Sexual transmissions

Dermot Bolger looks at the great, the graphic and the gratuitous on the box this week

Thanks to the joys of laptop technology, I am writing this on a train speeding through France on route from a highly obscure conference on Irish and Welsh literature. Every station seems to have advertising billboards for the excellent and tautly-paced writer Douglas Kennedy, who used to be the administrator of the Peacock Theatre in the 1980s when Ireland (and indeed Douglas Kennedy) was poor. In that decade, a schoolmate of mine ventured as far as Berlin, where the first graffiti he saw on the Berlin Wall read "Micko was here. Finglas West Rules OK". I need to resist a strong urge at present not to jump out at every French train station and scrawl on the nearest wall, "Pure Mule will be here. Eugene O'Brien Rules OK".

Because to put it simply, Pure Mule, which ended with a repeat showing on Sunday night (RTÉ2, 11.40am) is among the best pieces of television ever made in Ireland. If it had a landmark equivalent in the UK, it probably would be The Boys from the Black Stuff, which is praise indeed. I know that I already mentioned the first episode and television columnists rarely refer back to previous material, but the opening episode was so good that my fear was that it would dip in intensity after that. Looking back over the series, this has not been the case. The scripts have been consistent. Every single performer (from the brilliant Dawn Bradfield, Tom Murphy, Garrett Lombard and new talents like Charlene McKenna to the magnificently complex Gary Lydon as the Bomber) has been absolutely top class and at no stage did the directors, Charlie McCarthy and Declan Recks, or producers, David Collins and Ed Guiney, lose their nerve, weaken their resolve or strike false notes. This series is sure to travel and reveal a different side of Ireland to an international television audience, stripped of the sort of clichés that foreign investment imposed (in a rare bit of wrong-footing for Jim Sheridan) in, say, the film version of The Field.

Pure Mule will stand the test of time, along with a very small group of Irish television productions, stretching back to Brian Mac Lochlainn's A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton in the 1960s. There is talk of a second series. Any cast members temporarily unemployed in the meantime need not use the old excuse that they are "resting". They should merely say that they are "drying out".

Every Monday morning, as an increasing number of young people dry out and try to piece together their weekend, they learn to grapple with a lot of new, multi-syllable words, such as gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia. On Channel 4 last weekend, they were showing – for only the seven hundredth time this year – their 100 Greatest Sexy Moments (Sunday, 9pm). Around the time they reached No 55 – the full frontal sexual mayhem of the 1973 film Don't Look Now (which was narrowly pipped for No 54 slot by Nigella Lawson's cookery programmes), on BBC1 they were showing an operation theatre camera image of the inside of a diseased vagina that brought a new meanings to the term 'close up' and had squeamish viewers shouting out the name of the aforementioned 1973 film.

Admittedly, the BBC probably had low viewer figures, as they don't seem to understand the modern way to title programmes. To maximise its audience Panorama (Sunday 10.15pm) should really have been entitled 100 Greatest Sexually Transmitted Diseases. But Panorama didn't do jokes, because health clinics in Britain are sinking under the pressure of an epidemic of sexual diseases. The most high-profile is HIV, with which 7,000 Britons are infected every year and from which 500 die. But in an age where less than 1 per cent of Britons lose their virginity to their eventual life partners, and where everyone strongly believes in safe sex when sober (and nobody is sober for long at weekends), it is as easy to get a sexually transmitted disease in Britain as it is difficult to get treated for it.

Under New Labour, sexual health ceased to be a national health priority. Now every Monday in the UK it is a battle of the phone lines, with three quarters of a million young people a year battling to get through to clinics that are generally booked out for the coming week. By the time Channel 4's countdown had reached Buffy The Vampire Slayer (no, I don't understand it either), Panorama was showing a young girl in tears in a hospital bed being told that, due to having contracted chyamdia, her tubes no longer worked and she would only ever conceive a child by IVF treatment. One suspects that a Prime Time report on the same subject in Ireland would be equally informative. For a title, they could steal the remark of one forlorn girl staring around at the late-night mayhem on a London street and asking, "Where has all the dating gone?"