The Trib

by David Kenny

  Media-friendly sound-bites are exactly what Yes We Can! The Lost Art of Oratory was all about, despite a lot of claims to the contrary. The premise was that Barack Obama had brought oratory back to political discourse, and so Alan Yentob led a pool of academics, politicians, spin doctors and authors (including the crankily brilliant Gore Vidal) in analysing the history of public speaking and critiquing what made great speeches so great. It was a ‘greatest hits’ nostalgia show in which the usual suspects (Winston Churchill, FDR, Martin Luther King) were all dragged out to stir the souls, amid some incoherent theorising about the importance of oratory and a well-modulated voice.

  The programme was really about how Alan Yentob finds Barack Obama ‘dreamy’, so he didn’t even notice how it didn’t have a core argument, and reduced famous speeches to the sound-bites he claims to distrust (‘I have a dream’; ‘ask not what your country can do for you’; ‘we will fight them on the beaches’; ‘you do the shake and vac’).

  Furthermore, Yentob didn’t seem particularly worried by the more troubling side of oratory unearthed in his own programme: that some classical scholars thought it was a form of dishonest subterfuge; that a well-crafted speech from Tony Blair tipped his country into an unnecessary war; or that the insidious oratory of Adolf Hitler had horrific consequences. No, these things were no match for the fact that Yentob thinks Barack is just brilliant. So the official message of Yes We Can! was: ‘words are great!’, but this was undermined by plenty of evidence that words were cheap, and that Obama’s oratorical skills could eventually prove to be as relevant as Brian Cowen’s singing voice. In fact, I’d say it’s possible to work out how important oratory is to good governance statistically. But I won’t, because statistics are a form of science, and as I’ve learned from Eleventh Hour, using science would make me some sort of witch.

  Don’t check in to RTÉ’s lousy no-star hotel

  10 August 2008

  Panic spreads quickly through the RTÉ canteen. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ shrieks Dave Fanning as he pushes and shoves Marian Finucane out of his way and starts a terrified stampede for the door.

  ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ wails a hyperventilating Kathryn Thomas, standing on the hands of a collapsed Ryan Tubridy, who’s groaning a decade of the rosary in a heap with Myles Dungan and Maxi.

  ‘AAAAIGH!’ yells Caroline Morahan as she knocks Anne Doyle out of her escape path and bites a piece off Aonghus McAnally’s ear.

  Then. Suddenly. There’s silence. Not a bird can be heard. The air is sucked from the room. Philip Boucher Hayes turns, opens his mouth as if to speak, but simply points to a distant hill. The RTÉ board members have appeared on horseback, in full body armour, silhouetted in the evening sun.

  The presenters begin screaming and yelling again.

  But the board-members are silent, steely-eyed and carrying nets. They look to their leader for a signal. Cathal Goan, director general of RTÉ, sits straight-backed on his horse. His face is a grim death mask. Almost imperceptibly he nods. Then with a horrific war-cry the entire board of RTÉ ride down into the canteen. Horses snorting, their nets aloft. It’s like a scene from Planet of the Apes as they cut through the terrified presenters. When the dust settles, two figures are slumped in the nets. The director general raises his right hand. It is enough. It has been a good hunt.

  And that, no doubt, is how RTÉ got otherwise dignified people like radio person John Creedon and weather-lady Evelyn Cusack to be on Fáilte Towers, a reality TV show in which bottom-rung celebrities try to run a hotel for a couple of weeks.

  As for the other ‘famous people’ on display – glamour model Claire Tully, Eurovision losers Donna and Joe (for the purposes of this show Donna and Joe count as one full human celebrity), yer one from The Apprentice (Jennifer Maguire), and that R’n’B singer nobody’s heard of (Luke Thomas) – they probably got onto it as part of some sort of Fás course.

  As for Brian Dowling? Well, word on the street is that he’s been living a sort of Truman Show-type existence since he won Big Brother. As far as he’s concerned he’s just got a new job in a hotel.

  Anyway, Fáilte Towers isn’t so much scraping the bottom of the televisual barrel, as it’s finding there was a false bottom on the barrel all along, beneath which there was a secret room filled with poo.

