The news isn’t Top of the Pops, so less of the rollicking guitar riffs
UPFRONT WITH KATIE HANNON
RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm
RTÉ NEWS: NINE O’CLOCK
RTÉ One, Tuesday, 9pm
PRIME TIME
RTÉ One, Tuesday, 9.35pm
MEET THE ROMAN EMPEROR
BBC Two, Monday, 9pm
SLÍ NA MBEAGLAOICH
TG4, Sunday, 9.30pm
The most notable thing about Monday’s edition of Upfront with Katie Hannon wasn’t anything that was said or happened on it. It was the fact that it was, like Prime Time, on straight after the news.
This is so obviously the right time to broadcast a programme such as Upfront that it’s amazing they don’t do it every week, rather than pushing it back till everyone’s getting ready for bed.
The programme itself was less interesting, but that is perhaps no surprise. Immigration is a tricky subject to cover. Erring on the side of caution is understandable.
Upfront’s solution was to carefully balance out every opinion with one from the “other” side.
So the woman who expressed concern that bringing 160 men into an area with nothing for them to do might pose a problem “wherever they’re from” was immediately followed by the manager of a migrant centre who deplored “the most dreadful of things spoken about single males which people think it’s OK to say”.
Back in November, however, Upfront devoted an entire programme to what’s wrong with men, which essentially concluded that members of the male sex need to own and confront their own innate toxicity. I don’t recall hearing much balance that night.
Tuesday brought bad news for fans of Dr Phil as the daily talk show was dumped to make way for live coverage from the Dáil of the election of a new taoiseach.
It was a strange day. Broadcasters do get quite excited by these grand occasions of state. And that’s fair enough, too. They don’t get out much. Whether the feeling is reciprocated by viewers is another matter altogether.
By the time it got to RTÉ News: Nine O’Clock – which will never not be a pointlessly clunky title; what’s wrong with The Nine O’Clock News? – the giddiness had all got too much and they actually played out to a montage of events of the day set to a rollicking guitar riff, as if it was an episode of Reeling in the Years.
It’s worth noting that Virgin Media One’s news bulletins did nothing of the sort, concentrating instead on simply telling viewers what had happened that day – a radical idea, but it just might catch on, if given half a chance.
Prime Time then repeated the cringeworthy error, this time to the sound of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet – echoing a phrase Simon Harris had recently used when accepting the Fine Gael leadership, but which is most closely associated with terminally naff DJs Smashie and Nicey from Harry Enfield’s Television Programme.
It was all a bit silly, in truth.
Had it marked the launch of a shiny new government, it might – just about – have been forgiveable; but actually once the studio discussions began in earnest, the general consensus was that Harris’s first day had been a damp squib, with not much change at all, rendering the bombastic musical backing a tad over the top.
Mary Beard is to TV programmes about the Romans what David Attenborough is to shows about wild animals. There must be other classicists out there who could hold forth for an hour’s airtime on the topic of ancient Rome; but no, it’s Beard every time.
Her latest offering was Meet the Roman Emperor, possibly the laziest title of a TV show ever. Imagine the BBC meeting...
“You know yer woman who did Meet The Romans and those programmes about Caligula and Julius Caesar and other emperors? Well, she has a similar new show coming out. What’ll we call it?”
“How about… oh, I dunno… Meet The Roman Emperor?”
“That’ll do. Right, now where are we going for lunch?”
As it happens, I’m glad they still have Beard on speed dial, because she’s very agreeable company and this one-off film was no exception. She was as informative and witty as ever.
But it does feel as if every history show these days is obliged to follow the Horrible Histories formula from children’s TV.
Everything has to be humorous; even better if the jokes are carnal or scatological. There seems to be a fear of losing audiences by demanding too much of them in terms of attention.
At one point Beard even declared that Claudius’s last words after eating poisoned mushrooms served to him by his wife, “could only be translated as ‘blimey, I think I’ve shat myself’”.
“Blimey” may have been an in joke, recalling Sid James’s famous exclamation “blimus!” while playing Mark Antony in Carry On Cleo, but the truth is it’s clearly not the “only” possible translation, since there are others. Scholars also disagree if Claudius was murdered at all – and if so, by whom
– so stating it as fact surely was an oversimplification.
Breanndán and Cormac Begley were back on the road, meanwhile, for the third series of Slí na mBeaglaoich, this time following the Shannon, playing with fellow musicians young and old along the way. The music is a matter of taste, but always thrillingly done; the landscapes are irresistible; the people they meet, absorbing.
It’s also a timely antidote to those many TV programmes in which people wax lyrical about life on the road in a campervan.
Those campervans are always the last word in luxury. The O Beaglaoichs undertake their magical musical mystery tour in a very basic and bumpy, albeit much loved, vehicle that also “stinks”. This is Ireland, not California. It’s real life, not Instagram.
It’s great craic anyway, and viewers can only hope they keep going until there’s no more bits of the country left to explore.