12 Days In July - Channel 4, Monday
Sporting Press Gang - Network 2, Monday
All Mod Cons - BBC 2, Monday
Mr Tate's Gallery - BBC 2, Monday
BBC 2, Wednesday - Channel 4, Tuesday
Down in the soft, self-satisfied South, we may just think of Faith Of Our Fathers as part of the past, to be treated as a bit of nostalgia. But on the Garvaghy Road, the residents were singing it like it meant something, during an enforced alfresco Mass in Margo Harkin's observational documentary 12 Days In July.
Harkin's film was billed as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, but although she observed some of the conventions of the style, fly-on-the-wall operates on the (often questionable) assumption that what is happening in front of the camera would be happening anyway. What was immediately apparent in 12 Days In July was the extent to which the media was an integral part of the story being told. As residents' spokesman Breandan Mac Cionnaith dealt with the international press pack, it was clear one of the most obvious differences between the two sides lay in their respective levels of media literacy. On the Garvaghy Road the evening before the march, we saw a Greenham Common-style camp with children playing. Later, the same people were being forced off the road by truncheon-wielding, body armoured, black-clad RUC men. The imagery of the unionist side, by contrast, was of youths burning tricolours, of apocalyptic bonfires, and of sombre men in suits preparing to march. While the residents looked like the sort of oppressed civil rights protest group you might see anywhere in the world, the Orangemen looked sinister, bigoted and smug. Someone really is going to have to introduce them to the world of modern PR. The cameras on the nationalist side concentrated on Mac Cionnaith, but there was little sense of the social and leadership structures of the Portadown Orangemen. Three different directors were listed in the final credits, and perhaps these differences in emphasis reflected different styles, but the overall effect was unsettling - when it came to nationalists, the camera seemed to be looking with them, while with unionists we appeared to be looking at them.
12 Days In July raised again the difficult issue of "balance" in broadcast coverage of the Northern conflict. In a polarised community, the public-service requirement of fairness to both sides, however admirable in principle, inevitably causes its own distortions, either forcing programme-makers into a simplistic "mirror-image" portrait of the two sides, or trying to cling to a centre ground position occupied by hardly anyone at all. In this case, it might arguably have been better to commission two distinct documentaries from separate points of view, rather than attempting a spurious balance, which ultimately failed.
Despite its difficulties, 12 Days In July was exactly the kind of programme that RTE should be making, if only RTE actually made real television programmes during the summer. Instead, we get The Sporting Press Gang, which is actually a radio programme with superfluous pictures. This week, as usual, presenters Tom McGurk and Michelle Smith reeled off snippets from the press coverage of this week's sporting events. As radio, this might have been just about acceptable - as television, it achieved that quintessentially RTEish quality of being both boring and painful to watch. There is a fairly basic principle at work here - the human eye reads faster than the human mouth can speak (often), so the viewer always gets to the punchline before the chortling presenter. This has the effect of making the whole process deeply embarrassing. It seemed RTE had realised this simple fact when they took the late and unlamented Mailbag off the air a few years back, but obviously not.
The second part of the programme, a discussion about the relationship between sport and television, continued to ape radio. Five men uncomfortably perched on high stools discussed the issues. That we could see them did not add to the sum of our knowledge - on the contrary, in fact - but Eamonn McCann made some apposite comments about the corrupting effect of pay-per-view technology on sport. You can go one of two ways with all this talk of new technologies - either they're going to deliver us into an exciting new world which we can't quite envisage, or public service broadcasting, one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, is going to hell in a hand basket, and there'll soon be nothing left but porn channels and Oprah.
The history of British DIY hardly sounds like promising material for a series, but All Mod Cons was the unexpected treat of the week, using archive footage and vox pops to evoke an era that taste forgot. The first DIY television programmes were a hoot - out went those panelled wooden doors, in came the chipboard. Wave goodbye to that old Georgian fireplace and say hello to a fitted three-bar electric fire with chrome and moulded beauty board surround. It was easy to laugh, but All Mod Cons avoided sneering for the most part, concentrating on the liberation felt by young couples in the 1950s as they tossed out their parents' dull wallpapers and stolid furniture.
