The Eurovision Song Contest (RTE 1, BBC 1, Saturday)
Rebellion (RTE 1, Wednesday)
Short Cuts: Homeboy (Network 2, Wednesday)
Omnibus BBC 1 (Wednesday)
You have to worry about Pat Kenny sometimes. In a week when the politics of identity and human rights were to the fore all across the media, Ireland's former Most Eligible Bachelor seemed to be suffering hot flushes at the mere thought of what Israeli contestant Dana International had under her Jean-Paul Gaultier frock at this year's Eurovision Song Contest.
If you've been on a desert island for the past week, you may not know that the very attractive Ms International used to be called Yaron Cohen before her sex change operation five years ago, and Pat seemed to share the view of Israel's ultra-orthodox politicians that poor old Dana had "a sickness you must cure and not give legitimacy". "Freakshow," said the presenter of Kenny Live at the end of Dana's inoffensive Eurodisco offering, Diva.
We all know that Pat lives in a parallel universe where The Eagles, Travelling Wilburys and Garth Brooks are the most significant musical figures of the past two decades, but surely even he has noticed that sexual ambiguity has been a central element in modern pop? Has he really been taking his Eurovision straight all these years? Actually, we probably should be grateful to Pat. Despite his militant heterosexuality, he's one of a vanishing breed of broadcasters who haven't given in to the irony disease. You can't switch on British television these days without being confronted with some twerp in a four-button suit arching one eyebrow at the camera, and RTE is rapidly developing its own crop.
Of course, Eurovision has always been camp, but Dana International's victory may signal the final victory of the selfconscious Eurotrash variety. The suburban soft-rock values that Pat represents are in full retreat, and we'll soon be feeling nostalgic for them.
For most of the contest, this column stayed with the BBC, less for Terry Wogan than for the Ceefax English-language subtitles which allow you to appreciate the full intellectual breadth of the entries. After all, this is supposed to be a song contest, so unless your Estonian and Hungarian are up to scratch it's like Sullivan without Gilbert or Rodgers without Hammerstein. Well maybe not. . . although it seemed at times as if the translators just weren't trying hard enough to catch the flavour of things. "Frankly, I think I'm dead," was the sublime subtitle to one catchy chorus. Frankly?
The sad decline of the bing-bang-a-bong genre continues, with not one competitor attempting this most rigorous of lyrical disciplines. Portugal's entry was all about how wonderful it is to be Portuguese - an admirable sentiment, if hardly calculated to win over an electorate defined solely by its non-Portugueseness. However, they had already signalled their disinterest in winning by including a bagpipe-player in the band.
The advent of tele-voting seems to have increased the blatant prejudices of the whole thing. Along with the traditional Greece-Cyprus stitch-up, Slovenia, Croatia and (deep breath, Ulrika) the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia indulged in some Balkan bonding, with Slovenia tactlessly giving the game away by suggesting: "I hope they will remember it well next time." But when it came to shameless neighbourliness, the Balts were even worse, with Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden and Norway happily swapping votes.
Turkey got good support from its diaspora in Germany, whose own entry, the spoof act Guildo Horn and his Orthopaedic Stockings, confirmed all our worst fears about German comedy. If, as it seems, the contest is turning into a neighbourly popularity test, it's worth noting that the smug Swiss ended up with the dreaded nul points.
This column became heartily sick long ago of RTE's self-congratulatory coverage of its own brilliance at hosting Eurovisions. But RTE executives must have been hugely chuffed to see the mess our neighbours made of the show. The programme kicked off with a good luck wish from Carrie Crowley in Dublin, which gave the impression that we had passed the tricks of the trade across the Irish Sea in a spirit of Good Friday-style co-operation.
But the BBC's presentation was quite awful - flat lighting, a poky stage, terrible camera movement and bad editing decisions. The interval act seemed to be attempting some kind of multi-cultural celebration, but the resulting aural and visual cacophony was shambolic. So now we know - we do have a talent for it (whether that's something to be proud of is another matter).
