Omnibus - BBC 1, Tuesday
Apartheid Did Not Die - ITV, Tuesday
Home - RTE 1, Wednesday
Stressed Eric - BBC 2, Monday
Short Cuts - Network 2, Wednesday
`Wimp fiction" was Will Self's verdict on Nick Hornby's work. "These are books written for the boys who were always in the kitchen at parties. It's readability masquerading as profundity." Well, to thine own Self and all that . . . but Will's was the only condemning voice on Omnibus: Man Of The Match - Nick Hornby. All else was praise and yet it was difficult not to feel the irony that, even with Arsenal looking good for the Double, Hornby's confessional writing is not quite so perfectly in tune with the mood of the times anymore.
Back in 1992 Fever Pitch, Hornby's revelations about his life and loves in the context of his Arsenal obsession, was the mood of the times. English football, buoyed up by reaching the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup (the ubiquitous, melodramatic strains of Nessun Dorma indulged even "sensitive", middle-class ears), by huge cash from television and new post-Bradford and post-Hillsborough stadiums, was being reborn as showbusiness. Popular culture was experiencing the rise of marketing-led, New Lad codology. Hornby, though too bright to really be a Lad, not only surfed, but helped to define the spirit of this latest wave.
His writing, it was widely held, was doing for men what feminist writing had done 20 years earlier for women. The overstatement about emotion and understatement about sex in female sexuality having long been revised, Hornby's book suggested that it was time for an opposite rebalancing regarding men. Hence, the "wimp" charge by Will Self. But with football reminiscences, imagery and obsessions driving the book, wimp elements, if they existed, were in disguise. "Part of the book had come out of going to therapy in the late 1980s, so it - the writing - wasn't therapy itself," Hornby said.
Fair enough, maybe, even if "confessional autobiography" can't but have psychological effects on those who write (whatever about read) it. Citing Americans as his crucial influences, Hornby further pointed up the animosities between his type of writing and that of the more precious, English literary novelists. At base, it's the old argument between popular culture and classical (or, if you allow the appropriation of the word, "literary") culture. Will Self, knowing as much, admitted to envy at Hornby's much greater sales but insisted that he would want such commercial success for himself only if his books were "worth being written".
This was quite a standard, "literary" put-down - in Arsenal terms, a Nigel Winterburn, if not quite Peter Storey tackle. Roddy Doyle had emphasised the painstaking craft in Hornby's books, arguing that, seeking rhythm and timing, even an extra syllable could rightly earn a sentence a yellow card. The books, High Fidelity and About A Boy, as well as the seminal Fever Pitch, do manage to package introspection, not as an unwieldly stream of consciousness but as taut, laconic contemplations: soundbites of instant revelation and wisdom appropriate for the not-sobrave new world of declining male hegemony.
But the impact of the message, rather like Sky Sports's absurd hyping of soccer, cannot be sustained indefinitely. Already there are signs of football fatigue (an early exit for England from this summer's World Cup would increase this dramatically) and the exhaustion of Laddism. There's grand irony in this, of course: all those blokes living their emotional lives through football cannot but have been jolted by Newcastle United directors laughing at the gullibility of their devotion. Expect a return to a harder, less heart, more head, edge from fans next season.
Melvyn Bragg was right when he told the programme that football changed "for reasons to do with money". Technology (satellite TV with in-studio devices for, literally, more graphic analyses); marketing to the middle-classes and the decline (partly through pricing them out) of football's more lumpen followers, laid the pitch for Hornby to shoot to the top of the table. Indeed, even the "child-within" guff of the 1980s, which facilitated New Men's regression into New Lads, contributed to the transformation.
As it ended outside Highbury stadium as the crowds - sensitives all, you understand - arrived for an Arsenal v Chelsea floodlit match, it was impossible not to wonder about how much light this Omnibus cast. Not a lot really. It all seemed a few years too late, to have missed the crest of the wave. Another irony: even if Arsenal aren't quite so boring any more, Hornby's contribution to popular culture, though refreshing at the start of this decade has, like Manchester United this season, been rather played out.
The alliance between football and literature needs a reappraisal which will do a Vinny Jones on the marketeers. Introspection is fine but obscene political realities deserve bigger boots - with studs showing, if necessary. Such a reappraisal of pop music (the 1960s and early 1970s equivalent of 1990s soccer) found an, albeit partly market-driven, expression in punk. Still, as a characterisation of Nick Hornby's work, "wimp fiction" seems a trifle caustic - even if it comes from a "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll" defender of the English literary canon. Too Self-righteous, Will; too Self-righteous.
The charge of self-righteousness has regularly been made against John Pilger. His authored documentary this week, Apartheid Did Not Die, argued that the South African business establishment has simply co-opted the ANC leadership to preserve the country's capitalist economic system. Nelson Mandela's reformed nation, Pilger argued, has "been slotted into a global apartheid whose only certainty is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".
