Normal People is a Rotten Novel

Some "normal people", apparently.

The TV adaptation of Normal People, the phenomenally successful second novel by Irish author Sally Rooney, runs to twelve episodes. This is the latest news to stagger your faithful correspondent, for whom the success of Normal People exists at a similar level of bafflement as the placement of the figs in the fig rolls.

Normal People is a superficial, shallow, vain, vacuous, mutton-headed book about the first-world problems of a poor little rich girl. The characterisation would bring a blush to cardboard, the human insight is blind, the subtly is that of a cavity block and, if Sally Rooney’s really is the voice of a generation, that generation is an unusually stupid one.

Novels are written in three broad styles. These aren’t hard and fast guidelines, of course, more like familial resemblances than any scientifically rigorous classification, but useful for aiding our understanding and comparing our experiences.

The first family is the traditional story. There is a protagonist who does things, and these things are described in the course of the book. These books are generally set in a world that is real and recognisable. Emile Zola is typicalof this school. He thought it the novelist’s duty to go out in the world, and then report on what he or she saw there.

The second style is the window-on-the-soul school, of which Henry James may be considered the trailblazer. Acolytes consider such things as plots and story arcs passé and, for some reason, particularly prize the composition of the sentences in a novel, which are, ideally, exquisite. Colm Tóibín would be a leading member of this school.

The third style is avant garde, where the writer writes utter gibberish that can be understood by neither man nor beast, but we all pretend that they’re capital-P-Profound because we don’t want to look thick. Thomas Pynchon is the pope of this church, and Gravity’s Rainbow its sacred text.

To which school does Sally Rooney belong? Well. That’s hard to say.

Normal People is set in contemporary Ireland, rural Sligo and Dublin. Neither place is recognisable in the novel. A quick example: early in the book, the hero, Connell, is having an argument with his mother, Lorraine. Lorraine is so annoyed with Connell that she tells him to stop the car, she’s going to get out and get the bus home.

It is to be hoped that Lorraine packed a lunch, because she could be waiting a long time on that bus if she’s living in a small town in Sligo. I’m not sure how many rural Irish towns have public transport, but if there were any such towns in Sligo I feel I would have heard.

The book is full of these chasms in reality. Marianne, the book’s heroine, goes from social isolation at school to being the It-Girl amongst the freshers in college. That doesn’t happen. It takes time to learn social skills. You can’t just put them on like a hat.

Connell is from a working class background. He also has his own car and can afford to go back-packing in Italy while in college. Who pays that bill? Connell is embarrassed to tell his mother that he voted for Declan Bree, the venerable Sligo socialist. Lorraine voted for Bree as well – she’s a big fan, and has educated Connell about “Cuba and the cause of Palestinian liberation.” Why would Connell be embarrassed to agree with his mother? It doesn’t make any sense. Connell is appalled when a female teacher makes an advance on him in a nightclub. Come on, now. On what planet does that happen?

Only one part of Normal People feels real, and that’s in Italy, where Marianne is entertaining her college set and the back-packing Connell in her father’s villa. Marianne’s horrible college boyfriend Jamie – a pantomime villan, if ever there were one – gets snotty when the champagne is not served in flute glasses. Marianne points out that these are champagne coupes, *actually*, but the damage is done. We’re drinking out of gravy boats, sneers Jamie, and he means it to sting.

That part reads like an eye-witness account. That exchange was only part of the novel in which your correspondent was able to believe could have happened. The rest is narcissistic, pseudo-intellectual rubbish and how in God’s holy name the makers of the TV show have got twelve episodes out of it is baffling.

They’ve either stuffed it like a sausage with whatever offcuts or offal or dog or cat they could lay hands on, or else they’ve stretched it out, like someone buttering the bread for the harvest festival in the Presbyterian Hall. James Marriott wrote in The Times that he “finished the book determined to look at the world differently. I’m not sure what higher compliment you can pay a novel.” Sooner you than me, hoss.

FOCAL SCOIR: The New York Times previewed the TV show last week as “a rare TV show about teenagers that respects intimacy as a powerful storytelling tool, both on and off camera,” and praised the show for hiring an “intimacy co-ordinator.” Thank goodness the intimacy co-ordinator never went to so far as to suggest that the actress who portrays Marianne keep her clothes on. Nobody would have known where to look.

Val Doonican, and the Fight for Irish Freedom

Val Doonican did at least as much for Anglo-Irish relations as the Queen’s visit, that spurious rugby game in Croke Park, or the existence in material reality of Roy Maurice Keane, Junior. That fact is not widely known in this country, for different reasons, but it should be. Val Doonican is a hero, in his way, and should be celebrated as such.

Not even Val Doonican’s most ardent admirer could deny that the man was born square. Val Doonican was never cool. The jumpers, the rocking chairs, the songs – Delaney’s Donkey, Paddy McGinty’s Goat – no. There is no hipster willing to carry the charade through to that extent. But, in the long and troubled history of two islands in the North Atlantic, Val Doonican provided a bridge when it was needed.

We know there was huge emigration from Ireland to Britain during the war and after. We sing songs about it all the time. But what was that experience like, really? What was it like for someone who had grown up on the side of a mountain to find him or herself living in a terraced house in Blackburn, Lancashire?

There was a marvellous story in the Bullaí Máirtín collection called Peadaí Gaelach Eile, about a man about to go to London to make his fortune but who finds out just how much of a fish out of water he’s going to be before he even leaves home.

It was hard on that generation. They never liked to speak of it themselves, because it was humiliating for them. The current generation doesn’t like to think of it, because they seem to have trouble conceiving of people who are not themselves.

It’s interesting as well that the literature of those who built up and tore England down after the Second World War seems stronger in Irish than in English. Where are the English language equivalents of the navvying memoirs of Domhnall Mac Amhlaigh or Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé?

Nobody wanted to go on the record about how hard it was to come from rural poverty to a major industrial city. And nobody wants to think about the Irish being considered in England the way the Romanians are considered here. Dirty, stinking, going around in gangs, leaving their rubbish lying around, speaking gibberish, not to be trusted.