  In each episode, three of the celebrities are voted by the public to face the judges, Sammy Leslie of Castle Leslie, chef Derry Clarke and TV personality/hotelier Bibi Baskin. This trio decide who stays and who goes based on their ‘work’, but because the show is edited by monkeys, thus far they mainly make their decisions based on things we haven’t actually seen.

  Indeed, Fáilte Towers is defiantly, uniquely and impressively badly put together. There’s jumpy edits, bizarre sound-level problems, disjointed storytelling, and no coherent narrative.

  And there’s also loads of repetition. Every dramatic episode is shown at least four times. Whether it’s Brian Dowling cleaning a piss-filled urinal, Joe McCaul dropping a tray of potatoes, or Don Baker angrily jabbing his finger at Derry Clarke while repeatedly saying ‘are you calling me a liar?’, we’re shown a flashforward of the event before it happens, then it’s shown ‘properly’, then it’s shown again in flashback, and finally it’s presented as part of a montage when someone is jettisoned from the hotel.

  They also show things bizarrely out of sequence. In Tuesday’s episode, for example, Jennifer Maguire refers to cleaning up vomit earlier that day, but the incident seems to happen in the next episode. And unless RTÉ has managed to twist the laws of space and time, that’s just plain lazy (who could blame them, sez you, the way they’re hunted by those dirty apes in management).

  Anyway, thus far the hotel has been visited by hen parties, nudists, room-wrecking wannabe rock-and-rollers, hotel inspectors and people from Kerry. But they’re all just distractions. Everyone knows this show is really about self-righteous judges, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God presenters (Baz Ashmawy and Aidan Power), and famous people cleaning up vomit, sniping at one another and crying.

  Fáilte Towers is, indeed, poo-tastic. I think Brian Dowling (who’s been quite funny throughout) summed it up nicely when he said: ‘I think the s.h.i.t. [he spelled it out like that] is going to hit the le big fan. It’s going to splatter. I am going to have shit on my face. Michelle is going to have shit on her face. Claire is going to be covered in shit, Donna’s going to be covered in shit. So is Evelyn. We are all going to be covered in shit’ (I’m sure someone in RTÉ is, as we speak, devising a programme called ‘Poo Island’ which takes this literally).

  Richard Dawkins, the proselytising atheist, author and scientist is presenting a new series The Genius of Charles Darwin, and he would have loved Fáilte Towers, proving as it does, that intelligent design can’t explain everything (‘If there is a God then why does he let Fáilte Towers happen?’ I might have asked my mother as a troubled child, if my life had been edited by the time-bending editors responsible for Fáilte Towers).

  Anyway, amidst what is otherwise a very well-organised elucidation of the detail and discovery of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dawkins decides to go into an English secondary school to destroy the faith of some religious teenagers. What Dawkins doesn’t seem to grasp that it might be possible to believe in evolution and an almighty deity. So the show finished with some poor teens pummelled into admitting that maybe there might be something in this evolution thing, while adding ‘I’ll still say my prayers though,’ as if that was something to apologise for.

  Now, Dawkins also talks to geologists, biologists, visits the Galapagos Islands, looks for fossils, and clearly explains how Darwin’s big idea changed everything. But he can’t stop himself demonstrating a total disinterest in other points of view – saying things like ‘no reasonable person could believe otherwise’ or ‘evolution is a theory of life on earth far more wonderful and more moving than any religious theory of creation’.

  I’ll keep watching, on the off-chance Dawkins ar
m-wrestles God into admitting he doesn’t exist, or better still, announces what I’m sure he secretly thinks – ‘I, Richard Dawkins, created the universe. It was wet that Saturday and Mother told me to go to my room and play with my trains ...’

  Stuart Carolan and Barry Murphy’s romantic comedy Little White Lie wasn’t quite fully evolved. Which is a shame, because much about it was really cool – the characterisation, the parodies of Irish TV and radio programmes (‘so you found an earlobe in your cornflakes?’ says a Joe Duffy-like radio presenter), and some lovely dialogue.

