Happy New Year - although those of you who attended the RTÉ celebrations may be a little sick of that by now. Two New Year's Eves in a month surely blanches the sentiment.
New Year's Eve Countdown
RTÉ1, Tuesday
The Fight BBC2, Sunday
Northwest Passage: On Franklin's Trail RTÉ1, Monday
An Decay, TG4, Sunday
RTÉ's New Year's Eve Countdown was pre-recorded. When the champagne corks popped, shredded paper fell from the ceiling and Gay Byrne led the nation in a rendition of Auld Lang Syne, the revellers were involved in a conspiracy of celebration. It was mid-December, when 2002 still had some colour in its cheeks. The tape was then tucked away safely until the big night, when the important thing was to press play at exactly the right moment. At midnight on December 31st it's likely that the only people present in RTÉ were the security guard working double time and the person with the job of pressing that button.
You could see it in the audience. They were a mite embarrassed, a little shrunken in their seats, reluctant to participate fully in the charade. They sang Auld Lang Syne as if saving their gusto for the real thing. They seemed too concentrated on pretending to celebrate to actually celebrate. For revellers, they showed a distinct lack of revel. Happy mid-December. Tonight we're gonna party like it's 19:59.
I should point out to those of you who think I'm being unnecessarily churlish that I'm not blowing any major television secret. The trick was up when pictures of the night were printed in the national papers a week in advance. It was like showing the rabbit before showing the empty top hat.
To be fair to RTÉ, there can't be too many top international celebrities who would resolve to spend their New Year's Eve in an RTÉ studio - last year's live unspectacular proved that with painful eloquence. The night that Samantha Mumba does spend her New Year's Eve on an RTÉ cabaret show is the night you'll know her career is over.
So RTÉ cheated a little and picked an evening when a few of them would be around. In the end, the mix of chat and music and Gay Byrne's undying insistence on referring to himself in the third person was perfectly watchable. Watchable at least until Declan Galbraith made an appearance.
The 10-year-old singer, currently being forced fed to us, is precocious enough without rubbing it in through the wearing of a supernova-white suit. His handlers have given him songs that consist only of high notes, and when he reaches for them it sounds like he's being shot across the studio by catapult. His arrival marked the time to go to bed, even if it sounded like the brain-scraping screech of an early-morning alarm.
I know, I know, I should go pick on someone my own size. If Declan is willing, though, perhaps we could go toe to toe in the next bout of celebrity boxing (The Fight). By the end of 2003, you will be bored of watching mildly famous people trying to break each other's noses, but at the minute it holds enough fascination to wring a couple more rounds out of the genre.
Last week, Grant Bovey fought Ricky Gervais. Gervais is famous as The Office's David Brent. Bovey, meanwhile, had fame thrust upon him for thrusting himself upon Anthea Turner. Part of their nuptials involved advertising Flake bars on the cover of OK! magazine. It was to prove eerily prescient, given that he advertised Flake even further during the bout by turning the brand from a noun into a verb.
If Bovey has chiselled features - six pack and biceps, chin wider than his ears - then Gervais appears to be poured from a jelly mould. He is a sofa with arms. His chief weakness during training was his reluctance to throw a punch in case it angered his sparring partner. Normally a worrying trait in a boxer, here it didn't matter. When the two stepped into the ring, weeks of training were forgotten and the style became that of two drunks, leaning up against each other until one or both collapsed from exhaustion. Gervais won on a split decision. If you're going to lean against some one for four and a half minutes, it helps to be heavier than your opponent.
The Fight was a diverting enough way of watching celebrity devour itself, but like professional boxing we will never get the matches we really want. Grant Bovey stole Anthea Turner from a radio DJ called Peter Powell in a very public, humiliating fashion. A match between two men who really have something to fight about would do the genre no end of good.
Irish television, obviously, doesn't have the kind of resources to fritter away on such ephemera as celebrity boxing, otherwise that whole Dunphy/Kenny thing would have been settled in a much more dignified manner a long time ago. Instead we had a week of documentaries. An Decay was one that stood out. There can be few words to have such dark resonance as "sanatorium" and this excellent documentary on how TB ravaged Ireland reminded us why.
For an epidemic that seems a lifetime away, it's still awfully recent. By the 1950s, 4,000 people a year were still dying of the disease. For many, it was a shameful, anti-social disease in a social society, often unmentionable by name. If you contracted it, then your house would be fumigated and the entire family examined for infection. When Co Dublin's Peamount Hospital was built, its benefactors promised that it would be burned to the ground after five years.
It was an epidemic of statistics. Some 50 per cent of those who contracted TB would die from it. The industrial schools became choked with TB orphans; 64 per cent of young deaths, ran the posters of the time, were due to TB. One victim would on average infect 20 others. "Spitting costs lives," preached the public-health films.
Elsewhere, Northwest Passage: On Franklin's Trail followed the adventures of a group of Irish men sailing through the Arctic. These were men with the sort of windswept faces you do not get by sailing through life with the television remote control as your tiller.
The adventurous group had built their own boat, Northabout, to take them through the North-West Passage, the crumbling, ragged bit of the map over Canada which links the Atlantic with the Pacific. It is a part of the world clear of ice for only a few weeks each year, but where it can close in quickly and hold a boat prisoner for an entire winter. That winter, by the way, lasts for 10 months, and is conducted under the maddening blanket of 24-hour darkness and in temperatures that can drop to -50C.
The boat and its crew pushed through blobs of deep blue glacial ice on the trail of an Irishman, John Franklin, who set out in 1845 to forge a way through the passage in the name of the empire. At the time the world was obsessed with the deed. It watched as Franklin's ships, Terror and Erebus disappeared into the eastern end of the passage, and waited patiently for them to pop out the other end. They never did.
After two years, a rescue mission was despatched, followed over the next decade by 50 more. Rewards were offered. Balloons and foxes with messages for the stricken crew were released in their general direction. It was 1859 before their whereabouts were discovered by another Irishman, Leopold McClintock, who found the crew's remains well south of where they should have been.
Trapped in the ice for more than two years, the crew - minus the dead Franklin - eventually set out on a suicidal march south. They practised that particular eccentricity of the gentlemen explorers of the age and insisted on bringing along the impractical comforts of civilisation.
Across the ice, they dragged such things as a writing desk, curtain rods, button polish. All the button polish in the world, however, could not prevent them from resorting to cannibalism.
As McClintock followed their trail, he found lifeboats pulled by skeletons. The crew of Northabout had much better luck, navigating their modest vessel through the passage in a matter of weeks.
At Todd Island, though, they found a reminder of how folly can be so cruelly punished. The bones of the last survivors of Franklin's expedition lay scattered across the shingle. They found half a skull, bleached, spotted with lichen, 500 miles from the nearest tree.