And then, in the mid-sixties, one of those dirty, stinking Irish people got himself a variety TV show on prime time with the BBC. He wasn’t dirty. He was very well turned out, always with his hair cut and clean and nice sweater on him. He sang comic songs with a twinkle in his eye.

And maybe, after watching the Val Doonican Show on TV, maybe some Englishman heard his Irish neighbours the next day and detected that trace of Doonican in them. Maybe the way they spoke wasn’t gibberish; maybe it was actually a lot like that chap on the television. I wonder could any of them sing songs as well?

What was Val Doonican worth to the Irish community in Britain in the ‘seventies, when the bombs were going off in Birmingham and Guilford and in the car park of the Houses of Parliament themselves? How reassuring was it for the ordinary British person to hear of Delaney’s Donkey winning the half-mile race after the newscaster had just told them that the IRA had just admitted responsibility for the bombing of another bar, resulting in five killed and seven maimed?

Yes, Val Doonican wasn’t very cool. No, Delaney’s Donkey isn’t quite Carrickfergus. But Val Doonican was, by all accounts, a very lovely man who asked for little from life and brought happiness and security to millions and millions. Very, very few of us will get to say that we we are brought to account on the Last Day. Suaimhneas síoraí na bhFlaithis dó.

What If Sky Are the Big Losers in the GAA Deal?

As the national debate rages about the GAA and Sky Sports, TV3 are like the dog in the night-time in the old Sherlock Holmes story. They should have barked, but they haven’t. What’s going on?

Nobody else has been shy about giving his or her two cents. The negative reaction to the deal has been viscerally emotional. A media giant, run by the worst media mogul in the world, the Dirty Digger himself, taking a slice of Erin’s heritage. Returning the felon’s cap to the fair head of Kathleen Ni Houlihan.

Op-ed pieces mourning the loss of the peasantry’s simple pleasures were written by writers who had successfully hidden their interest in Gaelic Games under a bushel until this current moment of crisis.

Worst of all were Eugene McGee and others who wept for Old Dan, living the back the mountain, the salt of the very earth, who has no truck with that blashted Sky at all. Poor Old Dan.

When Old Dan, a GAA man to his bones, opposed the opening of Croke Park to garrison games, he was told he was a backwoodsman and castigated for standing in the way of Progress-with-a-capital-P. Now Old Dan is everybody’s pal. It’s not just the sweet poitín that has Old Dan’s head spinning.

And then on the other side, there have been many reasons behind the positive reactions. Some people look forward to increased coverage. Some people believe Sky is the means by which the Gael can evangelise his games to the wider world. And some people like to see RTÉ get a puck in the snout for inflicting Pat Spillane on the nation, year after year.

And even through all this debate, not a peep from TV3, other than a column from Matt Cooper in the Sunday Times, the busiest man in show business. Nothing. Isn’t that odd?

Sky is getting an exclusive selection of runts from the GAA’s summer litter for three years. The station is known for not sparing the hype, but we’ll see what they’re made of when they’re live from Markiewicz Park on some day when the rain is sheeting in off the Atlantic, while Fermanagh and Longford do battle in Round 2 of the Qualifiers.

Here’s another odd thing to throw in the pot: generally speaking, when someone sells his or her soul, her or she tries to get a big price for it. Even the miserable Doctor Faustus did his best to ask for dinner, drinks and dancing in the moonlight with Helen of Troy herself before you-know-who turned up to take him off to the hot spot.

The GAA are saying that this deal is a slight increase in revenue from what went before. Prior to this, the idea was that Sky would sell their best bull to get a slice of the Gaelic action. That doesn’t look to be the case now. Surely Sky couldn’t have got the rights – cheap?

In his Sunday Times column, Matt Cooper remarks that the GAA made no mention of TV3’s contribution to GAA broadcasting in this deal. That’s odd too. So, let’s construct a perfectly hypothetical hypothesis.

What if Sky never expected to win the rights in the first place? What if there are currently some geezers in stripy shirts in Wapping felling like they just woke up married in Vegas, and to an Irish colleen at that?

Could it be possible that TV3 lowballed the GAA? TV3 isn’t exactly flush with cash at the moment. The press has recently run stories about the horrific prospect of the final Xposé! featuring what’s fabulous for the dole queue in 2014. Could it be that Sky won the rights by default, because a strapped-for-cash TV3 thought the GAA would never look to Sky at all?

And here’s another thing. Who says the Sky coverage will be any good? People have been talking about what a great job Sky have done on darts. They didn’t have to – darts has been established as a TV sport since the 1980s.

What made Sky was that they hired Sid Waddell, one of the greatest sports commentators of all time, to do their coverage. Now Sid himself has moved on to walk in the asphodel, will darts go down the tubes? Snooker used to be a big deal on TV once, as was showjumping. There are no guarantees.

It was nice to think that as soon as the Sky deal was brokered, the Wapping geezers immediately made their way to the Kingdom of Kerry to offer Dara Ó Cinnéide a king’s ransom to front their coverage. But when you stop and think about it, why would they bother for Saturday qualifier games?

How much do Sky spend on their NFL coverage? Not. A. Lot, as Kevin Cadle himself might. Put. It, a man who could give any RTÉ chancers who can’t quite believe their luck a run for their money.

Or how much do Sky spend in presenting their Spanish soccer? It can’t hold a candle to Channel 4’s Italian soccer coverage of twenty years ago, with the t’rrfic AC Jimbo presenting.

Sky’s rugby coverage is poor. Their coverage of the Lions was embarrassing in the summer. The Lions are a miracle, a throwback to a different age of different values in rugby. Sky never got that for a second, and just had Will Greenwood and Scott Quinnell embarrass themselves over and over again.

The Lions are a symphony; Sky covered them like they were something by Big Tom and the Mainliners. If Sky can’t get rugby, what chance they’ll get the GAA? People who are hoping for GAA Paradiso may have to think again.

Sky will be novel and worthwhile, but it won’t last. The GAA is like Guinness. You can get it all over the world, but it only tastes right at home.

