Television: World war heroes and asbo zeros

While RTÉ One's War Stories featured dignified accounts of young Irish men who fought during the second world war, Sky One scraped the bottom of the TV barrel with Asbo Fever

There is an old story about two Irish crew members of an RAF bomber plane over Berlin in 1944. They were from different sides of the Civil War divide and were having a vicious argument about the merits of Eamon de Valera. As they dodged the flak and prepared to discharge their bombs, one shouted at the other: "Say what you like about Dev, but at least he kept us out of this."

Archetypal it probably is, but it sums up the contradiction of Irish attitudes during that war, which have been explored in books like Robert Fisk's In Time of War and Brian Girvin's The Emergency. As the Irish Press was assuring readers that nothing happening to Jews in Europe was worse than what was happening to Northern Catholics, and Frank Aiken was agreeing with the Portuguese dictator Salazar that, amid the devastation in Europe, the real victims were "the neutrals who were paying for the war", thousands of young Irish men were enlisting on the Allied side.

There were myriad reasons for doing so, from poverty to idealism to a quest for adventure and escape from the censored bleakness of Ireland. Their numbers have never been clearly established, although in 1943 someone as pragmatic as Sean Lemass felt there might be 100,000 in the British forces.

What is certain is that for decades many felt inhibited about speaking of their experiences, which makes War Stories (RTÉ One, Friday) all the more interesting in presenting, in their own words, the experiences of Irish people who fought on the Allied side.

In February of last year Léargas presented an excellent documentary, Neutral at Sea, which focused on the sailors of small Irish ships – like my own father – who risked (and often lost) their lives to bring vital supplies to Ireland during the second world war. It vividly conjured the sense of entrapment at being stalked by a torpedo-carrying submarine, when your only protection was a tricolour painted on the hull.

This week's War Stories complemented that programme with its accounts of Irish people who risked their lives on Allied ships during the same war. They were stories overdue in the telling, recounted with simple dignity.

Ten minutes into Asbo Fever (Sky One, Saturday), my son turned to me with the innocence of youth and said, "I hope to God that we are the only people in the world watching this, and we are only doing so because we have to."

But sadly there is a whole sub-species of humanity who simply cannot get enough fly-on-the-wall documentaries about people with asbos. Having given us kids with asbos, neighbours with asbos and old-age pensioners with asbos, this week Sky gave us pigs with asbos.

Asbo Fever featured the adventures of a group of pigs with the uncanny ability to dig their way out of any barbed wire encampment, adding a new meaning to the term "free range" by running amuck in nearby gardens. A woman with a blacked-out face talked about her fear of seagulls and a man got an asbo for complaining about his neighbour's 12 dogs' barking.

Asbo Fever is the sort of programme that makes inane television look intelligent. Indeed it makes the test card look intelligent. Depressingly, it probably pulls in 10 times more viewers than War Stories.

Thankfully they have not yet started issuing asbos for assaults on plastic water bottles or Steve Staunton would feature in a Sky One documentary. For now, the only commentators on his misdemeanours were Messers Giles, Dunphy and Brady looking thoroughly miserable on European Championship Qualifier (RTÉ Two, Saturday).

But, there again, you may have noticed that the only ex-footballer to ever look happy on television is Pele – and he is sponsored by Viagra.