Fergal Keane's Forgotten Britain (BBC 1, Sunday and Monday)
All Or Nothing (Network 2, Monday)
Dot.what? (RTE 1, Monday) (RTE 1, Sunday)
20/20: Vanished (TV3, Wednesday)
When television trawls through poverty, unemployment, drugs, despair and urban decay, focus should be maximised on the story. The inclusion of the reporter's name in the title of Fergal Keane's Forgotten Brit- ain was, at best, unnecessary and, arguably, distastefully vain. The sink estates have little enough without media people hogging the show. Indeed, the title's paradox of promoting a named "celebrity journalist" to shed light on "forgotten" lives inched it towards being a "show". In so doing, it provided a dark, if apt, irony.
Fair enough, the reporter ought not to be nameless in such programmes. But such prominence - the byline as big as (if not bigger than) the headline, as it were - served to make the well-known even better known while emphasising the anonymity of the forgotten. What can the BBC have been thinking? It's not as if Fergal Keane, a competent and well-regarded reporter, has a particular sociological expertise for this kind of authored documentary. Neither is it the case that his known views on the subject are such that his dealing with it might cause surprise.
Titles such as "Ian Paisley's Connemara" or "Jackie Healy-Rae's Africa" could be justified by shock-value. Likewise "Ian Paisley's Belfast" or "Jackie Healy-Rae's Kerry" could be justified by familiarity. But Fergal Keane's Forgotten Britain sounds, I'm afraid, gratuitous. More's the pity, because he did provide two nights of generally engaging reportage. On Sunday, he visited a shipyard in Govan on the banks of the Clyde. The following night he did a Paddy O'Gorman in the Lincoln Green estate in Leeds, home to 6,000 people, most of whom would love to leave.
Atmospheric shots of a setting sun over Glasgow, its orange light mirrored in the glassy Clyde waters, reflected the truth that the city's days of bustling shipbuilding are sinking like the sun. Thirty years ago, the shipyards employed 5,000 workers. Now there are fewer than 1,200. Keane met John Brown, a welder living under the threat of redundancy as the Norwegian-owned Kvaerner yard sought a buyer. Dramatic tension was supplied as we followed the ups and downs of Brown's waiting in hope for his ship to come in.
Rumours that prospective buyers, GEC Marconi, had agreed to no redundancies brought relief to Brown. But official confirmation was not forthcoming and more than 240 workers feared for their futures. Then the figure was cut to 97, later to 62. But Brown, despite his 13 years service, was among the unlucky ones. Finally, he was saved by being selected to inherit the job of a man taking voluntary redundancy. The strain over, he broke down in tears. The point was made but watching a working man in such distress felt unduly voyeuristic.
Still, compared with 38-year-old Davie McCuish, Brown has it made. McCuish, married with three children, is unemployed and really has few prospects. He "feels he doesn't deserve his kids respect" because he "can't provide properly for them". Living on a pittance, he can find nothing better than minimum wage jobs which would leave him and his family no better off financially. In today's dot.com world, he seemed to be an anachronism. We saw him staring into the Clyde, wishing for an industrial world that has long been washed away by the tide of globalisation.
In Leeds, Keane met 26-year-old drug-addict, Fiona Stewart. Although beautiful, she weighs just six stone, heroin, crack cocaine and prostitution having wasted her. A mugged 85-year-old pensioner told her horror story too. These indeed were grim lives, their stories told with gloomy candour. As straight reporting, they were stories which deserve to be heard. However, given the aggrandisement of having his name share the billing, Fergal Keane might have pondered more on why such widespread misery exists in New Britain.
It's not a simple question, of course. Case by case the balance between personal and societal responsibilities varies. A mugged pensioner is blameless but what of drug addicts, one of whom did the mugging? Clearly there are large economic and political forces to be considered and answers cannot but be ideological. As it was, however, the forgotten Britain of Fergal Keane, though the reporting was fine, might have been almost any competent journalist's forgotten Britain. What was most obviously forgotten here, especially given the subject matter, was proportion between the relative billings of the teller and the tale.
CATCHING the twentysomething bug this week, Network 2 screened All Or Nothing. A sort of hybrid of Castaway 2000 and In at the Deep End, three males and three females were lumped together and given three weeks "to rise to three challenges". For the opening episode, this latest six-pack was handed over to artist Eamon Colman. Their task was to create pieces for a professional exhibition at Dublin's Rubicon gallery. Whether it said more about the dynamics of group relationships or the dynamics of contemporary art production remained debatable.