Hopefully, the market will be stronger the next time broadcast rights are available because the GAA needs the money to compete against other sports (and not to just hoard it in great vaults under Croke Park, as some journalists who should know better seem to think).

In the meantime, let’s leave the final word with Seán Bán Breathnach on the Seo Spóirt. SBB said that, whatever about TV, people talking about exclusive radio rights are talking through their hats. RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta is entitled to broadcast every ball kicked and every sliother pucked in Ireland, so exclusivity doesn’t come into it. Ná laga a comhartha riamh.

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor is a Triumph for Steven Moffat

Steven Moffat was set no small task on Saturday night. Love it or hate it, Doctor Who is now a flagship BBC property, and worth many, many millions of dollars to the Corporation. The 50th Anniversary Special wasn’t just written for the Doctor Who fanbase – it was written for the broader sci-fi market of America, where the real money is to be earned (hence dollars as the correct currency of measurement).

In writing the 50th Anniversary Special, Moffat had to keep the fanbase happy, impress the Yanks and turn around two years of under-achievement with the franchise, which have been a letdown compared to the promise Moffat showed when he was appointed showrunner in the first place.

Moffat did all that, and more. People sometimes think writing is just pretty prose. It’s not. Without a plot, it all falls into the void. The Day of the Doctor was a tour-de-force plotting performance on Moffat’s part, and a supreme exposition of the screen-writer’s art.

Moffat faced three particular and peculiar challenges, any one of which could have broken another writer. It is to Moffat’s supreme credit that he overcame all three.

The Huey-Dewey-Louie Problem
In his book Hype and Glory, screenwriter William Goldman recounts a problem faced by a friend of his who was a scriptwriter on Charlie’s Angels. It seems the Angels, like all actors, were acutely conscious of billing, and kicked up blue murder if they thought one of their number was getting more lines than the other. That led to ridiculous dialogue where the writers had to make sure that each Angel got an equal amount of speaking time.

So, instead of having one Angel say “I’m going down to Tesco’s to get a box of teabags and a pint of milk,” Kelly would announce her intention to go to Tesco for teabags, Sabrina would tell her to make sure it’s Lyons’, and Jill would remind her not to forget the milk. Equal dialogue for Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Moffat had the same problem. He had three leads – three Doctors who are the same person and yet subtly different. He didn’t have clear delineation of character, but he did have three actors as capable of munching scenery as anyone out there if not kept on the bridle. And Moffat succeeded against the odds – each Doctor was able to co-exist, perform and not crowd the others out.

The Timey-Wimey Problem
Time-travel will never be possible. The potential paradoxes are impossible to resolve in reality. But time travel is always interesting in science-fiction, because it allows us to wonder: what if? What if Hitler won the war? What if John F Kennedy hadn’t been shot?

The problem of writing time-travel science-fiction is in dealing with the paradoxes – following each paradox through to its logical conclusion. This is what made Blink, the Doctor Who episode that really announced Moffat’s genius, so good. The paradoxical elements of Blink fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Moffat was less successful in the expanded River Song story that dominated the season before last, as the plot never quite clicked open and closed as it had in Blink.

The Day of the Doctor isn’t quite as complex as Blink, but there are many paradoxes to be resolved through the three strands of the story – the contemporary, the Elizabethan and the Time War. Moffat tied them all together beautifully in a way that, like all truly great stories, that is both inevitable and unexpected. This was triumphant plotting on his part.

The Gallifreyean Problem
Russell T Davies, Moffat’s predecessor as Doctor Who showrunner and the man credited with much of the modern Doctor Who’s success, made a big decision at the start of that process – possibly bigger than he realised at the time. Because Davies found the Doctor’s essential loneliness an interesting part of the character, Davies decided that he would make the Doctor lonelier still by wiping out the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey.

The problem with that is that it leads to a considerable hostage to fortune as regards future stories – it’s not easy to churn out plots, and by wiping out Gallifrey Davies had denied himself a very rich potential source. Davies was always more of a soap-opera writer than a science fiction writer and either didn’t realise or wasn’t bothered by the problem of the fall of Gallifrey – his own plotting and frequent resorting to alakazam! solutions would suggest the latter.

Moffat, however, is a science-fiction writer and must have known for some time just how important the return of the Time Lords must be. (It would be interesting to find out just when Moffat started plotting The Day of the Doctor – many years ago would be a sensible bet). Because he is a science-fiction writer, Moffat knew that Control-Z wouldn’t cut it, and for him to solve the Time Lord problem just when the series needed a barnstormer for its 50th Anniversary is a breathtaking achievement.

It had been reasonable to assume that Moffat’s attention towards Doctor Who was distracted by his writing of Sherlock, Doctor Who’s blood relation as an archetype. Sherlock has been superb, and Moffat’s Who started falling off as Sherlock thrived. The Day of the Doctor dispelled all fears that the madman in the box is in danger of being neglected. The BBC will be booking convention at Comic-Con in Las Vegas for many years to come, and Moffat deserves no small credit for that. I hope he gets a raise.

Flaky Narrative Snow Good for Doctor Who Christmas Special

Imagine if you cooked Christmas dinner and remembered everything except the gobbler. You had ham, you had stuffing, you had roast spuds, mashed spuds, carrots, peas, gravy, cranberry sauce, the works - but you forgot the actual turkey himself, the sun around which all else revolves.

This is what happened Steven Moffat in The Snowmen, this year’s Christmas episode of Doctor Who. He had a new title sequence, a new Tardis, a new companion, as fine a scenery-chewer as is known to humanity to play the villain – but what he didn’t have was a story to pull it all together. Doctor Who is a kids’ show – it needs a narrative. Leave the other stuff to Pirandello.

It can’t be easy to write Doctor Who. The show’s fiftieth anniversary looms in eleven months from now and there is a huge population who want to see something spectacular to mark the occasion. They may be the sort of human plankton who have no lives and are in front of their laptops when they should be partaking of festive cheer, but they are people too and are capable of weeping. More to be pitied than censured, really.

