Fair City - (RTE 1 and Network 2, repeatedly)
Coronation Street - (ITV and RTE 1, repeatedly), (RTE 1, Sundays)
EastEnders - (BBC 1 and TV3, repeatedly), (BBC 2, Christmas Day and St Stephen's Day)
This Bloke Walks Into a Bar - (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Apres Match Christmas Special - (Network 2, Sunday)
For the penultimate Christmas of the millennium, television's sermons could hardly have been more traditional. Soap operas, TV's proven ratings hits, were (Hollywood films apart) dominant across the holiday season schedules. It's ironic perhaps that as church-going declines, the public desire for soap's morality plays - pulpiteering through entertainment - remains buoyant. There is always the promise, never broken (if you have the stamina and the free time), that eventually the baddies will get their come-uppances.
Mind you, it's the eventually that exasperates. By pacing their most moralising weekly plot-lines to climax (or at least seriously intensify) at Christmas, soap producers know how to add seasonal spice. They know too what works best: rogue males. Fair City, Coronation Street, Glenroe and EastEnders exploited pocket Herods, Jack, Greg, Ray and Grant respectively. As more women than men watch soap, there is a pungent whiff of sexism in all this. Anyway, the preponderance of rogue males has become a soap staple ever since J.R. Ewing and Dirty Den delivered huge audiences in the 1980s.
Jack Shanahan, Fair City's rapist doctor, is a peculiar soap rogue. Though sometimes scarcely believable and never intimidating, he is a class caricature around predominantly working-class Carrickstown. Still, though the character is patchily drawn and performed, he does have a pertinent 1990s edge. In a decade in which, in Ireland, church, politics, commerce, media and the traditional professions have lost a considerable degree of credibility, a mean-spirited, avaricious, rogue doctor is a rather apt embodiment of the times.
This Christmas, Jack was abandoned by his parents and by Laura, his latest squeeze. Without doubt, this was satisfying for fans, but the main problem with the entire Jack plot-line is that it has been more dragged out than a bungee line with Jo Brand and Robbie Coltrane attached. It has been interminable. Long before now they ought to have tried, convicted and jailed the git - or had him otherwise killed off. But the promise of justice/revenge is a strong hook for addicts. Fair enough - but it's rather abusive and condescending to stretch a story so far beyond its natural limits.
Greg Kelly, Coronation Street's pretty-boy thug, is a more credible villain. There is a coldness in this character, conveyed by a tiny glint in his eye and a menacing smile spreading across his lips, which suggests the requisite nastiness. Greg has already beaten up Sally a few times and looks like he takes pleasure in inflicting pain. As soap rogues go, he's a good one - less of a sociological statement than Jack Shanahan, but more traditional and more believable. The women-as-permanent-victims brigade, which constitutes a significant proportion of soap audiences, just love to hate this guy.
Meanwhile, down in Wickla, Ray O'Driscoll is out of prison and back on the farm, resting up with his nasty mama, Lizzie, and wholesome brother, Oliver. He was perhaps upstaged by Miley (truth, justice and the Irish way) getting a box in the mouth from David (Glenroe's shiny doctor), upon the latter's discovery that Miley and the doc's then wife-to-be Fidelma, had vigorously emulated farm animals in heat in Miley's barn. But Ray's re-emergence shortly before Christmas was well-timed for the holiday schedules - the ailing agri-soap badly needs a serious, rural Ireland-style crime. Brace yourself, Nora.
And then there was Grant Mitchell in EastEnders. Accused of attempted murder, with his wife giving evidence against him, Grant is perhaps the most realistic of soap's current crop of rogue males. Certainly, he looks the part. He is no ruthless, young doctor, pretty-boy chancer or witch's spawn. No, Grant is just a common-or-garden thug, who will never be the Hannibal Lecter of soap opera. But that's his strength - he's a natural, even for a series which regularly takes naturalism to depressing extremes.
Across the band of character types, common to almost all soaps, it's intriguing that rogue males should feature so prominently. Though there are arguably sexist overtones - pandering to predominantly female audiences - in such depictions, there are also other factors. Every drama needs a baddie (even The Sound of Music had Nazis) but the structure of soap is such that, because they are particularly engaging obstacles to the desired fulfilment of the good folk, rogues are likely to be abused through overuse.
In episode upon teeming episode (more than 200 a year in the case of Coronation Street) the good must battle against life's vicissitudes. In reality, of course, most such battles are pure tedium, the stuff of utter ordinariness, and, as such, are the antithesis of drama. But in soap, as in all fiction, character can make even mundanity compelling and few characters are as compelling as the sharply written rogue. So Jack, Greg, Ray and Grant provide the touch of evil necessary to engage an audience while providing a morality play.
