Questions and Answers (RTE 1, Monday) Bob Monkhouse On Campus (ITV, Tuesday) Breakers (BBC 1, Monday to Friday) In Your Dreams (Channel 4, Tuesday) Sacred Weeds (Channel 4, Monday)
Occupying John Bowman's role, if not his seat, Vincent Browne has presented Questions and Answers for the last three weeks and has, by and large, been a success.
This week, Browne's panel consisted of Suzanne Breen, Pat Rabbitte, Ellen Mongan and eh, Bishop Pat Buckley. Quite properly, Omagh was the first topic discussed, followed by the US bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan. Given the utter revulsion over the butchery of Omagh, it is understandable that a vast swathe of public opinion would like to see the perpetrators, to borrow a CIA euphemism, "liquidated". Normal emotions practically demanded it.
But what then of the butchery caused by US bombs? Bishop Buckley felt that the two incidents could not be equated. In this, he almost certainly spoke for the vast majority of Irish people. And certainly, only the most cerebral and detached Irish observers could be expected to feel the same about Omagh and Afghanistan. Browne correctly pointed out that Clinton's decision was as lawless as that of the `Real IRA'. Both were not only legally but morally indefensible and this, unquestionably, is true.
It is part of the Browne method to place great faith in the law and that is fair enough, so far as it goes. Ultimately though, the old question of whether or not there can ever be a law capable of delivering justice must be considered. Is there law, or is there, in the final analysis, only power? Terrible irony here: Bill Clinton, who has been genuinely helpful in trying to secure peace in the North, through agreed laws, opted for naked power when it suited him.
Anyway, Vincent Browne understands such arguments very well. It was a pity then that he did not press this week's panellists with the fervour he showed towards Gary O'Toole on the first Questions and Answers he hosted. Maybe the fact that, as a result of that programme, he had to read an apology this week to Michelle Smith's testers, Al and Kay Guy, has subdued him somewhat. It would be a great pity to see him sink into RTE's characteristically timid housestyle when it comes to questioning power. Like John Bowman, the man he has replaced these last few weeks, Browne has presided over an increasingly rare slice of public service television.
With a cliched, scene-setting opening - spires, punts, bikes - Bob Monkhouse on Campus featured the pattermeister among the young fogeys of the Oxford Union. Spotties in tuxedos and evening dresses can constitute an audience as demanding as any working men's club. But Monkhouse, leaving aside his bizarre facial gymnastics, is an old - 70, to be precise - pro and the would-be witty and worldly-wise students never stood a chance.
It was a peculiar programme to begin with. Selected spotties presented Monkhouse with a "contention" ("My contention is that French is the sexiest language"; "Advertising is better than the programmes"; "Flying is the only way to travel" and so forth) and he would have to respond. Bob contended that he hadn't heard any of these contentions before. If so, he's incredibly quick-witted and not just for a game-show host. Chess grandmasters playing dozens of ordinary opponents simultaneously could hardly have seemed more impressive.
Mind you, some of the audience tried their best. "Tell me, Bob, what do you use for contraception, apart from your sense of humour," asked a supremely confident boy in a supremely inappropriate evening suit. "At my age, the best contraceptive is nudity," replied Bob, with incinerating hauteur. He then proceeded into a routine about a luminous condom (his wife reading a magazine by the light of the thing; Darth Vader jokes; moths being attracted to it, etc, etc).
Certainly, his humour was rapid-fire - one quip after another demolishing the contentions of the debating society amateurs. "Why," he asked at one point, "has the word `lisp' got an `s' in it? That's unnecessarily sarcastic, isn't it?" As an exhibition of stand-up comedy on the rebound, Monkhouse's performance was masterly. Repetition, however, made his technique more transparent. It was all predicated upon finding a credible first response to make the link between contention and reply appear as seamless as possible. After that, he just mined his memory for associated gags.
Still, it took not only wit but neck to face down the overdressed spotties in their oak-panelled and balconied lair. As the doyen of game-show hosts (a deservedly much-parodied legion of loud and undiluted ego), Bob Monkhouse showed that there's never any substitute for expertise through experience. In so doing, he proved that even smarm - or, at any rate, the very best smarm - isn't always to be derided. Remarkable carryon, really - but there were some genuine laughs here. When Bob wondered aloud: "What do gardeners do when they retire?" you had to admit that he was the wittiest person in the room.
In stark contrast, the BBC, which sniffs at the game-show genre, sank to a new low this week. Its new, Monday to Friday, Australian soap, Breakers, has the intellectual content of a moronic maggot. Set in a Sydney building which houses a cafe, a magazine and, wait for this, a modelling school, it's all vacuous, teenage hunks and busty, young babes in skimpy sportswear wearing sunglasses on their heads.
A typically castrated-rock signature tune introduced the first scene of the first episode. The putative models were jogging on the beach, having a "good workout". Part Baywatch and part Fame, with a pinch of Lou Grant, it will, like Neighbours and Home and Away, probably go a long way. Unfortunately, it will probably not go the long way back to Australia, where it belongs. It is part of the established wave of wholesome sleaze and we can be certain that it is going to surf that wave until it is laughed off the screen.
Sleaze is bad enough - but understandable. Sleaze presenting itself as wholesome is just too hypocritical to countenance. After the jogging models return from the beach, they go into a locker-room. The camera follows them in to provide shots of clothes dropping around feet, sweaters being removed to reveal underwear - that sort of thing. It's ultra-soft porn, predicated upon the notion that anybody who objects is simply old-fashioned and prudish.
In truth, it hasn't even got the decency to reveal itself for what it is. Teenagers will probably go for it in droves and some of the hunks and babes will probably become pop stars - or, at least, sicken us in the attempt. Of course, the BBC needs ratings to compete with commercial channels. But this stuff is just too cheap and tawdry for an outfit that continues to consider itself "the greatest cultural institution in the world". Oh, it's a form of popular culture, alright, but so too is the Sun.
Channel 4, never so hidebound by having to be popular, appears to be pioneering psychological investigation on television. In Your Dreams and Sacred Weeds are rather uneven programmes - sometimes insightful but invariably inconclusive. This week, the former sought to explain the meaning of Yorshire woman, Sue Heppenstall's horrific dreams. Heppenstall visited Freudian and Jungian analysts and also took counsel from the "Daily Express Dream Team" (which, remarkably, wasn't comprised of Kipling, Rhodes, Churchill, Thatcher and the like).
Anyway, the various analysts eventually agreed, hardly surprisingly, that "stuck emotion" was at the root of Sue's troubled dreams. Along the way, the concept of "universal symbolism" (which, in extreme form, sounds like dream interpretation by numbers) was discussed. With increasing and legitimate interest in dreams, the pop versions of interpretation, with "guidebooks" which reduce extraordinarily complex aspects of the unconscious to a simplistic and unvarying "symbol X equals meaning Y", are a growing danger.
Indeed, it might be argued that even putting such programmes on television runs a comparable risk. But, in fairness to Channel 4, even at the expense of ratings, it was prepared to avoid turning the programme into a psychological detective story with a dramatic denouement. Sacred Weeds was funnier though. Watching people getting stoned on camera is not funny. But listening to academic researchers trying to get on their wavelength is.
This week's hallucinogenic was the nearly extinct Egyptian Blue Lily. Apparently, back in the time of the Pharaohs, people would get their rocks off after munching this flower. The man and woman who ate a small dose of it this week, however, just got mellow and laughed at the researchers. Perhaps a compulsory feed of Blue Lilies for next year's Roses would give us a television show worth watching. The Stoned Roses . . . now that could be interesting, even if it wasn't quite public service television.