Turner Prize Live - Channel 4, Tuesday
The South Bank Show - ITV, Sunday
Underworld - Channel 4, Tuesday
Don't Feed The Gondolas - Network 2, Monday
Modern Times - BBC 2, Wednesday
University Challenge - BBC 2, Tuesday
A video of police officers in a seemingly still group photo (Sixty Minutes, Silence) and another (Sacha And Mum) of a middle-aged woman pulling the hair of a younger woman, who is dressed only in her underwear, won this year's Turner Prize for art. "This was an artist dealing with strong emotional issues. Her choreography gives it a very strong sense, like all art, of being distilled," said Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate Gallery and chairman of the Turner Prize jury. Is that so, Nick?
Presented by Matthew Collings, looking like a 1970s Brooklyn Mafia man - his hanglider-sized shirt collar overlapped his jacket collar - Turner Prize Live gave us a glimpse of state-of-the-art art. It was not a pretty sight. Gillian Wearing's win marked the second consecutive year that a video artist has scooped the competition's £20,000 first prize. The jury further complimented her on . . . wait for this . . . "producing unexpected insights into human behaviour".
That's really great, isn't it? There are always "unexpected insights" (usually into the "human condition", but never mind). But it's all guff. What insights have been produced? If some have been produced, why were they so unexpected? Isn't art expected to produce insights? Can anybody - even artists - defend all this nonsense without suggesting that people who call their bluff are philistines?
Earlier "work" by Ms Wearing includes the piercingly insightful Dancing In Peckham, in which she dances in a Peckham shopping centre to music only she can hear. Then there's a video of adults lip-synching to the voices of children; a video of disguised people confessing their secrets; a video of people carrying "signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say".
Ms Wearing - and her art certainly is - beat three other women to the loot. Angela Bulloch's entry consisted of bean bag-like objects, in primary colours. It looked like a disembowelled bouncing castle and it made irritating noises activated by punters pushing pressure pads. Fart art, perhaps. Christine Borland's oeuvre includes "forensic style work with death masks" and silhouettes of the preserved skeletons of a 19th-century giant and an 18th-century dwarf. She has bought other skeletons from India by mail order.
Cornelia Parker, the fourth finalist, used "found objects" to give expression to her genius. A pile of incinerated cocaine and the remains of a wooden Texan church, struck by lightning, featured. We also saw a teapot which had been dropped from atop the white cliffs of Dover.
"A lot of these artists," said Richard Cork, art critic of the London Times, "seem to be saying `I know nothing'." Perhaps we shouldn't doubt them. But, if Cork is right, rewarding declared ignorance appears to be the name of the game.
It's always easy, of course, to take the mick out of this sort of art. But even if the grander claims for these collections of manifest neurotica are accepted, there is an intellectual thinness about the entire enterprise.
"Is the art in the idea or in the object?" one critic asked. In the case of the Turner Prize finalists for 1997, it doesn't really matter. The ideas were not especially incisive or profound and the objects had, at best, nothing more than the polished mundanity of craft-centre pieces.
"Art is failing now to comment on the human condition (the phrase was inevitable!). It is commenting now on its own entrails," said Cork. The entrails of art - art offal in other words. "The piece of work is the absence of it," said Ms Parker, explaining one of her creations. "There is no art. It's just masturbation - a self-referring activity," snorted Daily Telegraph columnist, Janet Daly.
And so it went: four women and a function, a televised function, in which "interactive quality", "the notion of the art object", "the aesthetic of the macabre" and "it's bordering on philosophy, really" were among the more routine comments. Perhaps the disparity between art and the language used to describe it contributes to the lunacy of these occasions. Maybe there is something vibrant and relevant in such pieces. Then again, suspension of disbelief can only go so far. This was an exhibition of psycho trivia and it was all very sad indeed.
The South Bank Show concerned itself with genuine video art. Steven Bocho, creator of Hill Street Blues, LA Law, NYPD Blue and Murder One, was the programme's subject. He said that his biggest problem at the outset was to get on screen "serious work in a place ruled by ratings". Unlike the Turner Prize exhibits, his prime-time shows have regularly explored moral complexities, grounded in reason and emotion.
Very often his characters don't know how to deal with issues and situations. That makes them real and human and it does not mean that they attempt the sneakily smug, self-indulgent lie of claiming to know nothing. The best Bocho dramas characteristically include documentary-style, hand-held cameras and incoherent, overlapping dialogue. He got the hand-held cameras idea from watching an American documentary series, Police Tapes.