Perhaps the pressure of that anniversary is getting to Steven Moffat, the man in charge of Doctor Who (now gloriously titled the “Whopremo”). He will surely want to do better than the twentieth anniversary show, which really wasn’t that good. He is also distracted by Sherlock, which is as good a show as exists on TV currently.

But for whatever reason, Moffat dropped the ball tonight with the Christmas episode. Did anybody really understand it? You correspondent didn’t and, like the Reverend Mother in Midnight’s Children, An Spailpín is not stupid, having read several books.

It’s also worth questioning the point of hiring as fine a scenery-chewer as is known to humanity and not writing lines for him to gorge on. Michael Gambon was eye-rollingly superb in Moffat’s first Christmas episode, a Christmas Carol, but Richard E Grant was wasted in The Snowmen. He got one peach of a line near the start but spent the rest of the show pretty much sucking a lemon and having to pretend he liked it.

As for Clara, the new companion, she was there and then she wasn’t. Jenna Louise-Coleman has now played the new companion as a computer-savant, a barmaid and a governess. The Doctor himself generally waits for a regeneration to make a personality change but Clara/Oswin seems to go through them in the time it takes to hard-boil an egg.

It would be nice if the powers that be were to let her aye be aye and her nay be nay. Miss Coleman is as cute as a button but she may have to keep notes written on the back of one of her dainty little hands to remember if she’s the same person after lunch as she was at elevenses.

Perhaps Moffat is just trying too hard?  The presence of those anonymous bloggers in bedrooms terrorize both young and old, but sometimes maybe you’re better to just have the Doctor let one companion go, grab the next by the hand and run down a corridor somewhere. This is Doctor Who, after all. There’s a formula that’s worked for fifty years. There’s no need to re-write it as six characters in search of an alien.

Sherlock Holmes Condemned to Learning, Growing and Hugging in Elementary

Mr Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first and only consulting detective, faces a peril far greater than any other he has faced in a long and distinguished career. Professor Moriarty, Irene Adler and even the giant rat of Sumatra itself are as Curly, Larry and Moe compared to the rack of fire on which the Columbia Broadcasting System and their nefarious allies in Great Britain, Sky Living, seem determined to roast the ne plus ultra of fictional detectives in their new series Elementary.

At first, the danger seemed slight. There is no real problem with modernizing Holmes – he is an archetype, a man for all seasons. The classic Basil Rathbone movies of the 1940s were moved to modern times, when Holmes moved from the Victorian peasoupers to the Churchillian beaches and landing grounds to face down the Nazi menace.

Bringing Holmes to 21st Century London is one of the many reasons why the current BBC Sherlock is the triumph that it is. The character remains constant though the times may change.

The move to New York and the sex change of honest Doctor Watson in Elementary are also permissible. The writers have to do something to make it different. The biggest danger, in the early stages, seemed to be the tin ear of writers who over-egged the English pudding.

Holmes refers to the tube, rather than the subway. He refers to the baseball team as the Metropolitans of New York, rather than the New York Mets. That’s because he’s English, you see.

However, once the game’s afoot, Holmes speaks fluent American. “I need you to send this to the lab,” says Holmes to a flatfoot. Only Americans consider the subjective “I need” as an imperative. How has Holmes picked this up but can’t call the subway the subway?

But sloppy writing is a flesh wound compared to the evisceration that the writers seem determined to inflict on the misfortunate, unsuspecting Holmes. Part of the backstory of Elementary is that Holmes is a recovering addict; Watson is a doctor hired to keep an around-the-clock eye on him. Fair enough.

What is not fair enough is the burgeoning plot development that Holmes will flower as a fully-rounded human being under Doctor Joan Watson’s loving ministrations. In the second episode, the sensitive viewer is appalled to discover that Holmes has taken something from his AA meetings, and is now a “better person” as a result.

Watson complements Holmes on the “progress” he’s making as a person, and this isn’t even the worst of it. As Watson retires to her boudoir, we see Holmes staring at his childhood violin that Watson found earlier. As Watson lies in bed, she hears the first plaintive scrapes and smiles at the thought of Sherlock Holmes getting back in touch with his soul and becoming a more rounded person. That we are spared stock imagery of flowers blossoming can only be the grace of a merciful God.

It’s not hard to plot the coming years. Love rears its ugly head and, by Season 5, Elementary has become the Brady Bunch as Holmes and Watson’s brood perform precocious feats of deduction to the delight of their parents and the agonized rictus horror of anyone with any taste whatsoever.

They could even have a Christmas special. The grandparents can meet for the first time since the wedding – Holmes's parents are played by Joanna Lumley and the guy who played Lord John Marbury in the West Wing, while Mr and Mrs Watson are George Takei and Barbara Bloody Streisand.

The eldest and most precocious of the children, Chet Holmes, deduces that Uncle Mycroft is running a covert op between the CIA and MI6, and hilarity ensues. Ricky Gervais will be cast against type as Mycroft – to keep things edgy, you know. Challenging assumptions.

Sherlock Holmes – learning, hugging and growing. What George Constanza expertly dodged for so long is to be the grim fate of the world’s first consulting detective. How he must long for the sweet release of the Reichenbach Falls.

Going Dutch on Later with Jools Holland

It’s hard to believe that Later with Jools Holland is twenty years on TV. The aged and bewildered will remember Holland and the late Paula Yates presenting The Tube on Channel 4, the vanguard of a revolution that never arrived. The fossilized remains of those who remember the 1970s will remember Holland playing the piano for Squeeze, when up the junction was very cool for cats.

That’s a long, long time to be involved in something as ephemeral as popular music. Freddie Mercury thought that great pop songs should be like disposable razors, and God knows Freddie wrote plenty of great pop songs in his day. Why, then, this continuing effort to build and maintain a canon?

There was a fawning article of wide-eyed wonder about Later with Jools Holland in the Observer on Sunday, with a lot of puff pieces from various music industry sources about how great it is to meet one’s fellow artists, how competitive it is between them, and the incredible respect they all have for each other.

There were even star-struck ingénues – “In 2000 a debuting Chris Martin muffed the introduction to Yellow because, he said, Gary Brooker was in the room and he couldn't stop thinking about this being one of the guys that wrote A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Well, pinch of salt to the green room, please. That’s all very hard to believe.

