True Stories (Channel 4, Monday)
Invisible Movement (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Euro 2000 (Network 2, BBC 1 & ITV)
Ultimate Questions (ITV, Sunday)
Unfurling from a white stretch limo, Snooky posed for the cameras. Boy, did he pose! Over a three-piece scarlet satin suit, he wore a full-length white (with black trim) fur coat. A black felt fedora and a few pounds (weight!) of jewellery - rings, bracelets, earrings and two medallions - completed his sartorials. Three travelling companions, buxom women stretching slivers of lycra to blowout point, manouevred out of the limo, grinned sassy smiles and draped themselves around the posing Snooky.
The party had arrived for a pimps' convention where Snooky was hoping to capture the blue riband award - Pimp of the Year. True Stories: Pimp Snooky contained, as the continuity announcer had warned/promised, "extremely strong language". It also contained extremely strong images and as a vision of low-life high-life in a black American ghetto, it was profoundly dispiriting. There were occasional moments of humour - the idea of a pimps' convention among them - but the reality was sad, sombre and sordid.
Against a soundtrack of rasping gangsta rap, we saw Snooky cruising "the hood". Keen to expand his prostitution business, he was searching for a new "ho". When he didn't call the women "hos", he called them "bitches". Even the documentary's captioning accepted this pimp convention, identifying Snooky's latest recruit as "Mika - The New Bitch". That's not a gratuitous inclusion because offensive as it might appear, it's extremely mild in Snooky-speak, which is basically just a torrent of verbal excrement.
Even Snooky's chat-up lines came straight from the sewer. Attempting to seduce another prospect, he made even such classics as the chancer's supposition that a particular familiarity might be "out of the question" sound like fairy-tale romance. In tone, Snooky was so oily that he'd make the guff of a Rolexed Latin gigolo seem as dry as talcum powder. Really, he had to be heard to be believed. But so coarse was his language that even to record it for authenticity would corrupt not only the writer and reader but would almost certainly clot the ink.
Yet here's the rub: Snooky, by most accounts, was, as pimps go, quite genial. So long as his string of hookers accepted his unflagging and threatening verbal abuse, he sold himself as a pimp with a heart of gold to match his jewellery. Mind you, he wasn't best pleased with Mika and, teacher-like, put her standing in a corner, face to the walls, to chastise her. After that, Mika began, like the rest of his string, to call Snooky "Daddy". The women were encouraged to view themselves and their pimp as "a family".
It says much about the blood families that most of the women had fled. "I don't wanna go back. This is me. This is where I need to be," said a young woman who had left Snooky's brothel but returned within a week. If selling your body to keep Snooky in jewellery and a chrome-laden Mercedes is a much better deal than being at home, you've got it tough. The women spoke about "tricks", listing the `dos and don'ts' of life on the street, how to decide if a car is safe, weigh-up a punter, hide money - that sort of practical stuff.
Anyway, as the gala occasion with its Pimp of the Year highlight approached, Snooky gave an interview to an off-camera reporter. He said he couldn't feel love even though he agreed that "some hos" were in love with him. Bizarre as it sounds, some of them were - or, at least, said they were. Operating as a pimpless prostitute in Milwaukee is, it appears, a kamikaze-like gig. Hence the pimps' convention with its Oscartype award ceremony: grand arrivals, trophies and speeches (foul-mouthed, of course).
Snooky didn't win the top award. The Pimp of the Year for 1999 was awarded to a swarthty, brown, long-haired man in a violently flashy orange satin suit. Then, for a good two minutes, a camera panned across the faces of the assembled prostitutes. Though painted with make-up, glitter and gloss, they had a haggard look. For women mostly in their early 20s and some still in their teens, their prospects looked grim. Cut to outside the rap-throbbing party and a moody saxaphone struck up over night-time scenes of city life: skyscrapers lit to resemble boxed jewels, cruising cars, neon flashing pinks and greens.
Snooky was not best pleased to be pipped by another pimp. He decided to strengthen his team and went touting for more women. Cruising ghetto streets, he tried to cajole some to join him. "Pimp Snooky" was how he announced himself. The aggrandisement, at least as he saw it, of using a job description as a formal title, was even more bizarre than the usual Minister This or Secretary That. `Pimp Snooky' - why he allowed himself to be filmed, only he knows.
