TV Review: It was, as the RTÉ report put it, a "monumentous" day. It must have been, because by Wednesday night Sky News was once again running lengthy ad breaks, writes Shane Hegarty.
For three weeks, the commercials had been pushed aside in favour of rolling pictures of battle and bombing and a Baghdad skyline cowering under air strikes. Now, the pictures were of statues being torn from plinths, and the schedules were once again lubricated with snake oil.
Finally, the story seemed to have ended before it had peaked. It took everyone by surprise, coming as a polite cough that interrupted Kilroy and Trisha and the usual early-morning ephemera. On Sky News, Richard Chater roamed the city, greeting the marines with such gratitude that Fox News, a station whose news anchors sport stars-and-stripes underwear, adopted him as one of theirs and carried his pictures in place of their own.
Only the day before, Chater had broken down during one live report as he described the shelling of the Palestine Hotel. He now looked like a guy who had been rewarded with a pass home. He spotted a marine unfolding the stars and stripes from his tank.
"Get that flag going!" yelled a cheerleading Chater.
Marines gathered round for some holiday snaps. "That's great," Chater sighed.
He interviewed as many as he could.
"What towns have you come through?" he asked one.
"I can't remember the names of the cities. They're too difficult for me," came the reply.
Meanwhile, Richard Downes appeared live in the Dublin studio, and you felt terribly sorry for him.
"It's good to see you home safe and well," said Bryan Dobson. It is, and Downes remained remarkably stoic given that he had left his front-row seat only two days before Baghdad fell. The plane carrying history must have passed him as he headed in the opposite direction.
The war is not over, but it sure felt like it. It has been a tough month for reporters, dodging shells and propaganda, but the fact is that television likes war. Ratings jump. Reputations are made. Television prefers action, and peace has nowhere near the number of explosions. It is less than 18 months since Afghanistan turned the world's head, since marines marched into Kabul behind John Simpson. Its deserts teemed with reporters in flak jackets, its ground was trampled by a fleet of satellite trucks. Now, you can watch many hours of television without realising the country ever existed. Afghanistan is yesterday's chip paper.
In Baghdad this week the narrative got its ending. Everything that follows will be treated as epilogue. The camera crews and reporters will drift away.
The satellite trucks will pack up and head elsewhere. Once again, there are ads for chocolates and mobile phone ring tones and CDs that are not available in any shops. Soon there will be room in the bulletins to have a look at what's happening in the rest of the news. The sports reports will return. So will the funny little stories that send you to bed with a smile.
TV3's latest documentary in the Matters of Fact strand was Young Dubliners. It briefly featured Glen Hansard of The Frames, a man who has been young in Dublin through about three generations now. "Dublin is a teenage girl," he said. "She's going through a phase when she's not that cool. She sort of has a fixation with her big sister, who might be London."
It was a good line, and early in the film. It turned out, however, to be a spark from a damp match.
Young Dubliners featured a handful of the capital's young things, but prised open neither a generation nor a city. Dublin came across as a town empty of traffic and its citizens empty of personality. A smart, flowing style was intended to reflect a generation's attitude, but instead only deflected from its lack of substance. There was no sense of context or of texture. Apart from one refugee, there was no interest in the city's underclass. Dublin is weighed down with junkies and the homeless, but this film was not.
It was also overly obsessed with this generation's attitude to Catholicism, something perhaps explained by the fact that it was a co-production with French television. Viewers in France will be baffled. Has Ireland changed so much that it has wiped clean a city's character? It hasn't, but if this were all the evidence available, you could be fooled. The future's so bland, I gotta wear beige.
TV3 is far from the point at which its every touch enriches an idea. On Tuesday night, it showed Real Madrid v Manchester United, the kind of sporting evening to bristle the hairs on the back of Jack Charlton's comb-over. Let's go now to the TV3 studio, from where Packie Bonner and Kevin Moran are broadcasting live from inside a glacier.
It is advisable to watch the TV3 coverage wearing thermals and a padded coat. The set is ice-blue. Words echo in the chamber. It somehow cools the most heated of situations. Compared to the ITV coverage, the colours seem blanched and the sound dampened. It is not warmed by the commentators. Packie Bonner always looks like he's had to stoop to fit into the building. He was a marvellous goalkeeper, but as a presenter he stays rooted to the spot.
"The atmosphere is electric," was his promise, but he delivered the line as if reading the instructions on a flatpack.
Out in the field, Trevor Welch comes from the commentary school that teaches "if you have nothing good to say, then just say anything".
Non-sequiturs flowed with the goals. "There are going to be a lot of intriguing battles here tonight. Zidane one of them, of course. Keane another," mused Welch.
Beside him in the commentary box was John Toshack, a man who used to manage Real Madrid, but who had all his passion confiscated at the airport departure lounge. He commentates from somewhere deep in that twilight between waking and sleeping. His words are heavy bodies being dragged to a pit. For much of the match, Toshack seemed concerned primarily with counting the number of chances each team had had. And then counting them again. He offers a sober self-control to the pumped-up thrills of a magnificent sporting event. On Tuesday his monotone was interrupted only by the odd jolt to his larynx at a moment of high action.
"Wooh," he murmured at a Real shot. "Woah," he muttered when they scored their second goal, although he may have momentarily lost his balance in the commentary box.
Channel 4, of course, has long passed the point where its touch is sometimes the only factor that keeps a programme above water. 40 was absurd melodrama, heavily stylised and reliant on time tricks to disguise the shallowness at its heart. And yet, it managed to be diverting, even when one knew it was trivial and predictable. It was broadcast in three episodes over consecutive nights, possibly because Channel 4 realised that 24 hours constituted the outer boundary of how long the mind would retain interest in the exercise.
40 refers to the age of its characters. If television has taught us anything, it's that when a zero appears on your birthday cards, it is always time to sit up and take stock. Depending on circumstance, you either escape your tedious job, loveless marriage and troublesome teenage daughter by embarking on a dangerous affair, or you suddenly confront the emptiness of your top advertising job, sports car and sexual promiscuity. There is no middle road.
Nobody is ever settled happily into a life of Saturday morning trips to B&Q and a round of golf of a Wednesday.
Here, Eddie Izzard, Joanne Whalley, Hugo Speer, Kerry Fox, Mark Benton and Nimmy Marsh played a group of former classmates reunited after all these years, but finding that their emotions and relationships are still only festering, deep-rooted versions of those formed in their youth. It replayed the same story, from several different angles. The upshot was that everybody was having an affair with someone else, but that there was always somebody watching from behind the crack of a door.And that Hugo Speer died at the end of each episode.
Secrets were shed, but not as often as the clothes. The 40s were made to look particularly roaring. And grunting. And groaning. The screen was awash with flesh. Bottoms obstructed the view. Breasts punctuated the dialogue.
Meanwhile, one by one their worlds collapsed. Friendships disintegrated. Relationships ruptured. Those that survived will now go on to build new lives and a bunker in preparation for when they turn 50.