The only thing all these artists have in common is that they all work for record companies and all like to see a dollar at the end of the week. The notion of a giant love-in across the musical divide is hard to swallow. They’re all on Later for the money, because that’s what the music business, like any business, is all about.

For instance – Donovan was a guest in 1996, while Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros were guests in 2000. Donovan had “this guitar kills fascists” written on his guitar, while Strummer had “this guitar kills hippies” written on his.

So suppose they were booked on the same show in 1998. Would Strummer attempt to batter Donovan to a tie-dyed pulp in the studio, or would they find common cause in the fact that both their incomes are provided by Sony Music? Donovan covering Guns of Brixton and Strummer doing Mellow Yellow is my money, followed by a yard of purple prose in Q Magazine about music uniting across the generations.

An Spailpín read somewhere that the true power of Later with Jools Holland is the perfect symbiosis that exists between the old veterans laden with credibility but desperate for relevance and the tyros who need credibility to bolster their claim to be the Next New Thing.

The perfect episode of Later would be a duet between Aretha Franklin and Adele. Aretha would be grateful for Adele’s considerable popularity while singing with Aretha would be a further confirmation of Adele as the queen of popular music. Chi-ching, say the boys in the boardroom.

There are some great moments on Later, of course. There couldn’t not be on a music show, among all the grubbing for dollars. The Observer references John Cale’s performance of Hallelujah, and your correspondent was quite charmed by Katy Perry’s exhibition of campanology when she performed I Kissed a Girl a few years ago.

But while the Observer cites the four million views on You Tube of the Cale Hallelujah as proof that taste will out, the reality is that the vast majority of people who viewed it did so because it was on the soundtrack of Shrek.

The poet tells us that music has charms to soothe the savage beast, and it does of course. But the music companies know how to sell product too. It’s fifty years since Bill Haley rocked around the clock – a half-century is plenty of time for the boys in the boardrooms to have the formula down as pat as Coca-Cola’s.

FOCAL SCOIR: Speaking of Chris Martin, this 2008 article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker sums up Coldplay, U2 and that whole horrible school. Here’s that Katy appearance on Later, then, to cheer us all up. Ding-dong.

Claire Byrne is the Late Late Show's Only Hope

RTÉ has a dilemma in regard to the Late Late Show. It is this: the number of people who watch the show seems to exist in inverse proportion to those who actually like it.

If people stopped watching the Late Late, the next step for RTÉ would be obvious and inevitable. But people don’t stop watching. Twelve years since Gay Byrne did his last Late Late Show, the program remains a ratings juggernaut for RTÉ, even though the amount of people who claim to like it is equivalent to the current population of the Great Blasket.

The Late Late is an anachronism. In its glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, there was nothing else. The very presence of people in Ireland talking on television about Irish things was remarkable in and of itself. To think that that the Gay Byrne Late Late was shy about combing the RTÉ canteen is to re-write history. But that wasn’t a problem then, because the very existence of the show was novel and thrilling. Who cared if this was Maureen Potter’s ten millionth appearance? Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the Earth.

That thrill is now long gone. The audience’s sophistication has increased dramatically, meaning that they are less tolerant of the revolving guest list of Pat Shortt, Brendan O’Carroll and someone from Fair City. But they are not so sophisticated as to go watch something else. The nation hasn’t reached that level yet, it seems.

This presents RTÉ with a dilemma. The show must stay on the road because it brings in the money necessary to pay those extraordinary RTÉ salaries, but the standard of show is now so low that it has to be depressing everyone who works in Montrose. It’s time for a change. Tubridy is out of his depth. They need a new host – or hostess.

Miriam O’Callaghan is presented as the Woman Most Likely whenever this discussion comes up, but RTÉ should be a little more daring and give the Late Late Show a 21st Century hostess. Someone who can talk equally well to the Fair City starlets before the break and put the heat on public figures after.

There’s only one choice. It has to be Claire Byrne, and for three reasons.

Firstly, she can do all the frothy stuff, as she does weekly on the Daily Show. Your correspondent has never seen the Daily Show but it’s almost certainly fine, if that’s your bag. Tubridy is fine interviewing the Fair City barmaids too, but it was, famously, a point of contention for Pat Kenny.

But while Tubridy struggles with the grown-up stuff, Byrne is excellent, as she proves daily on the Late Debate on Radio One and used to prove on the Newstalk Breakfast Show. This is the second point in her favour. Claire Byrne understands current affairs. Not only is she is a tenacious interviewer, but she never editorialises. She knows he purpose is to moderate debate, rather than participate in it.

The final reason Claire Byrne would make an excellent hostess for the Late Late Show is less obvious, but vital. She can’t be pushed around.

It’s a small thing, but subtly revealing – the Newstalk Breakfast Show does a paper view every morning. And while your correspondent hasn’t been keeping score, I do have the impression that Ivan Yates always does the broadsheets and Chris Donaghue always does the tabloids. When Claire Byrne co-hosted, they alternated. That says a lot about La Byrne.

If the Late Late Show can be saved, it’s only Claire Byrne that can do it. And if RTÉ send Brendan O’Connor to Mongolia and replace his wretched show with Máirtín Tom Sheáinín’s marvellous Comhrá on TG4, that wouldn’t be a bad day’s work either.

The Role of the Pundit

Willie Joe, the eminence behind the Mayo GAA Blog, opined on Saturday that the opinion of the national GAA pundits doesn’t matter. “Such babble is simply noise, annoying and grating noise to many ears, but just noise nonetheless,” wrote that great and good man.

It is noise, of course. But it shouldn’t be. That’s the point. It shouldn’t be.

There are two types of people to whom punditry – pre and post match analysis of sporting contests, Gaelic football in our particular case – is aimed. The first is the general watcher who doesn’t follow the games and isn’t particularly knowledgeable but is watching because a child or a boyfriend is interested, or a neighbour is playing, or a team has gone deep in the Championship and the whole parish is now talking about nothing else.

