IN a week when Sky Sports packed the pubs for the clash of Newcastle and Manchester United and terrestrial British channels routinely churned out high quality drama, documentary and comedy, you'd have to worry about RTE. The gap is growing and RTE's traditional, cost effective responses - chat shows (in one guise or another) - are looking desperately jaded.
Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny have had almost indecently long innings at this stage. Byrne, in fairness, was excellent in his heyday and can still produce a shimmy or two. But the old master is old hat now - a national institution inevitably transmuting into a national monument. Kenny was a fine current affairs presenter - quick, bright and coherent. But as a chat show host, he's really from the Chippendale school of broadcasting. Oh, he's dazzingly French polished alright, but the sheen only enhances his woodenness. Week by week the grain, as it always does with genuine timber, shows itself more clearly.
Last Saturday's Kenny Live featured Janis Ian (singer/songwriter to the plain people of the planet) and former attorney general Harry Whelehan (reduced, poor bloke, to being a lawyer to the plain people of Ireland). Ms Ian found Pat Kenny's indelicate probing of her sex life to be "like Oprah" and, fair enough, it was - except that Oprah Winfrey isn't made of wood.
Prurience, if it must be accommodated (and in tabloid chat shows, it must), is better served by seduction than by interrogation. Wooden Pat is too gauche to seduce artfully. In contrast, he paid no attention to Mr Whelehan's sex life and was able to conduct an informative, if rather earnest, interview with him.
It's all rather serious for RTE. Gay Byrne will still kick in a few superb Late Late Shows each season, even though in recent years he has had disasters with Gerry Adams and Annie Murphy. But, like that of an ageing striker, his scoring rate is in irreversible decline. Planned shows, focusing on politicians at the aborted crime and the state of the nation programme and on media ethics, have fallen asunder.
The country's premier TV show has become - with notable but increasingly infrequent exceptions - boring. For a generation, it was the one Irish TV programme which retained a permanent possibility of sensation. But there are far too many bland nights now. Perhaps Gay Byrne will get the Mercy Sisters to provide a repeat of last year's clerical civil war show . . . but don't hold your breath.
The reliance of both the Late Late Show and Kenny Live on visiting British soap opera actors (even down to an Emmerdale Farm bimbo, in Kenny's case) gives the game away. The target audiences are middle aged and middle of the road, probably wearing slippers. Oh, Boyzone will come on and do a spot of PR. But Boyzone has nothing to do with vibrant youth. The group appeals to children and to a misguided perception the chronically middle aged have about young people.
Perhaps though, the most hideous PR of all is the hyping of (brace yourself) "the succession stakes to Gaybo". Four or five names are regularly mentioned in connection with these overblown "stakes" and really, the shameless, Hollywoodised gush about "intrigue" and "ambition" and "personality clashes" and (spare us) "major players", is embarrassing nonsense. It's patronising the licence payers too. Look, it's patronising when Hollywood does it to hype actors and flog films. When RTE people (in collusion with some newspapers) start it, it's absurd.
But it's also revealing. What it shows is a desire to apply old Montrose formulae to a changing world. The mega "talking shop of the nation" efforts such as the Late Late Show are of their time and that time, for better or for worse, is over. When Gay Byrne decides to hang up his microphone for good, RTE should let the Late Late Show die with his retirement. (Some of the suggested alternative presenters are, after all, unthinkable.)
Perhaps Pat Kenny could face up to the fact that, while he was once excellent as an information processor, he will never cut it as an entertainment guy. Cheer up, Pat: not many people, Gay Byrne included, can cover the TV presenting range from John Bowman to Alan Hughes; from Jeremy Paxman to Jeremy Beadle. Anyway, the decline of RTE's flagship chat shows and presenters is just part of a deeper illness.
Home produced television (with some exceptions such as Dear Daughter) is characterised by timidity; indeed, by an obvious and often strangling desire not to rock the boat. The list of British made programmes on subjects with more centrally Irish interests - First Tuesday on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974; World In Action on the Birmingham Six and the beef industry; Thames Television's Death on the Rock about the Gibraltar killings - ought to have embarrassed RTE into action. Some hope.
