Annual medieval pageant in Tralee does not come up roses

SOME TRULY gruesome phenomena just refuse to go away. Relatively few rural magistrates still fling suspected witches into millponds. Trepanning is now strictly a minority activity.

Confront any sensible, liberal-minded person 40 years ago and he or she would surely agree that, by the year 2011, the beauty pageant would have gone the same way as those medieval pastimes. Remember when those admirable feminists flung a bucket of flour at Bob Hope during the 1970 Miss World? (Okay, you almost certainly don’t remember it, Junior. But play along for the moment.)

It took a relatively short while – a decade or so – for their views to be shunted from the supposed fringes to the mainstream. In 1988, the BBC announced that it would “stop televising beauty pageants because they are anachronistic and almost offensive”.

Ten years later, Channel 5, a station owned by Richard Desmond, proprietor of Asian Babes and Penthouse, picked up the rights. Draw your own conclusions.

Yet the beauty pageant has not vanished. Last week, the nation selected its Miss Ireland. In a few days, the Rose of Tralee launches its Tolstoy-sized sprawl across two days of primetime television.

Is that the sound of a thousand correspondents hammering their fists angrily on keyboards? The Rose of Tralee organisers have always insisted that the event should not be regarded as a beauty pageant.

The competition is, allegedly, judged as much on "personality" as it is on pulchritude. Just watch as the New Mexico Rose juggles sliotars, plays The Fields of Athenryon the kazoo or recites quotes from Harry Potter as Gaeilge. Could you do that? In recent years, the crown has gone to a graduate in theoretical physics and a high-powered New York lawyer. No dopes there.

And yet. If a beast makes a quacking noise and bobs aquatically for its dinner then you can be fairly sure it belongs in a duck house. The Rose of Tralee still invites young women to dress up nicely, parade on to a stage and flirt queasily with a man in a dinner jacket. The format diverges somewhat from that of the Miss World contest – no swimsuits, more prancing to Riverdance – but the rudiments are essentially unchanged. The show bears the same relationship to a traditional pageant as a caramel fritter bears to a deep-fried Mars Bar. Neither will do you any good.

Pondering the show's history, one quickly realises that the prim window-dressing has – as times and attitudes changed – served to deflect criticism from two quite distinct quarters. When the contest was first conceived in 1959, a conventional semi-nude beauty pageant would surely have generated opprobrium from stern Catholic moralists. By keeping the girls properly dressed and allocating each a local "escort", the canny organisers made it clear that all contemporaneous notions of propriety were being observed. It is faintly chilling to recall that, as recently as 2007, single mothers were barred from entering the contest. (It should here be noted that Michael Dwyer, my late predecessor as Irish Timesfilm correspondent, once served as escort to a Northern Irish woman who, he explained, talked only about Coronation Street.)

In more recent years, the focus on career and the talent-show element has served as feeble ammunition against those feminists who foolishly argue that anything sporting an orange bill and damp feathers should be classed as a duck. Put the flour away, ladies. This woman can play the spoons while dancing the Walls of Limerick.

There are any number of aesthetic reasons to object to the competition. The sentimental vision of Ireland so frequently referenced by the American Roses fairly makes the stomach turn. The presentation appears stranded in a light-entertainment ghetto that went out of fashion when Matt Monro vacated the hit parade. The sheer length of the bifurcated show is more appropriate to an avant-garde Russian film about rural electrification than it is to a supposedly harmless embrace of the diaspora’s blandest manifestations.

But, for anybody half-schooled in gender politics, it is the largely unreconstructed approach to the female sex that rankles most strongly. Amazingly, it's taken us almost 700 words to get around to mentioning the Lovely Girls competition in Father Ted.That pitch-perfect parody found the titular cleric expressing amazement that a young woman could walk in a circle without falling over. Unlike Ted, Daithí Ó Sé is unlikely to say: "Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom?" But the very act of parading women before an audience and ranking them in order of likableness – or eligibility or amiability – invites echoes of an older, less enlightened era. Ask yourself a simple question: would any national broadcaster give over as much (or any) time to a show in which men were so presented?

Such whingeing is, however, likely to fall on uninterested ears. RTÉ still expects 1.3 million people to tune in around the world. Oh well, witch dunking was pretty popular in its day too.