At the end of the second World War, the vast majority of British families lived in rented accommodation, but the DIY revolution reflected a huge change in the way people thought about the place they lived - for the first time, you didn't have to be rich to think of your home as an expression of your personality. For middle-class British families, it took a while to adjust to this new world. One woman remembered how her mother insisted the curtains should be drawn while she painted the drawing room, in case the neighbours should see.
When the history of the rise and fall of British public service television is written, there could well be a chapter on the many excellent programmes about everyday life produced in its last few years. All Mod Cons is a fine example, combining interviews and archival footage to chart huge social and cultural changes through the mundane minutiae of suburban home-building. When it began, television promised to bring the extraordinary and the exotic into our homes. Now, at the end of its reign, it seems at its best when making the familiar new again.
Questions of taste also lay at the heart of Mr Tate's Gallery, broadcast on the 100th anniversary of the opening of the gallery of British and modern art. Unfortunately, this belonged to a worrying new category of documentary programmes, the hagiography, the most extreme example of which is Jonathan Dimbleby's portrait of his old pal Chris Patten in The Last Governor. (There's a peculiarly Irish variant, in which the subject of the programme, usually a semi-State such as Aer Rianta or the ESB, actually stumps up some of the money for the production.) After a spate of no-holds-barred portraits of British institutions, it looks as if the people who run those institutions have decided there's been enough public washing of dirty linen. Certainly, this programme's portrait of the Tate's current director, Nicholas Serota, was glowingly positive, and the future of the Gallery seemed uncompromisingly rosy. A shame really, since the Tate's dual role, as the custodian of British art since the Renaissance, and of international modern art of the 20th century, offered the opportunity for an evaluation of the fractious relationship between British culture and the whole modernist project.
This relationship was presented purely in terms of attacks on previous curators for their curmudgeonly dislike of international modernism.
Lee Strasberg never directed a feature film, and only appeared in a handful, but he's one of the most influential figures in modern movies. Without him, we would never have had Brando in On The Waterfront, Pacino in The Godfather or De Niro in Taxi Driver, for Strasberg pioneered the approach to acting known as the Method, requiring actors to reach deep into their own memories to produce an authentic emotional moment, which he taught at his Actors' Studio in New York from the late 1940s onwards.
In there was plenty of admiration but not much affection evident in the recollections in The Method - Strasberg could be cruel to his pupils, especially the women. Many well-known actors passed through his hands, but the most famous was Marilyn Monroe, who came to the Actors' Studio looking for legitimation as a serious actress. It was clear that Strasberg used Monroe, but she used him too: "It was always that way with Marilyn," said her biographer, Donald Spoto. The Monroe connection gave Strasberg access to the fame and fortune of Hollywood, the glitzy world he had always claimed to despise.
The Reputations series operates a simple but effective dialectic, setting up the commonly-received wisdoms about a public figure, then proceeding to knock them down. Unfortunately, it seems nobody had that many illusions about Strasberg, so this intermittently fascinating film was more biographical than iconoclastic.
When it comes to cheapskate programming, RTE isn't the only one at fault - Channel 4's new latenight series Nightwatch, an hour-long phone-in programme for telly fans, suffered from exactly the same problems. The central discussion was supposed to be about the "controversial" children's programme Teletubbies, which some feel is rotting the brains of Britain's pre-school population. The Teletubbies, who look slightly obscene to the adult eye, speak in the kind of gurgling baby talk which parents have been told for years not to use on their children. More worryingly, they have apparently been adopted by the rave generation as undemanding entertainment for their drug-addled brains. One sad soul, who proudly admitted that he lived on a diet of nothing but toast, confessed his Teletubbies habit over the phone to Kane, but anyone who thinks this is a new phenomenon should check the Zig And Zag ratings among Irish post-teens in the late 1980s. Compared to the Teletubbies, though, Zig and Zag are highbrow elitists - things have come to a sorry pass if even the druggies are dumbing down.