It is no surprise that the liveliest and gutsiest - talk show in Ireland these days is not on RTE. It is on Dublin radio station, 98FM, where Vincent Browne is mowing down all comers with a unique kind of cerebral bull dozing, which Would terrify RTE executives and enthral RTE audiences. Whether or not Browne can maintain the blistering pace remains to be seen. But, at present, he's doing the best gig in town.
Consider too, that last night, Father Ted (the Irish talents who made it, rejected by RTE) began a new 10 week season on Channel 4. It went out directly against the Late Late Show - the future and the past in a head to head. Unless RTE wakes up to the realities of television as the 1990s run out, its future looks bleak. Newspapers have gone to the wall because their readerships have died out. The same thing can happen to timid television stations.
FOLLOWING in the footsteps, if not quite with the rhythmic syntax, of Clive James, Clive Anderson visited New York City and headed for the Bronx. He played the timid, gormless Brit prat abroad a standard posture in these travelogues - and found out that, in spite of its fearsome reputation, the Bronx is, well, pretty average really. In fact, as urban disaster areas go, the Bronx is just living on its reputation.
Still, Mr Anderson tried hard. His Channel 4 chat show has shown him to have a quick and sometimes cutting wit, but the authored documentary requires more. It works better if there is elegance in the writing. Composing the sentences by numbers will only get you so far. On seeing typical, gaudy, Bronx graffiti, Anderson prattled on about home boys painted on the sides of homes; murals recording their extra mural activities". It was the right idea, but it was dreadfully contrived. Clive James has described New York graffiti as "ego from an aerosol".
Of course, Clive Anderson is a barrister and Clive James is a writer. No doubt, the old legal haggling can sharpen the mind, but it doesn't really have anything to offer in the way of developing an aesthetic sensibility. And so, the barrister turned wit blundered on, boldly going, as he might have said, where bolder wits have gone before. Clive Anderson - Our Man In ... The Bronx was watchable, certainly, but Mr Anderson's contribution was undistinguished.
Not that it mattered that much, because the Bronx was quite a star in itself. Indeed, better an undistinguished contribution from the presenter than one which distinguished itself by its intrusiveness. In other episodes of this series, Anderson visits such supposed hell holes as Lagos, Beirut and Calcutta. If the Bronx is an indicator though, the world's hell holes ain't what they used to be. Still, he hasn't risked a wet weekend in ... you know where.
THE most sacrilegious title of any TV programme in years has got to be In Search of the Holy Foreskin, an offering in this week's Without Walls series. Had Christianity not gone soft, presenter Miles Kington would surely be looking at a Romanfatwah for trying to chase down the most unmentionable of sacred relics.
The story, as related, was this 12 years ago, the alleged foreskin of Jesus (a circumcised Jew) went missing from an Italian church. A priest was blamed for the, eh, rip off. Kington never really stood an earthly of rediscovering this relic, but he used its notoriety and the mystery surrounding it as viewer bait. His principal intention was to film a range of weird saintly relics, which included "the bottled breath of St Joseph", "the house of Mary" and St Rita's 500 year old body, allegedly exuding "the sweet scent of roses".
Bizarre as these relics or fantasy relics seem, are they any different from the Elvis Presley wart and toenail clipping revered by fans and shown a few years ago in a documentary about the museum at his home in Memphis?
FINALLY, Equal But Different, Tony Parsons's rant about men and women which formed the second part of Without Walls.
Parsons loves the prose of the lifestyle pages: "new yobs"; "new cissies"; "neutered men" - all that sort of guff. It's a sort of language on steroids in which "blow jobs" and "power breakfasts" meet in the same sentence and take themselves just a bit too seriously.
In the long run, Parsons's plea was basically, that men should be more manly and women more womanly. "When women look good pissing out of train windows, that's when I'll be ready to do some serious drinking with them," he said. I don't know if that is new lad prose, or neutered man prose or new yob prose. At a guess, I'd go for new yob. But it sounds desperately laboured, doesn't it? Its suspicious groaning for earthy candour is nearly as jaded as RTE's timidity. There's a middle way. It's called natural.