The decline of journalism
The frenzy of reaction to the tragic death of Katy French brought radio listeners many entertaining faux pas.
I must admit it. Although I didn't know her from Eve, Katy French's death really made me sad, deep down sad. I was sad especially for her loved-ones, who had to watch her tiny corpse carrying so much symbolic weight.
I must also admit: some of the coverage that closely followed her sad passing made me laugh in spite of it all.
Partly the humour was a result of a sort of incongruity. On the radio the airwaves filled with people who were no strangers to microphones – models, agents, publicists, self-publicists – but who wouldn't exactly be accustomed to commenting on the biggest news story of any given day. (Why French's death was such a big story is a question for another column.) When their time on air inevitably filled up with understandable awkwardness and silly faux pas, we were reminded that, for better and worse, most of the time the radio is populated with confident and perfectly measured voices, men and women who sound right even when they're getting things wrong.
In their place, we heard the likes of Rosanna Davison, who told Morning Ireland that “a nation is in mourning”. That was pushing it. Modelling my methods on some of those Sunday Independent polls, I did my own domestic survey, which included two fashion-conscious, gossip-mag-reading teenage girls and a media-savvy woman, none of whom had ever heard of Katy French before she slipped into a coma. If such people could not be counted among the national mourners, then it seems possible that the “nation” itself might not be in uniform black.
Then there was Adele King on the Gerry Ryan show the day after French died. King, aka Twink, ranted via a mobile-phone connection that turned half her words into indecipherable buzz. I'm pretty sure she was blaming the meeja, the way they do, but she wasn't blaming it (them? us?) for the fact that she was allowed by RTE to keep talking interminably, incomprehensibly, despite the truly awful sound quality.
Other remarks were just a bit unfortunate, like the agent who said journalists loved French because when they phoned her they “could always get a few lines”.
Gavin Lambe-Murphy came on the News at One blissfully unaware that he was shaping up as the villain of the piece. In a classic moment of unwitting self-parody, in the midst of a pointless six-minute interview, he told us he was going to help sort out the cocaine problem by having lunch with minister Pat Carey.
Joe Duffy noticed the lunch remark and “casually” (Joe Duffy does nothing casually) repeated it as Liveline callers sang a chorus of abuse of young Gavin. Those callers – one of them called her “Kathy French”, another called him “Gavin Lambe-Friday” – themselves demonstrated just how shallowly the “knowledge” of such celebrities runs through this society.
That shallowness was echoed in the thin journalistic commentary that passed for the young woman's obituaries. Hardly anyone made an effort to locate her socially with any more precision than “in a designer dress at her birthday party” or “in lingerie on a restaurant table”. I heard hours of discussion, but it was four days after she died before I heard, in the Radio 1 newspaper review, where she had gone to school.
The year of the French underlines how for many of its practitioners journalism has been reduced to a game. A few weeks ago she gave an interview to the Sunday Independent, attacking Claire Byrne and the Sunday Tribune, that played into the Sindo agenda perfectly. (So perfectly that only my respect for Brendan O'Connor's scruples prevents me from suspecting he made up the quotes with her permission.) The agenda? Anyone who differs from our worldview is a misery boots who isn't having enough fun and sex.
At the risk of wearing the misery boots, with matching hindsight specs, can I ask: Is it just possible that Katy French wasn't the perfect poster-girl for Happiness?
A very different and dare I say better era for Irish popular culture was evoked on the Marian Finucane programme when Keith Donald reminisced about the golden age of Moving Hearts. The saxophonist recalled the haranguing that Donal Lunny and Christy Moore used to get from what he called the “folk police”, who resisted the Hearts fusion approach to traditional music.
But Moving Hearts had it easy compared to the musicians who were on show in the excellent BBC Four television series, Brasil Brasil – a powerful reminder that, yes, popular culture has meaning beyond mere, or more-than-mere, entertainment. After the 1964 military coup, music in Brazil became a focal point for popular resistance politics. Nationally televised music competitions took place in front of live audiences who divided into noisy factions – purists, pop-types, innovators – and the old footage from some of those competitions provided incredible documentary material.
On one occasion, a folk-singer, who had previously met with the approval of the rigid lefties who packed the audience, decided to sing a song about football. He was virtually drowned out by booing of such triviality; he got so angry that he stood up from his little stool, shouted “You win! You win!” – then smashed his guitar and threw it into the crowd. You're A Star was never like this.
That was “reality” television of the most authentic, as opposed to contrived, sort. And unlike You're A Star, from it emerged some of the most beautiful and powerful music of the last half-century.