Children Of Drugs - (BBC 1, Tuesday)
The Jenni Jones Show - (Sky One, Wednesday)
Pike People - (RTE 1, Friday)
Elements Of Irish Art - (BBC 1, Friday)
Talking about the relative highs of heroin and crack, teenager Gareth Hamilton cuts a sad figure. Over the five or so years of his addiction, Gareth has stolen an estimated £40,000 worth of goods from his family and friends. At one point, he had a £1,000-a-week crack habit which included wasting his entire £4,500 inheritance on the drug in less than a month. With three of his friends recently dead from drug overdoses, it's hard to see Gareth surviving much longer.
The Children of Drugs series, itself a part of the BBC's "Kick The Habit" campaign, this week screened A Family Divided by Drugs. The Hamiltons live in a grim housing estate in Bradford, west Yorkshire. The pitiful Gareth has two older brothers, Craig and Jamie, and a sister Donna. His father is dead and his widowed mother has found it necessary to call the police about her youngest son's thieving. Craig has never bothered with drugs but Jamie is a reformed addict who endured cold turkey to kick heroin. Gareth however, cannot face such a prospect.
Jamie has now taken to music and songwriting. Along with Craig and three other blokes, he is a member of a group named Warm. Though it's impossible to predict much in the shark pit of popular music, Warm has reasonable prospects. "I find that playing the guitar is a therapy in itself," says Jamie. Depending on your taste, such therapy may, of course, be for the guitarist only. But it was a fair point. "Look," he added, surveying the grim estate, "you can still see, on giro day, the smack kids waiting to get a score."
"Giro day" and "smack kids" and "score" - these are words and phrases from the margins. On television, a medium where fortunes are spent advertising a more marketable discourse about "your broker" or "your career" or "your mortgage", you don't often hear the real voice of social groups caught firmly in the mire. Knowing what's in store for them, it's extraordinary that so many young people continue to use heroin. It just doesn't seem to make sense. How bad can life be that junkiedom is preferable? Obviously, very bad.
But it's the scale of the blight which is most alarming. Gareth Hamilton is just one of tens of thousands of young drug addicts in Britain. Proportionate to population, the situation in Ireland is similarly bleak. Clearly, even in the culture of hard drugs, peer bravado too often outweighs simple common sense. Because it's overwhelmingly the children of the poor who become addicted to hard drugs, it's impossible to deny that addiction has a social aspect to it. It can't all be just individual psychological factors, though clearly, these can be crucial.
Listening to canny Craig, the reformed Jamie and the seemingly doomed Gareth, it was hard not to think that a kind of social violence has been done to the Hamiltons. Perhaps factors within the family guaranteed psychological difficulties among its members. But really, it seemed like a regular working class family, whose sense of its own worth had, in the space of a generation, been repeatedly and disastrously jolted. Economic changes underpin the sinking of the sink estates. These are not times to be short on job skills.
Mind you, it's often been pointed out that traditionally, publicans have tended to prosper in poor areas. Fair enough, wherever life is tough, it's reasonable to expect that people will seek to alleviate the grind. But heroin and crack, even though in overall terms, they cause fewer deaths than alcohol, are of a different order. Jamie used one voice to speak of his years drinking and using "cannabis and acid". He used another and trembled slightly when he recalled heroin euphorias.
Although there was little new in Children of Drugs, its terrible mundanity was both appropriate and striking. Current affairs invariably mainlines a hit of drama whenever it addresses the drugs problem. It can't but - it's the nature of news and news drives the current affairs agenda. But in a series dedicated to the problem of addiction, the awful hopelessness of the abandoned estates was unusually palpable. It's clear that, as in Ireland, Britain's official policies on drugs have failed. This simple, quiet, hype-free documentary was, in fact, a full-frontal depiction of devastation.
For all their obvious problems, the Hamiltons still appeared more human than most of the guests on Wednesday's edition of The Jenni Jones Show. Under the less than subtle subheading of "I've Had Enough - Give Me Back My Stuff", the show dealt with the fall-out from lovers' severance quarrels. Most of the punters involved seemed to be as emotionally sophisticated as a cavity brick. They insisted on keeping goods belonging to their former partners. In some cases, it was clearly just for spite.
