Red, White and Blue - BBC 1, Wednesday
Compass - BBC 2, Monday
Walden On Heroes - BBC 2, Tuesday
Out Of The Blue - RTE 1, Thursday
True Lives - RTE 1, Monday
`We have failed in our own efforts to explain ourselves," said playwright Gary Mitchell. "We are not boring and we are not a triumphalist crowd of bigots." Mitchell, from Rathcoole, Belfast's largest loyalist housing estate, was engaged in a rare example of Protestant introspection made public. In a week when Bill Clinton's troubles dominated television, Mitchell's authored documentary Red, White and Blue: A Protestant Experience was a measured meditation on the state of the union.
Considering the "Irishness" of Northern loyalists, Mitchell suggested that many feel betrayed by England. "It's like we've become lost and the confusion continues," he said. It wasn't a thoroughly original sentiment. But at a time when unionist murder gangs have been killing Catholics almost on a daily basis, it painted an alarming picture: lost and confused people, you realised, can quickly become desperate.
Mitchell pointed out that for a recent visit to Rathcoole of Mo Mowlam, the estate's red, white and blue kerbstones were painted grey and the UDA, UFF and UVF murals erased. Considering that Mowlam is "a representative of the British government", he found this removal of such stalwart symbols of loyalty to the British crown revealing. It is. It's as though there's a schizoid consciousness among working-class unionists over elaborate displays of fealty to Britain.
On the one hand, union with Britain is sacred; on the other, it is - or, at least its mawkish exhibitions are - a kind of embarrassment. After all, if people genuinely feel betrayed, then lavish demonstrations of loyalty to the betrayer must be seriously discomfiting. Yet, seething animosity towards the prospect of a united Ireland outweighed all other feelings expressed in this film. Even the mildest-mannered of interviewees bristled at the idea.
" `Brits Out' doesn't just mean the army and the RUC," said one young Rathcoole man. It was a chilling way of thinking, echoing the view expressed by a Catholic bishop this week that Catholics are being made to believe that they are not welcome in the North. It was a mindset for which ethnic cleansing exists as a real possibility and the man expressing it was not some moustachioed, tattooed, lumpen, loyalist hardman. "Nobody wants us," said the young man, "not Britain and not the South."
Mitchell left school at 16 and got a job in the civil service. He didn't like it, but it proved to be an education. At work he became friendly with wealthier Protestants and Catholics who were as poor as himself. "The Dundonald Prods, who seemed to get everything easy, had less in common with me, a Rathcoole Prod, than Catholics had," he said. As a class analysis, this was obviously true but not so potent an observation that it might impair determination to maintain the union.
Shots - camera shots, that is - from a helicopter flying over Rathcoole at dusk, with Belfast Lough in the background, had a poetic quality. The high-rise blocks against the shimmering water suggested urban tension beside natural tranquility. Mitchell's accompanying script was contemplative and he was neither boring nor triumphalist. But as an exploration of Protestant identity, it too failed to explain the depth of unionist fears and antagonisms. What is it, precisely, that unionists abhor about Catholic nationalism? It seems even deeper than the threat of a loss of political power.
Central to Mitchell's argument was that Northern Protestantism - even as represented in one housing estate - is deeply divided. He pointed out that Catholicism is the single biggest religious denomination in the North. Pastor James McConnell spoke of "political Protestantism", with its marching bands and murals. But the distinction between the politics and the religion was not fully explained. It was hard not to think, however, that the fire and force of internalised Old Testament absolutism (including the notion of a "lost" people) informed both.
As a documentary which, for a change, focused primarily on nonviolent loyalism, Red, White And Blue was thought-provoking. But a choral version of The Billy Boys, including its notorious lyric `And we're up to our necks in Fenian blood' reminded you that, at core, for all its claimed stress on individuality, Northern Protestantism (in public, at least) still seems more united than atomised. Sung by such sweet voices, the irony - given the brutality of the words - said as much as Mitchell or any of his interviewees.
IF Northern Protestants appeared as a people having monstrous difficulties with change, they didn't appear as monstrous as the economists featured on Compass: The Cost Of The Wild. Proving that the worst of their breed know the price of everything and the value of nothing, they spoke of "monetisation". Monetising (if that is the verb) the natural world involves viewing the environment "as a resource to be consumed".
So, British government environmental economists have put a value on Twyford's chalk downs. They are worth £1.98 per British subject. The American government, reportedly, values a grizzly bear at $18.50. "The value of anything to an economist is what people are willing to pay," said Professor David Pearce. Questionnaires are compiled for the "field research" for this sort of academic bilge. "Do you prefer flowers or birds and by how much?" is, apparently, a standard type of question.
