ROUNDING on the SDLP's Durkan, Prime Time presenter Michael Macmillan lost the run of himself. In a week so sensitive that conventional (i.e. theatrically adversarial) current affairs interviewing risked adding to the problems it was addressing, hectoring presenters should have thought twice before trying to bully politicians into corners.
Attempting to defend John Hume's suggestion about holding referendums in the Republic and the North, Durkan was savaged by Macmillan, who then moved to ensure that studio guest John Taylor could have no room for compromise. "The IRA must decommission now," he barked. Even Taylor was taken aback by the firmness of the demand. You could see the surprise in his face.
Normally, a spot of politician baiting is not only good spectator sport but is, at least in theory, a valuable safeguard of democracy. Current affairs presenters build their reputations on asking tough, pertinent questions. But there is the matter of tone to be considered. Of course, tough, pertinent questions must not be avoided, but with the political situation so desperately fragile, brow beating of the Macmillan variety is a kind of verbal terrorism which is irresponsible and dangerous.
In much the same way as there is a difference between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, there is a difference between a current affairs "show" and a current affairs "programme". Michael Macmillan is a showman, a presenter who, like a good tabloid editor, can cast stories in clear, clashing tones of black and white. The resulting conflict is dramatic, striking and vivid, but some subjects are not best served by the showbiz treatment. Some subjects are just too complex.
Complexity, by definition, presents problems for journalism. Journalists must try to hold a reader's or viewer's attention, and simple dramatic conflict is one of the best ways of doing this. But complexity presents even greater problems for television than for newspapers. It's not just the simplistic soundbite nature of the medium, but its proclivity for turning everything (even war) into a showbiz spectacle - a nightly entertainment - that can make TV dangerously artless.
It was equally infuriating to watch Jonathan Dimbleby interview Gerry Adams on World in Action. Like Macmillan, Dimbleby was taking no prisoners. He wanted Adams to condemn the Canary Wharf bomb. He was right to want to know whether or not Adams would condemn the bomb, as it was, to be fair, an obvious and necessary question. But wanting to know Adams's answer is not the same thing as wanting Adams's answer to be to your liking.
Macmillan and Dimbleby knew the score. Responsible Irish and British papers were publishing editorials about the danger of severing Sinn Fein from the IRA and about not painting politicians into corners. So, while, as ever, current affairs presenters had to ask hard questions and challenge answers, the question of tone was crucial. Macmillan mocked, bullied and hectored. Dimbleby nearly choked on a cocktail of headmasterly outrage and debate ing society indignation. If this is the best these ringmasters can manage, television is a danger to the prospects of restoring peace, although, in fairness, Miriam O'Callaghan kept Prime Time from capsizing this week.
On Monday evening's Channel 4 News, George Mitchell stressed that "habits, modalities and thought patterns of the past must be broken" if we are to get peace. He was making a very general, albeit crucial, point, but Michael Macmillan and Jonathan Dimbleby would do well to consider his advice. Turning current affairs television into a circus might be good for ratings - after all, it worked for wrestling - but it might well add to, rather than help to solve the gravest problems we face.
DESCRIBED by the BBC as "warm and witty", Kieran Prendiville's new six part drama series, Ballykissangel, will do nothing to break the thought patterns of the English about the Irish.
Set in a Wicklow village that is about 40 years behind Glenroe, it is super light in a heavy handed way. Avoca, starring as the village of the title, looks splendid, but the roguish, Irish eccentrics are unbelievable. This is Son of Darby O'Gill country with generous measures of The Quiet Man and Pinian's Rainbow just to be sure, to be sure.
It was not an ideal week for Irish based whimsy anyway, but there were very few laughs in Sunday's opening episode. Father Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson) is a young, enthusiastic, mountain biking, English priest who; comes to Ballykissangel. He meets Assumpta Fitzgerald (Dervla Kirwin), a cynical, young siren who runs the local pub. The local cute hoor, Brian Quigley (Tony Doyle), has imported a ludicrous, Portaloo type confession box which has a fax machine, leather seats and very noisy sliding doors.