  Even the daft setup had potential – a struggling actor (Andrew Scott) pretending to be a psychiatrist to woo a children’s television presenter (Elaine Cassidy). But it lacked sexual chemistry, so the will-she-won’t-she, will-he-won’t-he drama didn’t really come off.

  It was as if Carolan and Murphy got so involved in creating the detailed little world of their film that they didn’t bother colouring in the core relationship.

  Still, it was very funny, very watchable, and in its atypical depiction of Dublin and Dubliners, very refreshing. In fact, I’d love to see it expanded out into a fully-fledged drama series where the characters would have more time to develop. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that the budget for such things is wrapped up in about ten years of poo-farming at Fáilte Towers.

  DIARMUID DOYLE

  I’ve been a wild rover for many’s a year

  A lifelong fan celebrates his love affair with Corrie on its fiftieth birthday.

  5 December 2010

  I remember the date, or I think I do, all these years later. On 23 November 1973, a Friday, I arrived home from school to find an enormous aerial attached to the chimney of our house in Kilkenny. In those days, there was no cable TV outside Dublin, so if you wanted BBC and ITV you had to get your hands on one of these metallic monstrosities and point it towards Wales in the hope that it would trap a stray signal on its way from the valleys. For some reason, this always worked better in winter than summer, when reception regularly disappeared into a noisy fuzz on screen.

  To add to the occasional woe, Harlech TV and BBC Wales would often break in with the local news and sport from Llandudno. But to a ten-year-old already getting impatient with the nightly entertainment in one-channel land, the aerial was like a bailout to a zombie bank. The television addiction started around about then, as did a lifelong love affair with the Welsh accent. So, too, a few months after that November day, did my relationship with Coronation Street.

  The affair was more of a slow-burner than love at first sight. My mother watched it regularly, at 7.30 p.m. on Monday and Wednesdays on HTV, and my initial reaction was that if the adults were watching it, it must be rubbish – a reasonable point of view for any child to take, but wrong in this case. Over time, I found myself sneaking surreptitious glances at the television to see what all the fuss was about. By the time Betty Turpin, Emily Bishop, Hilda Ogden, Rita Fairclough, Mavis Riley and Bet Lynch won a Spot The Ball competition to go to Majorca in the early summer of 1974 (and actually went and shot some scenes there) I was hooked.

  Three of those people are still in the series, and you always feel that Mavis is on the verge of popping over from her home in the Lake District for a cup of tea, a liquid as important to Coronation Street as oil was to Dallas. It’s a series that values its old characters. Even when it was under ratings pressure in the 1990s to bring in a raft of younger, better-looking residents, it always treasured its oldies, always found decent storylines for them.

  Looked at purely as a working environment, it has clearly been a happy place to earn a living. Ken Barlow (forgive me if I refer to these people by their Street names; that’s how I know them and their real lives are of no interest to me) has been there since the first episode, fifty years ago this Thursday (9 December). Emily Bishop celebrates her half century in January; Betty Turpin (or Williams as she is now, following Coronation Street’s practice of making all married female characters take their husbands’ names, feminism bedamned) is there forty-one years. Rita Fairclough (now Sullivan after her 1992 marriage to the kindly but fatally haemhorrage-prone Ted) has been around thirty-eight years. So has Deirdre Barlow, daughter of the fantastic Blanche Hunt, who died earlier this year on her holidays in Portugal. She made her first appearance in 1975. Jack Duckworth was there more than thirty-one years before his own recent death, brought about by a tragic combination of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a broken heart. He was the 115th Street character to die.

  So when I’m asked why I love Coronation Street so much (and I really do love it, with the unshakeable passion of the perpetually smitten), I usually start with the old characters, with the way the show constructs a community around them, celebrates their importance, instills them with the wisdom of years and uses them as an often humorous sounding board for the madness in their midst. Fourteen of those 115 deaths were murders so Ken and Betty and Emily (whose husband Ernest was one of those gunned down) have clearly seen a lot. And yet they manage to keep going, these wise old heads, living their mostly non-eventful lives, keeping a beady eye on proceedings and giving the whole thing an air of reality, even when the more outlandish doings of some of the younger ones have you wondering whether this is the last days of the Roman empire or a working-class street.