He was sleazy at the start but ominous as the documentary ended. Even with the camera running, he raised his hand to beat Mika, before thinking better of it. A truly repulsive man, Snooky and his milieu were so vile that even the peacock-like pimps in Hollywood's `blacksploitation' movies seemed understated. Between sentences which used the word `ho' like Santa Claus with a stammer, he did, however, have some extraordinary lines including the unforgettable: "My momma's more important to me than anything in this motherf***ing world". It's rough it the hood.
It's rough, well relatively, for many people with limited educations too. But Invisible Movement, the latest documentary from Anne Daly, was inspiring. Focusing on the development of community-based education for women, it showed how `second chance' education has transformed the lives of many Irish women in the last decade and a half. From the concrete wastelands of Dublin's huge housing estates to rural groups in Donegal and Kerry, learning has lifted the morale and the prospects of thousands of women.
In structure, this was a simple documentary. A dozen or so interviewees spoke faceto-camera, detailing their experiences with women's groups. Interspersing these interviews, location shots - urban and rural - established mood and context. It was inevitably polemical, but not lamentably so. Though it was a common admission by the women interviewed that they had "lacked confidence" to "speak up" for themselves, they had all become not only articulate but, in some cases at least, admirably politicised.
Mind you, there was no angry, ballbreaking feminism to be heard. But you could see that having learned to understand how society establishes its pecking order, these women would not be easily cowed in future. That was the most inspiring aspect of all. Still, the depth of conservatism, almost certainly patriarchially-fostered, in parts of rural Ireland is such that even these women's education groups are often frowned upon as being, said one interviewee, "associated with strong feminism and politics".
Lifelong learning is quite a buzz term at present and it could scarcely have a better advertisement than Invisible Movement. Facing not only societal impediments but often geographical ones too, a number of women travelled for hours on infrequent bus services to make their group meetings. Some even hitch-hiked in darkest Donegal. Dreadful and appropriated by pimpish politicians as the word is, the real meaning of `empowerment' was obvious in this documentary. Repetition made it less than riveting but it was heartening to listen to people reclaiming the confidence circumstances had stolen from them.
And so to football. So far, Euro 2000 has been a good if not a great tournament. Eamon Dunphy, by times a pundit and other times a presenter, albeit a pundit-presenter, seems increasingly comfortable talking to camera and doing the links. In Liam Brady and John Toshack, he has fine partners with whom to play knowledgable one-twos. He might have pressed Toshack a little more about what it was like to be manager (or `coach', in Prima Liga-speak) of Real Madrid. But that's a mere quibble.
Anyway, much more serious in overall cultural terms is the impending loss of BBC's Match of the Day. Sure, the highlights package of Premiership football moves to ITV. But ad-free transmission, especially in an age when football shirts have become corporate billboards, was a genuine treat. The commercial outfit, offering £61 million-a-year for three years comfortably outbid the Beeb's £41 million-a-year offer. It marks, literally, the end of an era.
Still, its EURO 2000 coverage, over-the-top condemnation of England's performance against Portugal notwithstanding (Paul Ince and Gary Neville were the prime culprits), has generally been at Serie A standard. Ask Apres is increasingly surreal but genuinely funny in spots. Now we face the prospect of ITV, as like Sky Sports, it usually does, tabloidising football into cliche and inanity. That's the market for you. Today, England plays Germany. Network 2, BBC and ITV will screen the match. Which channel will you watch by choice?
Lifelong learning is quite a buzz term at present and it could scarcely have a better advertisement than Invisible Movement. Facing not only societal impediments but often geographical ones too, a number of women travelled for hours on infrequent bus services to make their group meetings. Some even hitch-hiked in darkest Donegal. Dreadful and appropriated by pimpish politicians as the word is, the real meaning of "empowerment" was obvious in this documentary. Repetition made it less than riveting but it was heartening to listen to people reclaiming the confidence circumstances had stolen from them.
Finally, Ultimate Questions, ITV's schedule-clashing answer to the BBC's Soul of Britain. Presented by Martyn Lewis, even this putatively intelligent programme couldn't resist tabloidising its agenda. Introducing a debate on cloning, a voiceover mentioned "Dolly the sheep" before leaping to the prospect of "neo-Nazis cloning Hitler" from DNA or fanatics cloning Jesus from the "Turin shroud". It was guff which brought us from science to bullshit in seconds.
Nonetheless, this was an invaluable programme, demonstrating, among other things, how little is known about the situation of ethnic minorities - the estimate that they make up approximately 2 per cent of Northern Ireland's population turns out to be no better than an educated guess.