Over a Christmas in which sophisticated electronic toys featured more than ever before, the traditionalism of the stories told by television pointed at one of the major dilemmas now facing the medium. The technology, like the technology for toys, is racing ahead at a staggering rate. Satellite channels are well established and digital broadcasting is on its way. But content - meaningful content - just cannot keep pace with technology. So, tried and tested soaps with tried and tested story-lines topped the bill. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
BBC 2, the best documentary channel, decided to run a two and a half hour profile of Brian Epstein over Christmas and St Stephen's nights. "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian," said Paul McCartney of the band's legendary manager. Arena: The Brian Epstein Story was big biography and yet it never quite distilled the essence of Epstein. It used sources, anecdotes and especially archive footage very well and yet it really only added detail - no piercing illumination - to its subject.
Most people of a certain age are familiar with the bones of the Epstein story: Liverpudlian; merchant class; Jewish; arty; gay; may have had a fling in Spain with John Lennon; killed himself in 1967 when The Beatles were at the height of their pomp. Arena fleshed out these and other bones but appeared to decide (or felt unable but to conclude) that Epstein as enigma was the heart of the matter. Perhaps it was but that's never very satisfactory.
However, in terms of technique, it was a splendid touch to show old Beatlemania footage (Liverpool, London, New York) to the sounds, not of the usual "She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah", but to the music which Epstein liked: classical, jazz, musicals. It made the point, too, that while The Beatles may have made the music, Epstein, in large degree, made The Beatles. His consciousness about style (he had hoped to become a dress designer), his class confidence (he was wealthy to begin with and talked proper) and his business breakthroughs in pop (first to crack the American pop market and first to introduce stadium gigs) have probably been underestimated in mythology surrounding The Beatles.
Perhaps the documentary's strongest line was the recurring point that back in 1960s Britain, the term was "queer" not "gay". A number of contributors said as much, intimating that the dominant attitudes of the Swinging Sixties may have been responsible for Epstein's swinging moods. The inquest verdict on his death says that he died from an accidental overdose. Popular belief has always held that it was suicide. That enigma, like the enigma of why bullfighters were his idols, remained unsolved.
Television did not provide a particularly amusing Christmas 1998 for some of us (see below). But the comedy of This Bloke Walks Into a Bar and Apres Match Christmas Special had their moments. The former focused on the relationship between stand-up comedians and the alcohol which regularly turns them into fall-down tragedians. By all accounts, it is often a deep and meaningful relationship.
Certainly the yarns were generally more self-deprecating than the hellishly boring "professional hell-raiser" guff beloved of the luvvie set. There was the whiff of puke and the discomfort of dry retching about the best of them. Mind you, a number of contributors were really Beezer Homes League drinkers, their tales of excess little more than back-slapping, teenagers-on-cider triumphalism. But Owen O'Neill's three-day blackout was Premiership play, all right. In truth, it was anything but funny, but it was still hard not to laugh, albeit guiltily.
The running gag of Apres Match: A Christmas Special saw Frank being sent for the booze for Bill's party only to fall asleep and get locked into an off-licence. Most of the sketches were repeats from the World Cup, but the caricaturing of football pundits can score even on the rebound. Barry Murphy, Gary Cooke and Ristard Cooper have given home-produced television comedy a genuine Premiership team with this carry-on.
They must, however, strengthen their squad of caricatures for the coming season. Surely, GAA pundits are not beyond them? Michael Lyster as a sermonising Redemptorist; Ger Loughnane as a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist; Marty Morrissey as a heavy-metal rock god . . . whatever it takes. Then there's current affairs and chat-show hosts and newsreaders - sport for all, if the lads have the inclination and RTE has the courage to let them at it.
Anyway, along with a deluge of soap, it was a Christmas of wind and rain. Perhaps the Met Office crowd rigged it all in protest at RTE's promised weather babes. Whatever the case, St Stephen's Day began my debacle. Gales banjaxed the MMDS receiver on the roof and power surges destroyed a decoder box and a video machine. Nice, eh? The ultimate TV zapper! Not that it seemed so important at the time - you know, when the heating system packs in with temperatures hovering around zero and the electricity finally fizzles out completely, television is seen for the luxury/nuisance it actually is.
After a second battering on Tuesday (electricity cut again!) it was probably as well that the intervening weather prevented Cablelink from fixing the original mess. As I write, I have Irish channels only. If the soaps have resolved any of their rogue males plot-lines, blame the rogue weather for my being in arrears of developments. Not all three-day blackouts are self-inflicted.