It transpires that Quigley has got the box "on appro" from the Mafia. With "sole importing rights", he sees a big killing for himself when every Catholic church in the country wants one. And so it goes. Quigley's daughter, Niamh (Tina Kellegher) uses the box to confess to Father Clifford that she wants to test out the sexual prowess of her boyfriend, the local gormless garda (Peter Hanly), before she marries him. Assumpta and the priest grow closer and really, there isn't an awful lot more to it.
The performances are professional and the show is well produced. But the characters seem inadequately motivated and that is what makes them unbelievable. There is an irritating jauntiness - even the name, Ballykissangel is not really acceptable - to the whole thing. It's a pity, for there is a lot of talent in the series. All drama does not have to be ponderous and heavyweight but why make this sort of whimsy? It might be justifiable, if it were hilariously funny, but it's not.
A second series of Ballykissangel will begin filming round Avoca this summer so, clearly, the BBC has faith in it. The corporation could, I suppose, be forgiven for making one series, but repeating the sin suggests that it never had a firm purpose of amendment. Following Songs of Praise and Antiques Roadshow in BBC 1's Sunday evening schedules, this is cosy drama for the contented. Wasn't there a sin of presumption defined in the old, green catechism book?
THERE was something unsatisfactory about The Moon On My Back, a documentary on the life of Pat Tierney, who committed suicide on January 4th. This may have been because his story was so well known to us, given the public controversy over the manner of his passing. Certainly, this adaptation of his autobiography seemed quite pedestrian, dutifully moving through his story of neglect, petty crime, drug abuse, writing and AIDS awareness campaigning, without bringing him fully to life.
In spite of what sounded like searing honesty, Pat Tierney appeared to be performing as he recounted the details of his troubled life. Perhaps he was just trying to find meaning in all it happened him, but he seemed unusually detached from his own past as he spoke about it. There was Pat the person, and Pat the performer who spoke about Pat the person.
He was clearly a bright and articulate man but it was hard not to feel that because he was so wounded by repeated rejection, he always rejected himself. Not that he could be blamed. The catalogue of injustice and institutional abuse which he suffered was horrific. Heading to America, after his long lost mother had rejected him, it was not surprising that he began to use intravenous drugs. "Try to love yourself," they told him in a Florida detox centre, but, clearly, he couldn't quite manage it.
So, rejection had led him to injection and he was unlucky enough to get AIDS from a dirty needle. We saw him in Dublin's St James's Hospital. He was sitting up in bed, a large respirator mask on his face. His own voiceover told us that he was hoping to reach the age of 40 in reasonable health. He was 38 at that stage and he hanged himself on his 39th birthday. His passing caused the kind of furore over journalistic ethics that Pat the performer might have loved, but Pat the person didn't deserve. Sad.
THE three part drama, Into The Fire, was, if you'll excuse the expression, a slow burner. Once heated up though, it flamed with an intensity which threatened every character caught in its ethical maze. Written by Tony Marchant, it was, at times, as unsubtle as a Michael Macmillan performance. But, then, again, the decline of business integrity in synch with the decline of Britain's manufacturing base should be spelt out loud and clear.
The plot, in brief, concerned a decent businessman, Frank Candy (Donal McCann), who owns a failing leather goods company. Frank is a pillar of the community - he does charitable work and is a magistrate. After the loss of a big order (Frank had mortgaged his home to pay for materials) he "commissions" an arsonist to turn his factory into insurance money. Unfortunately, a young offender, to whom Frank had given a job, is killed in the blaze.
"Making things is obviously a mug's game," says Frank, shortly before we see his son, an expert in corporate presentation. Frank's son is advising a group of typical business gangsters on how to stage manage an annual general meeting to fool the shareholders. This is a tragedy of principles versus expediency, in which the principled maker makes one big mistake which grows, like a fire, in quite unpredictable ways.
McCann's performance was very mannered, full of hangdog introspection and resigned angst. It takes a while to warm to his Frank Candy, but his community spirit and his agony at having to lay off workers mark him out as a businessman from a kinder, gentler past. Inevitably, there are dangers of sentimentality in this sort of drama, but these are outweighed by the reality that so many of today's wealthy actually do make money by making nothing.
Unlike Ballykissangel, this drama was not "warm and witty" - It began cold, but relentlessly heated up into an inferno. Perhaps there were just too many lines dripping with meaning and a lighter touch could have taken some of the unsubtlety out of it. But it reflected the mood of a depressing week.