In conversation with Melvyn Bragg, Bocho repeatedly made the point that getting complete creative autonomy was essential for his success. Because of the constant interference of powerful vulgarians, he couldn't hack working in the movies. Television - and even there with great difficulty - was the only place he could get control. It's a familiar story: TV companies, RTE included (where the "independent sector" tenders to fill pre-fab programming slots) have become anti-creative in the drive to give viewers what accountants want to give them.
Anyway, Bocho won through with the brilliant Hill Street Blues. The series had a bad first run but the press loved it. When it won a record number of Emmy awards, its future was assured. Not that all of Bocho's series have been first-rate. The abysmal Cop Rock musical was an embarrassment and Murder One, with its designer moody glossiness was ultimately as masturbatory as a Turner Prize exhibit.
But prime-time television drama has been improved by Bocho. "The best stories never attempt to provide answers," he said. This was an overstatement but the point was made. Art - even an art as sniffed at (by the pretentious) as TV drama - is not produced to provide answers. But neither ought it be produced, Turner Prize-like, to claim that the only answer is that there are no answers. Captain Furillo or a teapot dropped off the top of a cliff? Which says something meaningful to you?
Among current TV dramas, Underworld is one of the strangest. It's a tale of gangland, un-dead people and a disappearing wife, and meant to be a comic thriller, yet it includes such sights as an incinerated Iraqi soldier welded to his truck by an American bomb and a famine-stricken child watched by a waiting vulture. Maybe this "aesthetic of the macabre" is more common than it seems. Including such horrors certainly makes smiling rather difficult. Even the character Jezzard, as deranged a TV psycho as we have ever seen, had problems with these images. He knew they should be shocking, but he didn't find them so.
Shifting between ghoulish seriousness and flippancy, Underworld sometimes falls in the leap. There is cartoon violence here. This week, when reforming-thug Frank Middlemass blew Jezzard's house to pieces, it was played as black farce. Still, for all the mixing of genres, which cancel out as often as they complement each other, there are unforeseen emotions released. Usually, these tend to have a mundane, domestic, family-ties origin. In that, this drama is rather like psychotherapy made monstrously dramatic.
"I haven't been so scared since we had to tell Mum we painted the swastika on the tortoise," says Susan, a big sister whingeing to her wimpwith-a-heart-of-gold brother, William. There's the familial intimacy of a shared childhood in the remark. But, as a comparison, it does not seem quite robust enough to convey adequately the fear people in danger of being horribly murdered must feel. This is ambitious drama - so ambitious that it comes off the rails at times. Whether or not it says anything meaningful about "the human condition" is not clear to me. It is engaging and humdrum at the same time. Perhaps that's the point. The point of Don't Feed The Gondolas is to give RTE a smartass quiz-show like Have I Got News For You? and They Think It's All Over. It began with a joke which depended on confusing the words "pizza" and "penis" and proceeded to include such delights as "arse", "bollox" and "taking a dump". As presenter, Sean Moncrieff is the head lad. The teams were Eddie Bannon and Katie Hannon against Brendan O'Donnell and David Norris.
To be fair - extremely fair - there was occasional wit and genuinely funny footage of a Spanish bull taking the trousers off a bloke who was irritating him. There were also the sublime delights of Offaly victory speeches (and team singing) in Croke Park. But it was not nearly tight enough. Like Underworld, it was engaging in spots but humdrum too often. Unlike Underworld, it can have no excuses for the boring bits. It needs more scripting and a faster pace.
The most artful documentary of the week was Modern Times: Arch People, which explored the uses to which a number of London's 4,500 railway arches are put. We met a coffin-maker, a car-wash crew, a pair of dodgy pianists, wealthy gun-club prats and we also saw a club for sadomasochists. Called Dungeon, the S&M club is in Vauxhall. Outside, a lunatic in skin-tight wrapping staggered around, his private parts protruding like something you might see at the Turner Prize exhibition.
But it was the photography as much as the content which made this one. Made by David Turnbull, its opening shot, taken at track-level, showed a train flying over a series of arches. Underneath, we knew there was a kind of underworld - much of it unsavoury - but the sense of lifting a stone to let in the light was firmly established. Turnbull did let in the light, revealing a Dickensian London, where jeans and trainers were often the most visible signs of the 1990s. Good stuff.
Finally, four women and a quiz show who did no better than the four women and a function. Cambridge University's New Hall College acquired the academic distinction of the lowest score in 27 years of University Challenge - 35 points. Their opponents, Nottingham University, amassed 335. It's not as if the compiling of miscellaneous knowledge is much of an indicator of intelligence. But it does suggest a certain engagement with the world. Like the Turner girls, the Cambridge (so much for elite education!) girls seemed connected to nothing other than themselves. Perhaps they too were saying "we know nothing".