"I CALL my cancer Rupert," Dennis Potter told Melvyn Bragg in his final interview. Racked by pain and sipping a morphine laced cocktail, the dying Potter railed against the Murdochisation of the media. For Potter, British television's most acclaimed dramatist, Rupert Murdoch, the beast of the bottom line, was the great enemy.
This week, with the posthumous screening of the first episode of Karaoke, Potter's penultimate play (Cold Lazarus is still to come), Murdoch's minions sought their revenge.
A.A. Gill, the TV critic of Murdoch's Sunday Times, attacked Potter with the venom he had previously reserved for Irish Famine victims. Gill pronounced: "Television is not a medium for people who hate people. To be fair, he (Potter) did have a sentimental soft spot for writers with psoriasis and cancer of the pancreas."
What marvellous metropolitan wit! Attacking a playwright for having cancer and writing about it, has got to be a new low. But the nastiness of such abuse reflects the nastiness of television politics as we approach a new millennium. Potter's plays range from brilliant to self indulgent - most, indeed, are an uneasy mixture of both. You don't have to like them but attacks on the very idea of TV providing individualist drama which dissents from the Murdoch worldview, are despicable.
Anyway, that's the context in which Karaoke debuted on ours screens. Potter lovers had hailed the play as "the television drama event of the decade", but it was hardly that. It was, though, the politics of television drama event of the decade, for it sprouted like a vibrant, hardy weed among the dead, plastic flowers of Murdochland. It was, in that sense, a blast from television's iconoclastic past. Its screening signalled that, in spite of trying to own every media in the world, the press and broadcast barons are still vulnerable to guerrilla action. Good.
In itself, Karaoke seemed overloaded. There were diamonds there, alright, but they were strung along twine, where they needed silver or gold. Perhaps in his rush to complete the play before dying, Potter did not have sufficient time to perfect the links. The transitions were coarse and awkward. A few minutes into the play, an over confident, businesslike doctor announces: "Mr Feeld, I'm now going to insert this soft tube into your rectum." The smug, no nonsense, medical humiliation recalled The Singing Detective. Posthumous Potter would be no easier on the nerves.
As Daniel Feeld, a cantankerous television writer dying from cancer, Albert Finney was a peculiar mixture of arrogance and sadness. He represented necessary, if disagreeable, individuality being squeezed by pompously ruthless television executives. Feeld is writing a television play titled Karaoke and as he wanders drunkenly around London's West End he meets people mouthing his own dialogue. He fears that they are inevitably moving towards the gruesome fates which he has written for them.
The play is, arguably, messianically self referential. Surely, on Feeld's - and, by extension, Potter's - parts, such delusions of grandeur go too far. The plot seems in danger of vanishing up its own behind to meet the doctor's soft tube. There is desperation in Potter's attempts to make this drama a kind of last testament for television. Only in the dual contexts of the totality of Potter's TV drama and creeping Murdochisation, can Karaoke avoid the charge of dramatic masturbation. It is in love with itself, albeit in a sado masochistic way. Maybe, though, that is an admissible elegy to a TV era that, in spite of commendable guerrilla action, may indeed, be over.
The central metaphor of karaoke - adding your own little voice to pre ordained words and music - is clever. It is, in fact, one of the awkwardly strung diamonds, as is the aggressively sexy London tart (played by the suggestively named Saffron Burrows) with whom Feeld becomes obsessed. There are three more episodes of Karaoke to come. It is difficult TV drama and perhaps its ego is a little too hard boiled. But, whatever about its head, its heart is in the right place. Murdochland doesn't even have a heart.
FUNNILY enough, the sight of with a heart losing his head on Murdoch's Sky Sports provided the television moment of the week. Affable Kevin Keegan once famous for scoring Liverpool goals while sport germs from hell, trembled with rage after his Newcastle team had beaten Leeds 1-0. Manchester Uniteds dour manager, Alex Ferguson, was the object of Kev's fury. Ferguson had questioned the commitment of Leeds and Nottingham Forest players before their crucial matches against Newcastle.
The media drafted in shrinks to analyse the "psy wars" of the Premiership run in. It was ally codology, of course. The shrinks debated about whether or not Kev's "release of pressure" would motivate his team or add to their anxiety. The most casual observer was aware of the arguments without any help from the psy pundits. But there was something disturbing about the way Sky presenter Richard Keys moved to defuse Keegan's rant.
Hyping sport to commodify emotion, in order to make filthy rich Rupert even richer, Sky seeks to have its paying audience at constant fever pitch. Then, when a principal participant in all this fuelled fever actually blows a gasket, Sky rushes to dampen it down. Had Keys not intervened, Keegan would have said even more and there are things about modern British football which need to be said.