It's ludicrous, of course. But it's even worse than that because putting price tags on the world's natural wealth can make it easier for governments to destroy or "redevelop" areas populated by less valued animals and plants. Prof John Adams, a geographer at London University, pointed out that the questionnaire methodology is intrinsically unsound anyway. "If somebody says that an amenity is worth more than money to them, then that's infinity. It takes only one infinity to blow-up a cost-benefit analysis," he argued.
But really, it should not be necessary to make recourse to the logic of mathematics in order to rubbish this latest barbarism. Quantifying everything is just too coarse a method of evaluation to be taken seriously. The economists argue that they are merely trying "to reconcile conflicting demands". But how much further will they have to go to put price tags on human beings? How much, for instance, is an economist who views people solely as "consumers" worth?
It is true that the labour market makes value judgments about people's worth. But, strictly speaking, it is the worth of the labour, not of the total person, that is being expressed. How can you put a figure on a field mouse, or a grizzly bear, or a field of flowers? Appropriating the natural environment, of which we are only a part, and mangling it into a system of relative monetary values is a sick consumerism. Still, at least we now know the value of uncouth economics. I believe the term is negative equity.
With a 1990s version of Deep Throat threatening another American president, Walden On Heroes was a lecture about Bill Clinton's idol (some say, role model) John Kennedy. Against a backdrop of leatherbound books and wooden columns, carved in the classical style, Brian Walden attempted to do an Alan Taylor. (Lew Grade, older viewers might remember, got history professor Taylor to do straight lectures to camera in the 1950s and 1960s.)
But Walden is no Taylor. His central argument was that Kennedy - concerned more with appearances than with substance - was ultimately responsible for the dumbing-down of the democratic system. Using, according to Walden, a coven of "witch doctors and wizards", Kennedy allowed ideas to be trumped by image. What owiginality, Bwian! And therein lay the crucial difference between Taylor and Walden - Taylor was genuinely original.
Few people could argue against Walden's assessment. But we don't get television lectures trying desperately to prove that the world is round or that the Earth goes around the sun. Had Walden a strong argument against the notion that Kennedy's style was more marked by ideas than image, that might have been news. And worse - even in analysing the Kennedy method, Walden neglected to place it in its time. It wasn't just politics which were taking on the values of showbiz as television became America's dominant medium.
Television news and current affairs had already been jazzed up to win ratings. In a sense, then, John Kennedy was really a creature of his time, responding to changes in communications technology, rather than detachedly revolutionising political style. Had it not been Kennedy, it would inevitably have been someone else. Yet the impression left by Walden was that if Kennedy had not existed, politics in the Western world could well have remained more about ideas than image.
In fact, it was TV wot dun it, not Kennedy. "In the New Politics, everything was planned, nothing was left to chance," said Walden. "The belief was that appearances matter more than anything else in politics." Well, fair enough. But in television, the belief has always been that appearances matter more than anything else. Hence's Brian's books and columns - symbols of erudition and gravitas to set the mood. Far from being erudite, however, this lecture was banality masquerading as profundity. By the way, Alan Taylor used to do his gig on a stage with just a curtain for a backdrop.
Finally, two RTE programmes: Out Of The Blue and True Lives. The former featured Derek Davis fishing for water stories: items about yachts, cruisers and trawlers. It opened with Davis looking like an MTV presenter in front of a swirling background of psychedelic blues. He visited Crosshaven in Co Cork to talk to members of "the oldest yacht club in the world"; the Shannon, to meet a man who hires himself out with his cruiser; Donegal to see the £25 million trawler, Veronica, owned by Kevin McHugh.
As a magazine programme for water buffs, it might prove satisfactory. But whether it will sink or swim with the majority of viewers is another matter, which will in due course (sorry) come out in the wash. It's gentle, utterly untaxing viewing, but it has the whiff of the Titanic (the ship, not the film) about it and it's hard to see it making waves in the ratings.
True Lives, given that it screened an episode titled Interview With A Zombie, let you know how misleading programme titles can be. Two alleged Haitian zombies - Wilfrid Dorissant and Marie Moncoeur - were featured. When DNA testing showed that Wilfrid was not Wilfrid and Marie not Marie, we were not surprised. We had just been led up the garden path about voodoo, poisons and zombification and well, true lives. "Wilfrid" and "Marie" turned out to be sad, mentally unwell people. They were just lost.