  The question of Coronation Street’s ‘realness’ comes up from time to time. Fifty years ago, a tightly knit community on a quiet terraced street with a pub on the end was probably a common enough occurrence in England, or at least common enough to make it believeable. Not so now, goes the argument against the Street’s credibility. Such communities don’t exist any longer. Even on terraced streets, people don’t know many of their neighbours, still less sleep with them, which seems to be Item No. 1 on the Corrie residents’ association list of things to do. Nobody works across the street from their homes anymore, like Tyrone and Kevin and some of the girls in the knicker factory. Having a pub on the corner is an alcoholic’s dream, not a working-class reality.

  So what? Coronation Street has never made any serious claim for itself as a reflection of wider English society. The recession has had no effect on its storylines whatsoever. The recent change of government has gone almost entirely unnoticed. There hasn’t been a word about the Irish bailout. The show exists mostly inside its own little bubble, and is all the better for it.

  Where Coronation Street does fall down for many people is on the question of race. When it finally brought in a character from what used to be the colonies (Dev Alahan, from India, in 1999) it gave him a corner shop to run. Regular black characters like Fiona Middleton (now departed) or Cheryl, the stripper turned barmaid, or Lloyd in the taxi firm, are lighter-skinned black people than you normally meet around Manchester. The one exception, Shirley Armitage, who was Curly Watt’s girlfriend for a while in the late 1980s, was brought in mainly to be a victim of racism. You get the impression that if Ozwald Boateng turned up on the street, he’d be given a job stitching knickers but no meaningful lines to utter. It’s as though the Street’s producers have concluded or decided that somebody very black might frighten the viewers off. In 2008, that other great soap opera, the United States of America, tried something similar with its president, so Coronation Street has set a bit of a trend in that regard.

  I suspect that people are making too much of the race thing, however. One reason I like Coronation Street is that its producers (and many of its actors, I suspect) are hostile to political correctness and see it as the scourge of creativity. The smoking ban in Britain in recent years was greeted on the Street with a veritable army of cigarette-brandishing characters, who seemed to be there for no other reason than to challenge the nanny state.

  This distaste for state intrusion into the life of the local community can also be seen in Coronation Street’s consistently hostile treatment of policemen and women, a subject worth an entire article in itself. Stereotyping being the enemy of political correctness, Corrie has gone out of its way to give us characters – like Sean T
ully, as camp a gay man as you could find, or Jim McDonald, the drunken, fightin’ Irishman – who have traditionally existed in jokes but not so often in reality. The object is not to be offensive but to make the point that people are entitled to think whatever they like, no matter how much it may annoy liberals.

  Which brings us nicely back to Ken Barlow. The only character on the Street since that first episode fifty years ago, Ken was also the first person I remember noticing in my early months as a fan. Who knows why? I was a bit young for philandering. In those first episodes, Ken was due to go to college, a journey of discovery he hoped would provide a permanent passport away from Coronation Street. For Ken, being a socialist and a liberal did not involve living among the working classes. Fifty years later, however, he is still on the Street, still unhappy, still railing against the status quo, which these days involves marriage to Deirdre, the worst-dressed woman in England.

  Over the years, that discontent has manifested itself in sex, which has become almost as important to Coronation Street as tea. As I write, six characters are involved in infidelity or have notions in that direction. I watch now, a forty-seven-year-old fan, and wonder, not entirely disapprovingly: where do they get the energy? This is especially true when seventy-one-year-old Ken (who’s had twenty-five girlfriends, including three wives, over the fifty years) is putting it about which, for once, currently, he isn’t. Still, you know if you’re a regular viewer that it won’t be long before some Guardian-reading floozy turns his head again. He is, in many ways, one of the great tragic characters of English popular culture – permanently defeated, frustrated and on the verge of an escape that never happens. And yet, despite it all, he retains a certain nobility and an admirable lack of bitterness. He’s my favourite character.