Visits to the National Art Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art elicited opinions from the group. The most opinionated of the six, 20-year-old university student Linda Murphy, was adamant that she "doesn't like contemporary art" and "would rather a nice landscape painting or something like that". As an opinion, this was perfectly reasonable but the trenchancy with which it was held caused friction. Focusing on the economics of contemporary art, Murphy was rounded on by Colman and some of the less sceptical members of the six-pack.
You could understand their irritation but the gap between philistinism and gullibility is a legitimate concern. Still, Colman had them work on "self-portraits which will reveal something about themselves whether they like it or not". This was a fair premise, but deciding on what the portraits revealed inevitably turned out to be a subjective matter. It wasn't utterly relativist - the experienced practitioner, after all, would understand certain terms of reference. But art as revelation of the psyche is surely more meaningful when technique has been mastered.
Meanwhile the group alternated between bonding and fissuring. Colman had decided that the gig would be intensive and attacked them for slacking as exhibition-day loomed. This, of course, was part of the TV exhibition on display. But it galvanised the six-pack. Ian Murphy, a 22-year-old ex-Castleknock College boarder, who now plays rugby with Lansdowne, decided to "show leadership". This was a seminal move, more revealing really than the self-portraits under construction. Some of the group felt they were being "patronised".
Defending himself, the rugby player said that his sport had given him an understanding of the team ethic required to make a disparate group work in unison. But leaders need followers and the more independent spirits were not for steering. Still, despite bickering, they all buckled down to the task in hand and ultimately, Colman was "happy with their level of exploration". As such pop versions of psycho-social documentaries go, RTE can be happy with the level of exposition on display.
Next week, the six help on a holiday for people with a range of disabilities. Their final task, not surprisingly, will be the practically obligatory survival course. With BBC and ITV currently showing twentysomething dramas - Hearts and Bones and Metropolis - television is assiduously targeting the Internet generation. Clearly, the dot.com world is making ripples throughout the schedules. On the evidence of its opening episode, All or Nothing may make a few ripples itself. Then again, in cramming a week into a half-hour, that ought not to be too difficult.
GOING with the flow of the dot.com generation, RTE screened Dot.what?, a new computer magazine for the "technology shy". In fairness, this is a defensible case of showing leadership to demystify information technology and its jargon. Such is the volume of hype surrounding IT, it's unlikely to explore the exploitative economics of an industry which milks the public through cynically planned obsolescence. But that, perhaps, is another story.
Presented by John Creedon playing the computer gom and Keelin Shanley as the knowledgeable party, this is an eight-parter. It has recruited a Meath family of computer virgins and will follow their progress over the course of the series. As a running story, this is, in a sense, the hard drive of the series and is a good idea. Mind you, the Austin Powers jingle which accompanies the family appearances on screen is as irritating as the electronic burps of a home computer starting up.
Still, its vile economics aside, the emerging dot.com world is a wonderland. We saw the equally vile economics of prescription drugs which can vary in price by factors of more than 10 from country to country. Buying prescription drugs on the Net is a dodgy business, of course, but the price comparisons do show the scale of the rip-off. In much the same way as print reacted to television - partly cannibalising it - television is now reacting to the dot.com world. Such is the tide of time.
A MORE traditional television world reached a milestone last Sunday with the Glenroe-meets-Bullitt death of Biddy Byrne. Struggling for years now, the agrisoap is beginning, like the great shipyards of the Clyde, to slip into history. We shouldn't be surprised. Ireland has become increasingly urban and a rural soap's appeal is diminishing. Still, there are contemporary issues - refugees in Glenroe is a must - which merit attention. But the cosiness of the place, for many its true appeal, cannot reasonably be sustained. The pace of its plotlines, as the pace of rural Ireland has done, will have to accelerate.
FINALLY, 20/20: Vanished. In a week when white collar crime properly stole the headlines (what has happened to the previously blustering Frank Dunlop?) this TV3 documentary focused attention on the growing suspicion that a serial killer has murdered Leinster's missing young women. American-made, there was little new in it for Irish viewers but the topic reminded us that the globalising dot.com world may be spreading more than computer viruses.
This story is so sinister that it must not be allowed to become part of a forgotten Ireland. The gardai will be judged on this one.