There is, from a socialist's perspective, obvious truth in this. But journalists berating Mandela for the slow pace of change in South Africa are, to switch sports, on a sticky wicket. Twenty-eight years in the slammer can bestow a certain moral authority. The same principle, on a smaller scale, is true for many who criticise Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for turning a paler shade of green. Global capital, though many may abhor the fact, is the current heavyweight champion. Its dynamic inevitably produces inequities. South Africa and even the tiny North are being ushered into line.
Still Pilger, metaphorically at least, stuck to his guns. Mandela rejected the suggestion that no significant changes have occurred, although he did agree that "people like De Klerk have avoided responsibility". Contrasting the life of an idiot socialite, Edith Ventner (voted by some outfit "the best-dressed woman in South Africa'`) with the lives of millions who exist on a pittance (more than half of the population lives on £12 a week average wages), Pilger made his point.
As Edith swanned around wearing £100,000 worth of jewellery, giggling about being "proud to be an Imelda Marcos", it struck you that such inequalities, albeit not always on quite such a scale, exist throughout the "freemarket" world. Standing at the memorial to Cecil "I prefer land to niggers" Rhodes, Pilger told us that 69,000 men have died in a century of South African gold-mining. It did take some of the gloss off Edith's baubles. And yet the old, Pilgeric polemics seemed tired in this programme.
It wasn't that they didn't tell a truth - they just seemed impotent against the self-congratulatory propaganda of the new world economic order. "Judges who gave apartheid a veneer of respectability are still administering `justice'," he said. It's obscene, of course. But is it worth killing to change it? Pilger did not say, even though, by now, he must realise that gall and outrage are very limited weapons against exploitation. The ANC could not move directly from apartheid to socialism - the "international community" which self-approvingly sponsored the political changes would not tolerate that at all, at all.
Back on RTE, Home screened Home Is A B&B, the second in a six-part, documentary series on housing in 1990s' Ireland. Another product of "the market", property prices here have become reflections of the increasing disparity between rich and poor. Opening with city shots of Dublin traffic, the Liffey and the loopline bridge - the daily-Tiger-in-action sort of atmospherics - the scene changed to a Gardiner Street B&B.
There, James and Wendy Egan and their three children, Nikita (5), Sean (4) and Gareth (2) had spent the past four months. Since the children had burned down the garage of their most recent, privately rented house in Tallaght, the Egans were finding accommodation hard to find! They heard about a transitional housing scheme, which would also teach them "homing" and "parenting" skills. To their credit, they seemed intent on not messing up again, even if the whiff of official patronising, albeit outweighed by their obvious problems, made you wonder.
Anyway, the Egans got their transitional house. The Allens, an elderly couple from Manchester, were not so lucky. Seeking the Dublin she had left 40 years earlier, 74-year-old Kathleen wanted to end her days in her native city. But time had wrought more changes than birthplace had preserved similarities. The Allens returned to Manchester. Home is certainly of the moment, a kind of 1990s commentary on urban wealth as ties of capital and labour accelerate the transition from the older ties of blood and land. Observational in tone, it's good, but a little Pilgeric acerbity wouldn't go amiss.
Finally, two quick mentions: Stressed Eric and Short Cuts. The former is a new animated sitcom, a British Simpsons with a narrower range. Eric Feeble is a 40-year-old deserted father. His wife, having done a runner with a mantra-chanting New Age prat, says things like: "I'm going for a swim in the lake of me". Eric's day begins with him pleading "Please don't let it be morning, please don't let it be morning, please don't let it be morning." It is, of course, morning.
Eric lives next door to rich, successful, Mr and Mrs Perfect, all smiling teeth and smugness. His au pair is a young drunk; his boss a bully; his secretary just gossips on the phone all day. Beside the Perfects' progeny, Eric's children are no-hopers. You've got to root for Eric, even though you know that nothing short of an Uzi spray-job on those around him can possibly change his world. The humour, however, is uneven - hilarity interspersed with mundanity. It's no Simpsons or even King Of The Hill, but if it makes the satire more sustained, it's got every chance.
Short Cuts screened A Soldier's Song, Kevin Liddy's story about a young army reservist. Shot in Drogheda and Gormanston, it featured Gary Lydon as the sensitive Tony Doyle, who must comes to terms with his unhappy childhood and boorish army father by confronting a barracks bully. With army life being rather too raw for the male introspection of the Hornby generation, Doyle has to deliver a head in the face to the bully before he can begin to exorcise his ghosts. He gets sent home in disgace, of course . . . but in triumph too. Redemptive violence - fine for drama but off-limits for documentary? Maybe so. . . but art and life are not so neatly separated.