Thanks to Team Anna for this dose of reality
Why Girls Quit Sport RTÉ2, Thursday
Ireland’s Rich List
RTÉ One, Monday
Prime Time: RTÉ Investigates
RTÉ One, Tuesday
We are slap bang in the middle of silly season. The football has ended, the Games have yet to begin, and the TV schedulers are stuffing the summer doldrums with more filler than you’d find on the face of a Beverly Hills matron.
On Tuesday at 8.35, BBC1 showed the Sandra Bullock/George Clooney film Gravity, and I can’t remember the last time that channel showed a movie in prime time on a weeknight. Mind you, it also reminded me of the greatest joke ever told at an awards ceremony. Hosting the Golden Globes (and spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it), Tina Fey described it thus: ‘It’s the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.’
Most of the summer programming is made up of repeats, which seems pointless when there are so many ways to catch up on streaming services. Thanks, then, go to RTÉ for providing original factual programming, the best of which was Anna Geary’s new two-parter, Why Girls Quit Sport. The title was a little misleading, because this is in the mien of Davy Fitzgerald’s Davy’s Toughest Team, which sought to train disadvantaged and troubled young men to climb to Mount Everest base camp.
Thanks to the pandemic, they ended up climbing Carrauntoohill, but Geary’s ambitions were a little more modest and relatable. She wanted to convince girls at a secondary school in Dublin’s Ringsend to take up Gaelic football, since most of them had given up physical activity after leaving primary.
Why this is so common seems to be down to social media, which so often portrays body image as impossible to achieve without a lot of airbrushing. My heart slumped to my boots when one girl lamented the fact that she never would look like Kendall Jenner, which leads me to think that schools should have a module explaining why even Kendall Jenner doesn’t look like Kendall Jenner.
Another girl neatly summarised the generation gap, explaining that parents didn’t understand teenagers because there was nothing in their day to keep in touch outside of school, ‘but we have Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok and Twitter’. Another said that when school was over, all she wanted to do was get home to watch Love Island, a reality show that also projects an altered version of what the human body looks like. The thought of it is depressing, but that’s our world nowadays.
Undaunted, Geary quickly identified leaders within the group, though their classmates probably would call them ‘influencers’. The girls formed a team and were all set to play their first match when Covid first struck last March. The concluding episode this Thursday sees them changing the plan to run a marathon instead, and I’ll be fascinated to see how they get on, because they’re a lively and funny bunch of children and I’m already invested in them.
As an interesting aside, I took to social media afterwards to see what people were saying and one anonymous account accidentally illustrated why many girls probably do quit sport. Addressing Geary directly, the person posted: ‘Why do you wear so much eye makeup?’ We have a long way to go.
Ireland’s Rich List did a runthrough of the wealthiest people from Connacht and Ulster, and the big eye-opener was the winners and losers of the pandemic. One West of Ireland company that makes PPE saw its value rise by millions, while many other sectors slumped in value because of the likes of construction shutdowns.
There’s a certain fascination in seeing people do well for themselves, but the Rich List programme feels like it would be more at home in a different era. With so many workers still on the PUP, I can’t imagine how watching others actually increase their wealth in this period would induce anything beyond blind rage.
There was plenty of that around on Tuesday night when RTÉ Investigates exposed local councillors who were double-claiming expenses. One even summoned the power of bilocation to be in Europe and Ireland at the same time.
When challenged, it was, they said, an oversight.
Seemingly, there is no need to vouch expenses – the system runs on self-declaration. That’s an extraordinary state of affairs, and one unrecognisable to anyone who’s ever had to file a tax return and account for every cent spent.
But this is the Ireland of little accountability and no consequence. Knuckles are rapped and then everything goes back to how it was, and in the meantime, children who could be encouraged to play more sport are deprived in many cases of the facilities they need to do so.
We can only hope the next generation puts those phones down, gets match fit, and changes things for themselves… and for all of us.