If one of the side effects of Dawn's failure to win this year is that RTE has more resources for programmes such as Rebellion, then we should all be grateful to the tele-voters of Europe. The first part of Kevin Dawson's accomplished account of the 1798 rebellion was an exemplary piece of historical television, drawing with great effect on international archives, first-hand written accounts and the analysis of modern historians to chart the course of the two decades which led up to the rebellion in Ireland.
What was particularly impressive about the first programme was the way it found a strong television grammar to explain complex events with concision and drama. Blending pictorial records of the period with astute sound-editing and a stirring musical score, Rebellion looked at the impact of the American and French revolutions on Irish society, and the new political forces which led to the formation of the United Irishmen.
At times the narration tried too hard to find contemporary echoes - repeated references to the "economic boom" of the time, and a description of Lord Camden as "a security man, a hardliner" jarred - but this story is so full of resonances for the contemporary viewer that such attempts seemed unnecessary.
What the programme managed to do was give a broad and fascinating picture of a very different time within which can be discerned the seeds of most of the issues that preoccupy us today. It immediately made me want to go away and read more about the subject, in a way that other articles and programmes haven't done.
Given that most of the art, fiction and drama in this society is produced by and largely for the urban middle class, it's remarkable how infrequently that class is represented on screen drama. It's probably a good thing, therefore, that the Short Cuts series of short dramas from RTE and the Irish Film Board is explicitly dedicated to contemporary drama, and that some of the drama in this year's season is recognisably set in the suburban world where so many of us live.
Unlike last week's Before I Sleep, this week's offering, Homeboy, didn't attempt to deal with big issues such as unemployment or loneliness (and there's no reason why it should). This was a broad (too broad) comedy set in a middle-class, single parent household, where teenaged Victor Burke has taken on the maternal role, fussing over the rest of the brood and refusing to live a life of his own. When his father suggests moving the family to Sweden, Burke is faced with a crisis, which he determines to resolve in a rather startling way.
It takes a lot of gumption in this day and age to construct your central gag around the concept of a paedophile ring, as happens here, but Brian Lynch's screenplay seemed blithely unconcerned by such delicacies, and Mary Mullan's direction was more concerned with sitcom-style mechanics.
Short films by young film-makers don't deserve to be critically ripped apart, but the dialogue and characterisation in Homeboy (and also in parts of Before I Sleep) show the difficulties still experienced by Irish writers and directors in transposing the mundane realities of contemporary life into convincing and entertaining drama.
Back to irony and identity with the Omnibus profile of Jeffrey Archer, a strange man with an unsure grasp of either. Now with his sights set on becoming London's first mayor, the bestselling novelist and politician manque seemed more like a rubber ball than a human being. Described by old pal John Major as "uncrushable", Archer is the selfmade man par excellence, bouncing back again and again in the face of adversity and humiliation. He's been caught out on several occasions for embellishing his own past (a "diploma in physical education" from an American college turned out to be from a Charles Atlas-style body-building course in London) and on several occasions he halted himself in midstream during his interview, apparently aware that some further exaggeration was about to fall from his lips.
It was telling to find that his parents had borne another son, also called Jeffrey, before their marriage, whom they had put up for adoption, so that from birth he was an embodiment of the principle that everyone has a second chance. Everything about the man, including his prose, seems ridiculous, but he's rich as Croesus, and there was a grudging awe apparent in the comments of even his most bitter critics.
"He's the self-invented man; he overcomes a natural inability (to write) through sheer willpower," said one. Publisher Eddie Bell told an anecdote of how Archer invited all the book sales reps from around Britain to his house for a party, greeting them by their Christian names and giving them presents. "He was the first author they'd met," said Bell, leaving no doubt as to the effect of this strategy on Archer's positioning in bookshops. There's a lot to be said for having no shame.
