IF YOU sit in front of a television set for a long time looking at programme after programme about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, something happens to your brain. It turns spongey. Holes spread in it. A grasp of the basic information you need about beef, such as you get from reading print, seems beyond you. All those people going talk, talk, talk on television diffuse your focus. Your body begins to slump. Fact and assertion run around in your poor head. On Panorama on Monday there was a shot of a cow which, if not mad, was seriously agitated. You begin to feel like that.
Television is really bad at conveying information. Panorama, for instance, consisted of various academic experts, suddenly called from obscurity into the bright light of the studio. One of them was much balder than the others. You sit there wondering what he would took like if he wasn't bald. The interviewer laid into the wretched Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell. Would Dorrell let his child eat beef? What does the child look like?
These irrelevances never waylay you when you're reading a newspaper. But people talking to other people about something is the leakiest possible way of transmitting information about that something. No wonder we're so ignorant. The television narrative leaves us with a collection of random items. Did you realise, for instance, that mice live a long time? According to Panorama, one of the reasons we are so much in the dark about the link between suspect meat and human disease is that you inject the meat into a mouse and then you have to wait two years to see what happens. That was one point I latched onto. Another was that there is beef in such things as wine gums, fruit jellies and mousses. Who would have thought it?
The pitiable mother who had lost a son to the human equivalent of BSE said on the programme. If men hadn't messed about with the laws of nature this wouldn't have happened." But that is what men do, and not just men but women and children too.
Panorama showed the advertised programme on drugs after the BSE scare special. It suggested that all classes and conditions of young people in Britain, from plummy voiced public schoolgirls to disadvantaged Scots, are simply dying to alter the natural law that says that if you dance like a person possessed for 10 hours you'll get tired. They buy the tabs, they borrow tomorrow's energy for today, and God knows how they'll all be feeling 10 years hence.
Maybe they'll be feeling just fine. There is no justice. Or rather Christopher Darden, who blew the prosecution of O.J. Simpson by getting him to try on the gloves, popped up on the box this week to say that justice will be done some day. When? Like - is he going for a re trial? Turns out he means at the Last Judgment.
THERE was more genuine emotion in the looks of loathing Alan Dukes levelled at Vincent Browne on Questions And Answers than in all the Academy Awards show. Except for the moment when Christopher Reeve appeared in his wheelchair. That was both affecting and macabre, what with his taut face and synthesiser voice, and it was a coup de theatre one would have sworn was quite beyond the capacity of the event's organisers. Everything else about the show was lumpen.
The audience rose to their feet and cheered the brave Reeve, but then they rose to their feet and cheered for obscure animators and people's agents and bad old movies and terrible songs and displays of sound effects and weeepiecreepie speeches like Susan Sarandon's. "May all of us find it in our hearts and our homes to non violently end violence," she intoned. God.
Of course, it would be going too far to suggest that television is no good at information and it is no good at entertainment either. The point about the Academy Awards is that they are not entertainment: they are a trade show, a reading out of the Leaving Cert results show, a conferring with badges for tyingknots show, and it just so happens that the vocational group involved are entertainers. But that doesn't make them entertaining. Take them out of their films and they are no more necessarily entertaining than moral philosophers are necessarily good. Though film stars are, need I say, a hell of a lot more beautiful.
We began badly, with some bleak jokes, including one about Hugh Grant and the black prostitute, badly delivered by a charmless Whoopi Goldberg. Then we had Pierce Brosnan, beside whom a concrete breeze block is relatively animated. Then, 15 supermodels got together in an ensemble reminiscent of the finale of our school's production of Lilac time in the late 1950s. Then Whoopi Goldberg killed what warm feelings one might have mustered with another sour remark.
So it went. The drill is someone you thought was marvellous, like John Travolta, opens an envelope, looks into the autocue, says who has won, the camera cuts to the winner fraudulently looking surprised (with real surprises the camera takes as long to find the winner as it takes to find the questioner in Questions And Answers), the winner thrusts his or her lips into the lips of the person in the next seat, gets up on the stage, and thanks their father. At least in The Rose Of Tralee they get to thank both their parents, and often their grandparents.
Mira Sorvino thanked her tat her, who was in floods. "I love you very much," she said. But she also loved her manager very much and her agent and her friends.
I don't mind at all. Let's include everyone in. But in that case why not love her mother very much too?
And that's another thing - Mel Gibson opined, later in the show, with all the solemnity of someone who had just thought this up himself and was trying it out, that "we are all part of one global village." In that case why didn't Ireland get thanked? For the supply of heather, soldiers, Michael D. Higgins and so forth? Why didn't we hear "An' I wanna thank Ireland for all she has given me. Ireland, I love ya very much . . ."?
Keen statisticians will have noticed that the Academy was thanked evens more often than fathers. The homage to" old style values in the word "academy" is touching. Though nowadays, when you can call every jumped up technical college a university, it may not carry the clout it once had. There is, if not an academic, then a genuine craft dimension to the whole affair.
The full Oscar show, not the edited highlights, pays proper respect to the enormously skilled backroom people - the likes of set designers and costumers and sound engineers and screenplay writers. Would that the beef industry took itself as seriously as the film industry, and had an annual celebration of high standards.
OSCAR losers are tremendously good losers, too. They never stopped smiling in that rubbery way. Not so poor Simon, the electrician from Burton on Trent, who consistently failed to win a heat of the Mr World competition in Beautiful Men. He is a large dyed blond chap who lives with his granny and wears a lot of oil under a black singlet.
"People do look at me," he said. "The area I live in, there's not that many good looking people around." Unfortunately, Simon falls dawn on the "personality" side of the contest. He doesn't see the justice of this.
"There's plenty of people telling me I should have won," he glowered, after he'd failed the Essex heat. "One of the judges - he's going out with the winner's sister".
Mr World is less upsetting than a female competition. Men don't get jumped on and made pregnant. But it is still saddening as well as funny to see so many boys take it so seriously The lizards Eric and Julia Morley are behind the whole thing, of course. They claim to have improved personal grooming and all that through their competitions. But I'm glad to say they haven't improved manners.
The ghostly archive film of Miss Worlds having their breakfasts in bed in their tiaras are the height of genteel prurience. Whereas the raucous little birds who fall around the Essex discos with drinks in their hands, shrieking at Simon and his fellow contestants, are more than up front about what they want from the boys.
WHAT television is good at is the human story. Esther Rantzen's new series, Hearts Of Gold, has everything - good, kind people are lured to the studio where they're confronted with the people to whom they were good and kind. I bawled my way through the scene where shy Jonathon was re united with brave Danita whose life he saved, as a passerby, with the emergency care he gave her after a road accident.
But Rita's story, in RTE's Would You Believe slot, was too tragic for tears. Her childhood consisted of "total and utter fear and terror, morning noon and night" because of the sex abuse she got from her father. This was a father who knocked the television off if a kiss came on it.
Rita married a lovely man. When the marriage ran into intimate trouble, and they went away to talk things over, he said: "For the moment, let's take sex off the agenda." Rita wept with loving gratitude at the memory of this gift. This release. But they parted, anyway. And a year later, he died in a car accident
Rita was the only unforgettable thing this week. But she was ill served by RTE. If there's anyone in Montrose even remotely interested in standards, they might look at the dull filming, the jumpy editing, and the unmatched sound on cutaway questions in this programme. RTE has a real problem with jobs for life tiredness, or it isn't giving programme makers enough time to present even simple interviews, like this one properly. Or both.