Eighteen-year-old Brandie split with her 20-year-old boyfriend Dameon. He said that she had an affair with his twin brother Les. Brandie countered by alleging that Dameon had an affair with Les's wife Ginger, when she was Les's girlfriend. Between them, Brandie, Dameon, Les and Ginger have been busy bunnies. Dameon alleged that Brandie was "into sex and stripping games for his friends". He celebrated this denouncement by circling his fist in the air and hollering. Dameon was repulsive.
Brandie was no role model for emotional elegance either. But she didn't appear to gloat like Dameon. He was delighted to announce that she had had to work in McDonald's. It gave him great pleasure and again elicited the circling fist and the hollering. Even if he was just playing to the cameras - and on these junk chat-shows, you can be sure he was doing some of that - it was vile. His crowing dehumanised the abject Brandie who, in any case, wasn't doing her own situation much good.
Sheli and Thomas were next in the ring. Sheli is now with Rance. She roared at former husband Thomas: "You're a loser. You're 30 and you live with your mother." But Thomas had brought a friend who roared straight back at Sheli: "You're a loser and you're a liar. If he's a loser how come he's got the kids, Sheli? You're a bad mom, you're a bad mom, you're a bad mom." Thomas's friend kept hammering away with a pointed finger as he delivered his repeated last charge.
All this for television ratings to impress advertisers? Are these legitimate voices or is it fundamentally a case of exploiting exhibitionists who don't know any better? If it doesn't really matter to the people involved, can we say that it can't matter more to anyone else - that hurt people have a right to emotional exhibitionism? Surely not. It's the dissemination of coarsened attitudes which is the virus in these shows.
You'd have to wonder why practically all those on display for Jones's viewers were quite poor people. There was something of the Hamiltons of Bradford syndrome about it all. Even allowing for the melodramatics, you couldn't mistake the social and psychological violence on display. The final dispute centred on Heidi "a woman who let her lover take erotic photographs of her and now wants them back". The lover was called and turned out to be a huge woman named Jeana.
"Why does she need them?" asked Jeana. "She can look in the mirror." (There's logic, eh?) There was no acknowledgement that to Heidi the pictures, now that the relationship has ended, might feel invasive rather than shared. None the less, this lesbian spat was more good humoured than the rest of the televised poison extracted from the social sink pits of the United States. Because of their bluntness, even traditional freak shows had more integrity. They were terribly brutal but they relied less on pretence.
The traditional pike featured on RTE's St. Patrick's Day. Pike People documented the rise of pike-wielding groups commemorating the rising of 1798 in the south-east. Official Ireland, they felt, would have been happier with a pike-free bicentenary festival. But the rebel spirit naturally bristled at this and the pike movement gathered strength. Compared to commemorations on Vinegar Hill in 1938, when marchers carried silvery, plywood pikes, the 1998 model was as lethal as its 200-year-old progenitor.
Measuring between eight and 12 feet long, a pike, though obviously it can't beat guns, is a serious weapon. Some people made do with three-piece pikes, like those snooker cues that can be dismantled. Most, however, wanted the real thing despite the dangers, inconvenience and lack of insurance available in carrying them. Pikery generated a social side too with a number of women also becoming involved. It took a certain depth of feeling - regional, historical and social - for the rebirth of the pikes.
Ironically, that feeling is largely conservative now. With the passing of the 200th anniversary of 1798, the pike societies are now disbanding. Indeed, there are calls for the decommissioning of pikes. The funny thing about that is that the louder and more shrill such calls become, the more entrenched become the attitudes of the pike people who won't be bullied. The bicentenary of 1798 has passed but it seems that the spirit of the time is still with us. A competent short documentary.
Finally, Elements Of Irish Art. A rather less populist documentary for St Patrick's Day, this first in a six-part series considered the theme of landscape in Irish art. Scripted by Bruce Arnold, the "elements" of the title refer to earth, air, fire and water. Abstractions are risky on television but so far so good for this one. When artist T.P. Flanagan spoke about "similes and metaphors that exist in the structures of trees or in the light of the hills", we knew we were not in Jenni Jones country. In fact, in the name of culture, we were even deeper into nature. An engaging opener.