TV: Breaking broken news
Parodies, non-existent aliens, Northern Irish politicians and Irish islanders occupy Dermot Bolger's TV week
There was only one problem this week with Broken News (BBC 2, Monday, 9.30pm). It was that – as a parady of news and television – the programme was just so uncomfortably close to reality that you had to ask yourself if the comic piss-take was anymore outlandish than the real thing. Now in its third week, Broken News is brilliantly put together in constantly changing segments of tiny news clips. It was like sharing a hotel bedroom with a demented chimpanzee who has gained possession of the remote control. We were constantly hopping between momentary bursts of breaking news and comment from anchormen, weather-people and reporters on location, who breathlessly expose such shocking stories as their 'Look Out East' special on prostitution in Thetford, or their on-location account of a family that has not been seen by neighbours from months and who may either have been abducted at a barbecue or simply gone for a long holiday.
Broken News is not to be confused with real serious television like, for example, Alien Worlds (Channel 4, Saturday 7.05pm). This breathlessly told us that "experts" not only believe that could we could find extraterrestrial life within the next ten years, but that they are already actively preparing to deal with it. Lest we, the viewing public, feel left out of the exciting discovery that we might perhaps one day possibly discover something, Alien Worlds kindly brought us on a 3D voyage into the very heart of the extraordinary extraterrestrial world which scientists believe could exist elsewhere.
This seems a very interesting breakthrough in television. Any old fool could tell us what does exist or has happened, but – looking for example at the miserable results of Irish rugby or the sad spectacle of Irish Olympians – wouldn't it be great to have a range of documentaries with lots of scientific mumbo-jumbo telling us all about the matches and medals we could win? Instead of The Politics Show (BBC1, Sunday, 10.55pm) having the DUP and Sinn Féin bore the pants of themselves and the viewing public over Mickey Mouse present day quarrels, they could show documentaries over the Northern Ireland which scientists believe could one day exist.
Alien Worlds certainly felt it had a good tip off about what this world might look like or what sort of long-winged heat-proof intergalactic birds could hover around the burning surface. Although highly futuristic and crammed with jargon, the whole exercise reminded me of those "specials" which the late, lamented popular science programme Tomorrow's World used to show in the 1960s, about the sort of strange machines and fashions that might exist in the 1990s. They always gave us a good laugh when shown again in the 1990s. Let's hope that any extraterrestrials picking up Alien Worlds from space had a good laugh too.
And poor old Broken News could never parody OFI Sunday (UTV, 10.30pm, Sunday), because it is already a sort of pathetic parody of Chris Evans' TFI Friday evening shows, which were popular at the tail end of a previous century. Back in the late twentieth century, Evans was a somewhat endearing young ginger-haired impish miscreant trailblazing an irreverent, deliberately ramshackle comedy show with a format designed to make Paul Gasgoigne look like a winning contestant on Mastermind.
For younger readers unsure of who Paul Gasgoine is, he was the grown man who danced at the airport when the English football team returned from Italia '90 proudly holding a pair of plastic bosoms from a sex joke shop in front of him. If he turned up on the set of OFI Sunday in such an outfit, one suspects that he would be sent home for being too soberly attired. Nobody ever quite discovered what the millennium bug did, but in essence its chief effect may have been to turn young ginger-haired impish miscreants into middle-aged ginger-haired impish miscreants, which is the boiling point at which what is vaguely amusing becomes sadly ridiculous. Mr Evans had an audience vote of whether they liked playing with bigger "boobies" and then rolled a ten-foot inflatable pair into the studio. Next week he promises to do the same with an inflatable ten-foot backside. If that's your type of thing, don't say you haven't been warned.
The week's finest piece of television was easily Filleadh (TG4, Saturday, 9.05pm) which followed two elderly Tory Islanders back to the farms in Scotland where they had worked as hired labourers 50 years ago, sleeping in rough bothy huts. The two men, Eamonn and Joe, were natural conversationalists who – returning to the outhouse where they had once spent years – quickly forgot about the camera as they found their initials and the initials of dead friends still carved on the window-frames and found their old bunks and glow-lamps stashed in a corner. It was fascinating to see them take possession of that outhouse and make it come alive again in their memories as the packed sleeping quarters of migrant workers. In years to come, elderly men from Moldova and Estonia will do the same in shabby outhouses in Roscommon and Mayo.