Meeting your idols

Ancient gods, spot prizes, sports heroes, Irish artists: Dermot Bolger has his choice of idols on TV this week

They were giving away a car on The Late Late Show (RTÉ1, Friday, 9.30pm) with four anxious contestants engaged in a series of guessing games, like estimating the number of body piercings on an exotic guest who was in the Guinness Book of Records for possessing the greatest number of body piercings in the world. This was the easy knockout stage. When it reached the final knockout punch round, the guessing came around to the truly impossible question of trying to estimate the value of a painting by a contemporary Irish artist. As one contestant was Cavan-born and Finglas based – therefore possessing inherent canniness and received street sense – there could only be one winner. At just €1,750 out, she probably estimated closer than many art experts, if the Arts Lives documentary Art For Sale (RTÉ1, Tuesday, 10.15pm) is to be believed.

Presented by journalist Anne Marie Hourihane, this set out to establish, among others things, just who sets the price for the paintings being purchased in the flourishing auction scene today.

Forty years ago, there was a fairly archetypical art buyer – a college professor or solicitor with intellectual leanings. Today there is a huge array of buyers, ranging from those buying directly from artists hanging their work on park railings, to those attending openings at a host of new galleries, like the excellent Hillsboro off Dawson Street.

If one moment could be described as pivotal in awakening public awareness of art, it might be the Adams auction in 1973, which made headlines because a Jack B Yeats sold for the then princely sum of £15,000. This caused a huge stir and introduced what might be called 'big game hunters' into the art scene, each trying to outdo each other in the social upmanship stakes. It led to one wonderful conversation (overheard by the late John Ryan at the time in the Royal Hibernian Hotel), when one rich Southside buyer boasted of how much he had paid for the Yeats and then – as if needing to justify his purchase – added, "but of course it is hand-painted."

Irish art and art awareness has moved on a long way from there, with the Irish art market now worth €40 million a year. In determining value, paintings of women, and especially good-looking women, still vastly out-sell paintings of men, although at least the Victorian principle no longer applies where astute artists noted that husbands would generally pay more for portraits of their pets than of their wives.

Semi-abstract landscapes of misty days in West Cork locations adjacent to where Dublin dentists have their holiday homes still sell best of all, but Art for Sale examined the various factors that have made Irish people more visually literate, including the opening of the Museum of Modern Art just 14 years ago. Big buyers now include property developers and builders, although artists receive little or no instruction in art school on how to handle the financial aspect of their careers – they are often caught in the bind that if you chase money it generally kills the work creatively and yet money is the intimate enabler in allowing the artist to buy time to work. Nicely put together and fast moving, Art for Sale made for interesting viewing.

Fast moving, however, does not even begin to describe the pace of the highly ambitious and well-made Na Deithe Caillte: The Lost Gods (TG4, Sunday, 9.30pm), with its blend of computer graphics and speeded cameras – a nice counterbalance to the conversational intimacy of narrator and scriptwriter Christy Kenneally. Produced and directed by Stephen Roche for Tile Films, the programme cannot be accused of lacking in scope, as it sets out to examine over six weeks the lost gods of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Maya, the Incans and the Celts.

The ancient world was vastly over-populated by different gods for virtually everything. Kenneally's opening statement that today the world is dominated with only one God seemed at best simplistic and at worst bizarre, but apart from that, his brisk and eminently engaging account of the role of Gods in ancient Egypt made for intelligent television. It is nice to see an Irish company engaged in such an international co-production, bringing to life six very different ancient civilisations.

I last saw Christy Kenneally in 1976 when he was a priest and we shared a stage (myself in short trousers or at least short elephant flares). I remember him as the first poet I ever heard tell jokes on stage and he has never lost the ability to communicate.

However, television is not all about communication and in a curious way it was fascinating to watch the ultimate iron man of Irish sport, Sean Kelly, on Tour de France: The Official History (TG4, Sunday, 2.45pm). I've seen more expressive cardboard cutouts yet his words posessed authenticity, looking like they were being drawn forth like teeth. It's refreshing to see a sportsman who still looks like a sportsman and not a polished-up communicator.

The Late Late Show RTÉ1, Friday, 9.30pm

Art For Sale RTÉ1, Tuesday, 10.15pm

Na Deithe Caillte: The Lost Gods TG4, Sunday, 9.30pm

Tour de France: The Official History TG4, Sunday, 2.45pm