The second is the actual fan, who goes to all games at all grades. He or she has maybe played at some level, or coached, or sells the club lotto on Saturday night. But that doesn’t mean that he or she has ever played in Croke Park before 50,000 people and knows what that extraordinary experience is like. He or she has watched Championships unfold year after year and likes to compare one year with another, one team with another, one player with another, one philosophy or experience with another.

In other words, punditry should reach out to everyone who watches the game, irrespective of the level of his or her own knowledge, experience or exposure. Neither of these needs is being met.

Part of it, of course, is because of our national refusal to ever take anything seriously. Sure it’s only a bit of craic. People think it’s a laugh to see Brolly and Pat Spillane getting stuck into each other.

If I want a laugh I’ll read the Program for Government. Football is serious, and due deference should be paid. Deference should be paid for those who don’t live and die by the game but are still interested for all the reasons listed above.

Deference should be paid for those who do live and die by the game and expect it to be analysed by those for whom the game has the same magnitude in their lives.

That’s the problem with the current level of punditry. It’s not that pundits are too harsh on players. It’s that they’re not harsh enough.

Pat Spillane rowed back on his (typically strident) criticism of Donegal in the very first game of the Championship after Donegal won their first Ulster title in nineteen years earlier this month. It’d be easier to respect Spillane if he said he still couldn’t stand it, matteradamn how many Anglo-Celts they win. At least he’d be consistent, instead of running with both hare and hounds. He’ll be back damning them again when – if – they lose again in the Championship, thus making you wonder if he only took a crack because he thought it was a free shot. There’s something kind of rotten about that sort of behaviour.

People think that controversy is better than the mind-numbing and stomach churning smugness of the BBC’s Match of the Day couch. But what’s currently served by RTÉ isn’t controversy. It’s lads acting the jackass. Lads who are just as capable of the BBC’s old pals act when the son of one of the guild is playing. For instance.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a new generation of pundits now, men who call the game as they see it but who don’t rub players noses in it either. Anthony Tohill and Dara Ó Cinnéide on RTÉ, and Peter Canavan on TV3 are superb, to name but three. The sooner they take over from the washed out vaudeville of the current RTÉ front line panel the better off the game and the people will be.

How to Watch Doctor Who - A Five Step Program

The sixth season of the new Doctor Who reaches its midpoint finale on Saturday. It got off to a rocky start with a confusing two-part opener, but my goodness gracious, it’s fairly hit its stride now.

Now in his second year in full command of the series, Steven Moffat has brought the old warhorse to undreamed of glories. Moffat gets Doctor Who, and utilises his considerable powers as a writer and storyteller to make some very thrilling science-fiction television. The current Doctor Who is a lustrous jewel in the BBC’s starry crown.

Only thing is, if you sit down in front of your TV this Saturday night expecting to be blown away, there’s a very good chance you’ll have no idea what all the fuss is about. That’s one of the problems with TV as an art form, you see – if a series has been on air a long time, you have more than a little catching up to do.

And if the series dates back to the 1960s, as Doctor Who does – well, I mean to say. You’d need a time machine, wouldn’t you? There are 776 episodes aired and you may count on it that at least 500 aren’t much cop.

So what, then, is Doctor Who, why is it worth my while to watch and with so many episodes out there, where on earth do I begin?

It’s worth your while to watch because the age at which Doctor Who is best enjoyed, ten, is the age when you’re imagination is at its richest and the world seems full of possibility. The makers of the Star Trek movie understood this absolutely, which is why that movie was such fun, instead of a lot of po-faced sturm und drang. Best leave that to Bergman.

Steven Moffat has returned that childlike glee and wonder to Doctor Who. The BBC run Doctor Who Proms to help introduce kids to classical music, and they are currently running a competition where kids can write their own three minute episode. What’s not to love about that? Take a look at the kids' reaction to the entrance of the monsters at last year's Proms - really, if you're not charmed, you need to see another kind of doctor entirely.

Doctor Who’s origins are the derring-doers of British popular fiction, the Richard Hannays, Bulldog Drummonds and Sherlock Holmeses, mixed with the British scientific know-how that saw the Victorians conquer the world. The Doctor might be a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, but he’s as British as Marmite.

Any further attempt to explain and we turn into Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. If you’re still interested, check out these stand alone episodes from the past six years. If you like them, then perhaps a boxset of Season 3 and, who knows, maybe even some Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee from the 1970s heyday for some hardcore exposure. Enjoy.

Blink. Season 3, Episode 10. The perfect Doctor Who story, on so many levels. Every story about time travel gives rise to paradoxes, and those paradoxes particularly engage Steven Moffat, the writer of Blink. In Blink, not only does Moffat unravel a complex timey-wimey story and ties it all up again in a perfectly formed plot arc, but he does it all with the Doctor himself sidelined, and the action led by Sally Sparrow, played by the wonderful Carey Mulligan, who went on to be Oscar nominated last year. 42 minutes of sublimity. Perfect.

Human Nature/Family of Blood. Season 3, Episodes 8 and 9. A two-parter in which the Doctor becomes human to hide from his enemies. The story is set in Edwardian antebellum England, a civilisation on the eve of its doom, and features a lovely performance by wonderful, heroic and terribly under-rated Martha Jones. In a story marred by some over-writing in the second part, Martha, a medical student having to work as a maid as part of her and the Doctor’s diguise, remarks to her friend that she likes this new teacher, John Smith, because he doesn’t discrimate against Martha because she’s a Londoner. I love that line.

Amy’s Choice. Season 5, Episode 7. Doctor Who is meant to be weird, and very few episodes have been as weird as Amy’s Choice. The Doctor and his companions find the TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine, invaded by a Dream Lord, who is messing with their heads big style. It’s marvellous, spooky and especially interesting when we find out just who the Dream Lord actually is.

The Girl in the Fireplace. Season 2, Episode 4. The Doctor as hero. Another episode written by Moffat, in which Doctor Who returns to its roots as a program that will help kids with their history. Guest star Sophia Myles makes a very beautiful and suitably tragic Madame de Pompadour.

The Doctor’s Wife. Season 6, Episode 4. A thrilling tour de force, and the best jumping off point into the long backstory of Doctor Who. Guest written by Neil Gaiman. Marvellous. Just marvellous.

