just love the idea of the weary and balding struggling to look suitably grungy for the morning commute.

One man who appears to be entirely indifferent to the way he is perceived by others, however, is Roy Keane. The Cork man is the subject of a brief but energetic two-part series from TV3, which promises the whole nine yards from Saipan to Sunderland before diving straight into the cauldron of Hades with a glimpse into “Roy Keane’s life of controversy”. Yikes, if I was the programme-maker I’d be on the 7.05 from Banker-on-Wry hiding underneath my mouldering poncho.

Born without an ardour for soccer, I admit to being rather tawdry in my initial enthusiasm for the series, but I liked this week’s first part, Roy Keane: The Sunderland Story. Its subject is a man of such epic intensity that he ignites the interest even if you don’t understand the offside rule (oh hang on, is that rugby?).

The Sunderland Storywas a rollicking tale, illuminated by constant close-ups of Keane's fixed expression of cemented passion. His eyes (occasionally awash with something that looked alarmingly like psychotic rage) growled under angrily articulate eyebrows, and even his occasional beard seemed groomed to cause maximum terror in those on the receiving end of what emanated from the unsmiling mouth at its centre.

A couple of years ago, Sunderland was an ailing club in a depressed town, and its home, the Stadium of Light, built on the site of a former mine, was failing to illuminate a grim, under-employed city. Then one of the club’s former stars, Niall Quinn, a nice, affable bloke with a nice, affable wife (who once graced our screens in a washing-powder commercial), got a consortium of Irish blokes with a few Tiger euro in their pockets to take it over. In a coup that amazed everyone who’d followed the events of Saipan, Quinn also persuaded his old teammate and adversary, the incendiary Keane, to come on board as manager. In his first season, Keane dragged the club from the Championship relegation zone to the top of the table and promotion to the stratospheric Premier League. The world (or Aer Lingus and Ryanair at any rate) tripped over themselves to facilitate all the Irish that began to lash out cash to get to the matches.

Then the inevitable denouement: with millions spent on players, results not going the club’s way, and the Irish investors being sidelined by a wily American, Keane lost patience with the dressing room full of overpaid, over-hairstyled players he’d assembled, who refused to be as talented as he was and who weren’t enjoying being intimidated by a raging Corkonian in a well-pressed suit. Keane, a keen walker, walked.

“I woulda liked to have seen him finish out his tree years,” said former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, a man apparently delighting in his own truncated career, who certainly seems happier shooting the breeze on the beautiful game than he did at the less than lovely tribunals.

ANYWAY, IN FOR a penny, in for a pound. It was difficult to avoid the fact that Ireland were playing Italy in a World Cup qualifier this week – hell, before the damn thing had even kicked off, I knew that rain was forecast in Bari and that you could buy a ticket to the match there for around a tenner (a situation that, if emulated here, might mean that living, breathing fans, rather than the ghosts of empty corporate seats, would be able to fill stadiums).

I have to admit, though, that I struggled to maintain concentration during the actual event (to be honest, early in the second half I did a bit of colouring-in of an old nativity poster that somebody found under the couch), although it did get more entertaining towards the end. If I was Mr Eircom I would have given man of the match to the long-haired Hunt brother – he was terrific, ringlets bouncing in the mist as he cantered up and down the wing.

But generally, there’s something about the Irish squad that doesn’t inspire confidence. I dunno, maybe it’s their milk-white legs, blurring into their white shirts, or their pale, earnest faces searching for the words of the national anthem (and not a hair extension in sight). The Italians are far more visually confident, and one of them even wore his Viennese opera mask onto the pitch.

I do like the punditry, though, the lads all having a cosy little bitch around the studio hearth. Bill O’Herlihy is an entirely laid-back host, completely at ease and uniquely devoid of artifice.

"Ireland liberated from their negative mindset?" he pondered, while Dunphy and Gilesie both did excellent imitations of their Après Matchpersonas.

“But do we have enough subtlety?” O’Herlihy continued, interrupting Dunphy in mid-rant (something to do with how Trapattoni should be on his knees in the dressing-room begging the players for forgiveness). I didn’t realise subtlety was a prerequisite for booting the ruddy thing into the back of the net. Still, what do I know, I’m still struggling with the Virgin Mary’s sleeve.

BEFORE I DASH off to practice my dribbling skills, I must mention a touching edition of Would You Believe, presented by Anna Nolan and featuring a report on Dublin Pro-Cathedral’s Palestrina Boys’ Choir, an institution founded in 1903, which makes it almost as old as Eamon Dunphy. WYB sees Nolan at her best – she has a genuine warmth and curiosity about spiritual life, and there was an unobtrusive ease about her interaction with the film’s participants that led to a sweetly moving film.

Somewhere in my dusty psyche the Palestrina Choir is associated with well-scrubbed middle-class boys tripping over their altar frocks to be the next Count John McCormack, but Nolan showed us an entirely different reality. Under the musical directorship of Blanaid Murphy, the choir looks at schools around Dublin city centre to fill its ranks, and the result is an eclectic mix of boys, some of them from families newly arrived in Ireland.

Two of the choir, Daniel and Said, live with their mother, Carmel, in Dublin’s Sean MacDermott Street. Carmel, a single mother, is deaf (though she loves music, she told Nolan) and her commitment to her sons as she walked them up and down to choir practice and encouraged their musicality was uplifting to witness.

Murphy, one of those extraordinary women who quietly challenge the status quo, is about to launch an all-girl choir whose singers will also have the opportunity to belong to the Palestrina. May their delicate voices sprinkle this rapidly ageing millennium with a little godly girl power.

tvreview@rishtimes.com

Teenage rampage Trying to preserve children's innocence in an increasingly 'pornified' world

This week saw the return of Channel 4’s provocative and valuable The Sex Education Show. Presented by glossy, chirpy, down-to-earth, Davina-esque Anna Richardson, the show strips away at misguided preconceptions by offering a kind of advice roadshow on all things sexual. Although the gobsmacking statistics garnered by the production team are specifically British, there is every reason to believe that Ireland’s sexual pace is quickening to catch up with that of our neighbours.

In the current series, the show is taking on the billion-pound pornography industry, with an emphasis on the impact it is having on teenagers. The UK and Ireland, we were told, are downloading more porn per capita, from the 400 million pages available, than the rest of Europe.

In England, the average age of those first coming into contact with internet porn is 11 years old, and the resultant skewed thinking about sex and sexuality – from expectations about langer length to what will happen when an adolescent boy first hits the scratcher with some other unfortunate virgin clinging on to her school kilt – is staggering.

This was a deeply depressing programme: from internet providers denying all responsibility for what they pipe into homes, to the leadenly dull quasi-sophisticates running erotic boutiques, to the mass-marketing of pale pink vibrators decked out in lurid plastic bunny’s ears, to the battery-operated penis rings on sale in Tesco, she described a “pornified” society.

The apparent aim of the week-long series – to debunk porn mythology and release kids from thinking they have to be Deep Throat, to allow young people to discover their own sexuality without the cattle-prod of an ever-growing industry – is magnanimous and was briskly articulated, but God, there a crushing sense that this tender horse has long since bolted.