Connect: This autumn's Friday-night zapfest on Irish television has been welcome. Naturally, advertisers don't like it, but viewers have been generally well-served. Pat Kenny, Eamon Dunphy and even the now tiresome Gaybo puppet have breached the TV blandness of recent years. It would be a pity to see either show fail (Kenny's looks much safer, anyway). Media, after all, thrive on conflict.
Predictably, the clash was embarrassingly hyped at the outset. Gladiators of guff would face-off in an epic struggle and the staple TV genre of chat-show would become not simply a battleground of ephemeral entertainment, but of contemporary Irish culture. The puffing was shameless, especially from the side of the now increasingly beleaguered newcomer Dunphy.
Ironically, the single most important and most derided incident on either show this season concerned puffing of a different order. When, a few weeks ago, Dunphy said he used "recreational drugs" he simultaneously endangered his show's future and provoked a debate in which hypocrisy characterises the exchanges. In the process, he also, of course, admitted breaking the law.
Thus his show's backer, Esat BT, which has forked out €500,000 in sponsorship, inhaled deeply and considered withdrawing their support. They certainly didn't want to be accused of endorsing law-breaking by drug-taking. That's not surprising, even if common sense tells you that, like those of all other huge companies, thousands of Esat BT's customers must be smoking weed.
Based on seizures alone, it's incontrovertible that hundredweights of the stuff are being smoked in Ireland every month. It can't be doing much good to its consumers but neither are the millions of gallons of alcohol drunk here either. Drunkards, after all, have been killing, maiming and destroying lives - often, but not always, their own - in Ireland for centuries and now more than ever.
So, forget Bertie Ahern, Roy Keane, Robbie Keane, Pele, Bono, Andrea Corr, Nigella Lawson, Denis Law, Robert Fisk, Geraldine Kennedy, Germaine Greer, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Páidí Ó Sé, Fintan O'Toole, Ivana Bacik, boy-bands, soap stars, punters plugging books, Jordan (forget forever!) and all the rest of the guests on both shows this season.
These people may or may not have entertained you; really it's immaterial. Remember, though, what drink has done to George Best, who appeared on The Late Late Show, and to Shane McGowan, who pitched up for The Dunphy Show. Consider then why young people who smoke weed find the hypocrisy of this society regarding drug-taking intolerable and deplorable. What sort of duplicity is this society foisting upon them? It's legal to drink alcohol and illegal to smoke dope, so regardless of consequences or which might do you, as an individual, more harm, if you must indulge, stick to the drink. That's marvellous; about as enlightened as people a generation ago being charged for having condoms.
There's no doubt that chemical adventuring, whether with alcohol or cannabis, begets casualties. Consequently, the sensible course of action is to indulge in neither and practically all parents would prefer their teenage children to abstain, likewise with cigarette smoking. But it's not going to happen and maintaining hypocrisy about the matter is certainly no deterrent.
Language, as ever, is critical. There is an alarming charge from the word "drugs" that is absent from the word "drink". That's understandable; a bottle of stout is not a rock of crack cocaine, nor is a gin and tonic a hit of heroin. But a bottle of whiskey is rather more toxic than a joint of hashish. Yet one is "drink", the other "drugs"; one legal, the other not.
Young people know as much. Certainly, there's subjectivity about the term "recreational drugs". The late William Burroughs, for instance, who, despite a life of debauchery lived to be 83, might have listed morphine among his aids to recreation.
Only nutters, however, could condone such wanton inclusiveness. But is alcohol not the most popular recreational drug in this country? Of course it is. Distillers and brewers spend millions targeting mostly young people with promises of chemical nirvana: sophistication, attractiveness, communal bonhomie and warmth. Media advertising of alcohol (like alcohol itself) obliterates clear-headedness on the issue. "Believe!" says Guinness, when "disbelieve" is the sanest response to all drinks advertising.
Anyway, Eamon Dunphy, perhaps sincerely, perhaps banking on the outlaw cachet of his remark - most likely a mix of both - voiced, deliberately or inadvertently, an issue which requires serious debate. Who knows whether alcohol or cannabis is more dangerous? I don't, and there's not much prospect of finding out while hypocrisy prevails.
The Late Late Show seems likely to prevail against Dunphy's. Fair enough, if that's the outcome viewers choose. Perhaps Kenny will chair a debate, though avoiding an ignorant propaganda-fest on the issue is desperately difficult. Certainly, Dunphy, having raised a matter of genuine concern, dare not touch it again.
Meanwhile hypocrisy, suiting the legal drink and illegal drug trades alike, will continue to keep us in ignorance. Public service television? Yeah, right!