The Late Late: Guests from Aldi, 24 Carat Diamonds Left at Home

The galling thing about the Late Late Show’s booking policy isn’t just the pool of dodos from which guests are regularly harvested, painful though that pool is. It’s that the Late Late is remiss in its duty as the cultural flagship of the nation in bringing actual culture to the people, and churns out a lot of old gas from Frances Black, Eamon Holmes and Charles Bird instead.

An Spailpín was reminded of this when buying a CD recently. The CD featured Seán Ó Sé as a guest star of the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, which is a development that An Spailpín thinks worthy of a Late Late special all to itself. Bear with me for a few hundred words, and then decide if this isn’t of greater import to the nation than Ronan Keating or Mary Byrne.

Who is Seán Ó Sé?
Seán Ó Sé is a retired schoolteacher in Cork. But in his spare time he is one of the saviours of Irish traditional music. The economy is buggered, the language has been burning diesel for over a hundred years and survives from sheer spite alone, but one thing we did do right is that we saved the music.

The rising tide of the 1960s US folk scene helped in no small measure of course, t say nothing of the huge archive at the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush, but the indigenous impetus to save the music came from Seán Ó Riada and Ceoltóirí Chulann. Ó Riada showed that Irish traditional music was every bit as sophisticated as the great musics of Europe if arranged in a similar style and all of a sudden the nation realised that we didn’t have to hide fiddles under the bed like they were some sign of hopeless boggery. The music took her place among the musics of the world and hasn’t looked back.

Seán Ó Sé was the singer in Seán Ó Riada’s band. Why Ó Sé didn’t move on when Ceoltóirí mutated into the Chieftains after Ó Riada’s early death in 1970 I don’t know, but Ó Sé is still an unquestioned hero of Irish music and culture and should be treated as such even if he never cleared his throat to sing An Poc ar Buile again.

But he’s done even more than that. Recently retired from teaching, Ó Sé is using his retirement to push the boundaries of music even further, and the collaboration with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band is further evidence of that.

And Why’s That?
Because although he loved traditional music, Seán Ó Riada had very clear ideas of what traditional music is and what it isn’t. And Seán Ó Riada particularly despised ceilí bands. He hated them. He said they had “all the musical integrity of a bluebottle buzzing around in a jamjar.” It was a rotten and unfair to thing to say – not least for a man who played the harpsichord himself, hardly the prettiest of instruments.

Ceilí bands had their advocates too, not least the late Ciarán Mac Mathúna, who pointed out that buy playing them at dances ceilí bands saved countless tunes that could have been lost. But there has always been that snobbery associated with ceilí bands, that that are not fully of the tradition.

Crossing No Man’s Land
And that’s what makes the Ó Sé collaboration with the Turloughmore so significant. Ó Sé has crossed no man’s land to join the opposition. In recording a CD with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, Seán Ó Sé has declared music to be all one, streaming out from the forts of Tuatha de Danann and the other weird peoples that have lived here before us.

If that magic is captured in the nets of the Pipers’ Club or Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann or the hammer men on stage at a hooley while the dancers belt the floor, what matter, what odds? Isn’t it all music all the same, and all particularly Irish, resonant and harmonious with the Irish soul?

That’s what An Spailpín thinks a Late Late Show should be about. The Chieftains and Ó Sé talking about Ó Riada and what he did. Jim McCann and Barney McKenna talking about the folk singers, now the Clancys all roam the other worlds. Planxty and the Bothy Band and Altan to bring it up to date. And then a huge band of the whole damned lot of them, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, giving it socks on the Rocky Road to Dublin.

And what do I get instead? “Ryan Tubridy chats to Charlie Bird about his new documentary series of legendary Antarctic explorer, Tom Crean. Mary McEvoy talks about her new book, Ireland's greatest slimmer gives advice on how to shed the pounds, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche talk about the Chernobyl Children and Jessie J performs her hit single, 'Price Tag'.”

Price Tag, indeed. Go gcuire Seán Ó Sé an dea-chath fós, go gcasa sé a amhráin go binn go bráth, agus go mbronntar an ómós atá tuilte do lá breá éigin gan moil.

Irish West Wing: Mind Your (Native) Language

Irish West Wing: Making a Contribution

Irish West Wing: There Will Be Blood (Relations)

The West Wing - Irish Style

Television and the Heart of the GAA

Martin Breheny wrote a remarkable article in yesterday’s Irish Independent about the coverage of Gaelic Games on television, specifically TG4. So remarkable, in fact, that your faithful correspondent started to wonder if Martin understood the GAA at all.

Martin started out with an old-fashioned swipe at binnbhriathra na Gaeilge, sean-teanga na nGael. “Since the majority of viewers have only a sketchy knowledge of the Irish language,” sniffs Martin, “they can't enjoy the coverage as much as if the commentaries were in English.”

Would it be wrong of An Spailpín Fánach to point out that a commentary in Mongolian would make it easier to enjoy the coverage compared to some of the stuff that’s come out of my television since poor Micheál Ó hEithir got sick, God be good to him?

Matters of personal taste aside, where Breheny’s argument falls down is in a matter of fact. Breheny compares the GAA TV product to the rugby and soccer products, but the comparison is not legitimate. He is not comparing like with like.

It’s like meeting your neighbour taking his dog for a walk and asking him why he doesn’t take the goldfish for a walk as well. Sure isn’t a goldfish just the same as a dog, really?

The advantage soccer and rugby have over inter-county Gaelic games is that soccer and rugby are professional games. They exist solely to entertain the public. Their schedules are set in such ways as to provide maximum reliable entertainment for the public – everything is honed to that end.

The GAA is not set up to provide entertainment in the same way. It annually provides the greatest sporting spectacle in the country, year after year, in the football and hurling championships, but this is co-incidental, rather than essential, to the GAA’s actual purpose.

If the provision of a sporting entertainment to compare with soccer or rugby were the GAA’s mission, there would have to be some changes made. The league and Championship would be amalgamated. A transfer market would have to be created, in order to ensure that every team had a chance to have good players, and not leave things to chance accidents of birth.

