TV REVIEW: Does God Hate Sex?RTÉ1, Sunday
An Jig GigTG4, Sunday
Baz's Culture ClashRTÉ2, Monday
IN A WEEK when the BBC's 10 O'Clock Newsshowed Sarah Brown, wife of British prime minister Gordon, waltz onto the stage at Brighton during the Labour party conference, wearing a prim frock (with what appeared to be an abstract aspidistra trailing across the seams), to introduce her husband to the party faithful (hiding their disdain under their puce ties and well-cut jackets) as "her husband and her hero", here on home turf, with far less of a curtsey towards traditional roles and solid, well-tended values, the national broadcaster kicked off the week with a debate about divinity and desire.
God could be classified as either "an incompetent or a pervert", posited journalist Brenda Power, speaking on RTE's provocatively named new four-part discussion series, Does God Hate. . .? Chaired by its incomparably well-qualified host, Marian Finucane, this rather scattergun series of short debates kicked off by asking, potentially explosively, Does God Hate Sex?
To ponder this uncomfortably bald question, panellist Power shared the functional studio desk with journalist Róisín Boyd, Irish Independentcolumnist David Quinn and the characteristically forthright Senator David Norris. There was also a small audience made up of theologians and representatives of various churches. Power, in the spirit of the programme title, made a couple of challenging points and went on to qualify her "incompetent/pervert" remarks by more or less stating that she didn't believe God could be such a killjoy as to link reproduction with sexual pleasure and then firmly tie sexual pleasure to sin, just so that we could all roast in the hellfire of eternal damnation. She concluded that, somehow, God's catechism had gotten skewed by the largely male scribes who have interpreted his Word for us.
For a while, the debate cautiously simmered on the familiar hob of the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards contraception, and Boyd was briskly intelligent in her reading of the Aids crisis in Africa and the Pope’s outlook on prophylactics, basically saying that the church was propagating views which can have disastrous effects. David Quinn argued the case for “no sex outside of commitment”, which begged the question of what exactly constitutes commitment (is it a joint mortgage or the purchase of a second bottle of Bacardi Breezer?), and appeared a little tetchy about being the only one of the four panellists to attempt a positive interpretation of the church’s position on matters sexual.
In fact, Quinn made a pretty provocative point of his own, one which the debate, unfairly truncated by its span of around 28 minutes, failed to encompass: that it is critics of the church who have been responsible for caricaturing religion. I don’t know about that, though – sitting in my car earlier today with the radio on, waiting to collect my son from school, listening to heartbreaking tales of the Magdalene laundries, it seemed to me that the church has managed to damage itself with little or no help from its detractors.
Anyway, the discussion rumbled rather than raged. A Muslim theologian in the somewhat stiffly self-conscious audience told us that the practice of stoning, as a way of deterring adulterers, was largely “symbolic” (though I doubt he’d try out that line on any of its wretched victims, up to their armpits in packed earth and facing a gathering of merciless zealots). The same man also suggested that homosexuality was “a violation of the rights of women”. This point gave me a headache and made Norris harrumph and offer a mock-apology to the female members of the panel, before sharing an anecdote about a couple of gay penguins. Apparently, in some zoo somewhere, a couple of same-sex-relationship penguins acted as surrogate parents to a nest of baby penguins (what is the collective noun for penguins?) after the babies’ hetero-penguin-sexual parents (if you are looking for terminological accuracy, you are barking up the wrong TV reviewer) had split up and their mother had gone to attend a yoga course in the Maldives (okay, I’m making that bit up, but Norris was being straight about the penguins).
Anyway, the point is, clearly, that there is plenty of juice for collective deliberation in the fruit of our religion. Hopefully, the same should apply to the remaining topics coming up for discussion in the Does God Hate. . . ? series: war, the role of women, and science. Finucane is an entirely relaxed and vastly able chairwoman, but four weekly half-hours will merely scrape the surface of our hopes, fears and attitudes about these issues. RTÉ's religious affairs department has brought us some terrific work in recent years, and it should be rewarded for pushing out the boat of inclusivity and openness. Someone should up the budget on this particular party and give Finucane's series the time and space it needs to get its teeth into the soul of the nation.
HIGH-STEPPING ITinto the schedules (oh, excuse the awful pun) is a new dance series from TG4 called An Jig Gig. Yet another talent show which pitches dewy-eyed children against dewy-eyed children and quaking hopefuls against dispirited hoofers, the purpose of An Jig Gig is, apparently, to find the best traditional Irish dancers in the country. Now, I know roughly as much about Irish dancing as I do about the larvae of the white-lined sphinx, and whatever nascent talent I may have had for our national dance was strangled by the early years of my education. I was one of those little girls who skipped around the convent auditorium in my ballet shoes desperately trying to keep in time with twinkling Mrs Devitt on the piano in the corner, while an angry-looking virgin in a wimple beat out the rhythm with her rosary against the folds of her skirts.
An Jig Gigis a somewhat confusing pantomime insofar as proponents of various different styles of Irish dance are all competing against each other to go forward to the next stage. There were flocks of children set-dancing around the studio stage set, there were shoals of Riverdanceimpersonators (skirts swinging, chins aloft and ringlets hopping), and then there was a nervous-looking woman stepping back and forth at great speed over a sweeping brush.
All three judges, two of whom had been employed as principal dancers in the cultural juggernaut that is the aforementioned Riverdance(Dearbhla Lennon and current dance director Breandán de Gallaí), seemed to have issues about which style constituted the most robust example of our heritage. The third judge, Labhrás Sonaí Choilm Learraí, a champion sean-nós dancer who doesn't have a Riverdance hairdo and is a fanatical advocate of the older styles of Irish dance, displayed great excitement altogether throughout the proceedings, and the subtitles didn't appear to do him justice.
His bonhomie (or maith-an-fear-ism) was refreshingly joyous for a show that has been hacked from the bloodied and singed mould of global reality television, so let’s hope his time in the spotlight doesn’t blunt his ardour or dilute his enthusiasm.
“Did you enjoy that, Labhrás?” asked the gracious hostess with the stewardess bun.
“I’d stand in the snow watching that girl dance,” said Labhrás. “Sure if she got any better we wouldn’t know what to do with her!”
The Baz witch project Toothy aliens and a haunted shopping centre in Carlow
Skirting the precipice of RTÉ2's Monday-night comedy zone, Baz Ashmawy, an easygoing chap with the leather jacket and sexed-up self-effacement that are obligatory for television presenters nowadays, got all spooky on Baz's Culture Clash, which this week investigated (well, that might be too strong a word for it – let's say glossed over) the world of the paranormal.
Ashmawy, who is a number of rungs down the ladder from the Therouxs of the television world (reporters who traverse the globe for grisly tales, with only an obliging camera crew and a single disposable razor for company), had been presented with a rather less glamorous assignment. In his examination of alternative Irish lifestyles, Baz was sent to a chilly shopping centre in Carlow with a bunch of pleasant, if pasty, ghost-hunters to find out why the furniture was going bump in the night. He also made for Co Monaghan, to meet a man who looked remarkably like Harpo Marx and who could talk to aliens in rock language, using a high-powered torch. Harpo’s doppelganger didn’t actually find any aliens to chat with on the night of Baz’s visit, but he was able to reveal that aliens are generally humanoid in appearance and have very wide teeth which they replace every five years. The blasé Baz may not be storing up the air miles in this rather lateral gig, but there is something soothingly odd about open-hearted domestic lunacy.