It's understandable that most people with even a peripheril interest in soccer want Newcastle to become champions of England after a gap of 69 years. But the rise of the ABU (Anyone But United) brigade is pretty sick. Motivated by malice rather than appreciation, these creeps get their kicks, primarily from others' disappointment. Very sporting.
The fervour is all somewhat bizarre, anyway. True, there are strong links between Ireland and British soccer - Manchester United, for instance, has traditional Catholic associations and has fielded more Republic of Ireland international players than any other British club - but, it's sad to see the emotional nastiness of British soccer colouring attitudes here.
Taunting chants about the Munich and Hillsborough disasters are sometimes exchanged between Liverpool and Manchester United fans. But football and its paymaster, Sky Sports, prefers to pretend such downright nastiness doesn't exist. Ferguson is right to feel that his club is unfairly despised; Keegan was right to react to his club's suffering United's backlash against the ABU morons. Sky is wrong not to address the reasons for the viciousness in the sport it has stolen. But in plastic Murdochland, real questions mustn't get in the way of profits.
TELEVISION politics and football aside, angels, nuns and nerds crammed the schedules this week. The angels were idiotic, the nuns impressively unangelic and the nerds . .. well, the nerds were nerds. Sitting atop multi billion dollar fortunes, the arch nerds were as messianic as a paranoid.
Potter playwright. Still, it was curiously comforting to realise that some of them are even wealthier than Rupert Murdoch. It's hard not to feet like an ABR (Anybody But Rupert) when you see what he's done.
Anyway, the angels. Derry born actress, Roma Downey, featured in Touched By An Angel, a saccharine sweet dose of American syrup, in which she plays an angel, named Monica, sent to Earth to give mortals a dig out in times of trouble. It was so offensively wholesome, that even the late, Michael Landon's honeyed television series (Little House on the Prairie; Highway to Heaven) seemed, by comparison, as dark and threatening as Apocalypse Now.
Looking like a Playboy centrefold and behaving like a naive version of an Enid Blyton character, Ms Downey is under the tutorship of an older, more experienced angel, Tess. Tess is black so the PC race and age quotas are fulfilled. In fact, Tess is a real card. "You get your little angel butt back on the job," she advises the extravagantly altruistic younger angel.
"You want me to back to the creator of the universe, the alpha, the omega, the great I am and explain to the Almighty . .. ?" she continues. (Look, I had to listen to this guff, so you can absorb your share too.) And so it goes. You don't need to know any more about this programme, believe me. Angels with Derry accents in the American desert are, really, way, too weird for prime time RTE. Apparently, the Yanks took to this series. But then, they've got the drugs that you'd need to make sense of this stuff.
It is possible - just about possible, mind - that Touched By An Angel is so off the wall that it could attract a cult following. Ms Downey performs miracles (literally) in a figure hugging dress of such designer simplicity, that geezers who like the F-factor presented as innocence, will get off on this show. Twenty years ago, Charlie's Angels tried the same trick. But beside Monica, the characters of Kelly, Sabrina and whatever the other one's name was, were fully realised, multi dimensional characters struggling heroically with the existential angst of being. Monica brings vacuousness to a new level of emptiness. Startling.
BACK on this planet, Davis assembled a studio full of nuns to discuss the future prospects of "women religious". Last year, just 29 young women in Ireland became novices and, barring the intervention of a Monica miracle, it appears that the end has been reached in a 150 year old cycle of. Irishwomen entering convents.
Looking at the nuns, sorry, "women religious" in the studio, it was clear that the modern world has all but killed off a once magisterial and forbidding population. Gone, for the most part, are the medieval habits of both apparel band behaviour. They accepted that they are a dying breed and more impressively, acknowledged that the hierarchical, male Catholic church refuses to grant them equal status.
Some of them were, clearly, formidably intelligent women. If they turn their anger against domineering male clerics, they could yet go out with a bang. A guerrilla army of nun ideologues might knock off a few mitres if the Pope continues to urge them back into their old habits. None of them quite did a Fr Brian D'Arcy in confronting, the hierarchy, but their anger was simmering all the same.
FINALLY, the nerds. The Triumph Of The Nerds, shown recently on British television, detailed the origin of the people (well, they're a bit like people) who brought us the computer revolution. In an industry in which a year is an epoch, the programme scoured the pre history of the 1970s to begin the story. White, middle class, California lads took to their parents' garages back then and the world was changed forever.
It's true, in a way. But wearing dungarees, listening to acid rock and inverting sex by shoving software into hardware, does not a hippy make. Oh, back then the lads looked the part alright. But they were not even suburban radicals. The drive to build computers "is the same thing that causes people to want to become poets instead of bankers," said a rather smug nerd. Well, not quite. The nerds intimated that it was not their fault the billions came rolling in. Really, they were just financial victims of their own genius. We'll buy the computers lads but not, I think, the PR.