Pride in the jersey, be it ever so humble, counts for lilttle when the mob paid their dollars, are waiting to be entertained at the circus and it’s five minutes to showtime.

After a few years, the GAA would have changed completely. Some counties would have disappeared off the map entirely. It’d be like Aussie Rules without the money, or the League of Ireland with crowds. Or the current GAA without its soul. A Frankenstein’s monster wandering the Earth, wondering why it’s different.

Because providing a reliable sporting entertainment isn’t the GAA’s mission. If the GAA ever changes from that it will have ceased to be what it is, which is the single greatest common cause in our society.

All over the country, in the recession-hit and broken-hearted and bitter and divided Ireland of 2011, people give up their free evenings in front of the fire to take busloads of dirty, noisy kids back mountains and into glens to play busloads of other dirty, noisy kids in games referred by fat men with red faces with good hearts that mightn’t really be fit for running around any more. And they all do it for a chicken dinner at Christmas and an empty promise of an All-Ireland ticket if the county team goes on a run.

Of course, volunteers train kids to play soccer and rugby too. But it’s not the same. The connection isn’t as strong. One in a thousand soccer stars might get an apprenticeship with Dagenham United. The good rugby players will find out how hard it is to get a paying gig in a country with two and three-quarter professional teams.

But the GAA star still meets you at funerals and stands next to you in the queue at the Centra and has Ruby Walsh’s horse and high hopes in the Grand National sweep in the local.

People talk about the heart of the GAA being a full house in a floodlit Croke Park. It’s not. It’s a gang of kids and a fat man on the side of a mountain, and the kids beginning to realise that they’re from somewhere, not anywhere, and that matters. Long may it thrive.

The Doctor Who Christmas Special

An Spailpín Fánach is unlikely to be alone in considering the Doctor Who Christmas Special a Christmas TV highlight. But to really understand the appeal of the long-running TV show, it’s more instructive to look back to the summer, when the Doctor Who Prom was held in the Albert Hall.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who Prom is that music from the TV series can be used as a way of introducing children to orchestral, actual, music, as opposed to the unspeakable X-Factor and its vile spawn. But this summer, there was an extra twist at the Royal Albert Hall: they brought along monsters from the TV show.

Highlights from the Prom were broadcast in September and it was wonderful to see the reaction of the kids as the monsters suddenly clanked, glided and slithered down the stars, as appropriate.

The ideal audience for Doctor Who are not internet saddos. They are children, from about age seven to eleven, and those lucky souls who remember what it was like to be that age.

The great thing about being aged between seven and eleven is that you’re old enough to tell the difference between a grocer and a goblin, but you’re still innocent enough to believe that there are such things as goblins and spooks and weirdies in the first place.

And even though you know there really aren’t any monsters under the bed and the creaking in the house is just the wind – well, maybe it isn’t. Maybe this time it really is the sound the advance craft of Admiral Zozo and his Martian fleet landing in the garden, and it’s now down to you to save the Earth. Maybe. You never can tell, and there’s no point in taking a chance when the future of the entire planet is in danger.

And that duality, between having being told by your parents that there are no such things as Daleks or Cybermen or Venetian vampires, and then actually those crazy chicks in the white dresses gliding down the stairs in the Royal Albert Hall with those gobs full of pointy teeth – well, I don’t know about you adults, but I’m going to keep my two eyes on them and I advise you against making any sudden movements, or else it could be curtains for the lot of us.

And that’s the joy of Doctor Who. People who should know better have tried to load the show up with a lot of sturm und drang but it’s all my hat. If you want Schopenhauer, read Schopenhauer. Leave fighting the Death Lizards of Megalon 7 to the professionals.

This is something that the current Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat understands absolutely. He’s said that he decides on what goes on the show according to whether or not he thinks it’ll scare the bejabbers out of his kids. Once it does, it stays in the show. How perfect.

The Doctor Who Christmas episodes have been a mixed bag since they were introduced for David Tennant’s debut, with Tennant’s exit and the Kylie one being particularly weak. This year’s seems rather similar to a story by Chas. Dickens in its inspiration, but no matter. It’ll be wonderful for an hour. Christmas is a good time for Doctor Who. Who is Santa after all, but another traveller in time and space? Just like a Time Lord, in fact. Oh hold on ...

RTÉ Complacency, Incompetence Symbolic of the Greater National Malaise

RTÉ’s stunning and repeated coverage failures for one of the historic days in the history of the state is further evidence of just why we’re in the mess that we’re in.

The Observer hit the bulls-eye in its editorial yesterday. This isn’t just the failure of one Government, but the failure of an entire political culture. The media is part of that culture and, as the national broadcaster, RTÉ has a duty above and beyond all other media outlets to tell the people what’s going on. They failed in that duty.

Instead of having live coverage from outside Government buildings from when the cabinet meeting started yesterday afternoon, the national broadcaster decided instead to show Ireland’s Greatest Talent Show, Reeling in the Years and Fair City.

Aware that they were in danger of being scooped by both the BBC and Sky News, RTÉ managed to cancel Gaybo Laughs Back at half-eight to show the Government press conference live. Or almost live – the RTÉ feed was about a minute behind the British broadcasters. Evidence that RTÉ were really caught on the hop.

And then, the most astonishing decision of all – RTÉ cut from the press conference just as Vincent Browne was getting medieval on An Taoiseach, in order to interview their own correspondent. For no apparent reason.

The Nine O’Clock News did not reflect the momentous events of the day and RTÉ appear to have been quite content to go through the motions with a pre-recorded Week in Politics were the eternally mischievous Vincent Browne not hosting a special edition of his current affairs show. RTÉ appeared plenty interested in spiking Browne’s guns.

This is why the state is so deep in the soup. Because the higher echelons of Irish society – the banks, the broadcasters, the politicians, the legal profession - are all comfortable while the general population is utterly lost in what’s going on and genuinely terrified for the future.

Ireland needs a new politics. This is bigger than a single Government. The civil war politics has run its course and it’s time for new beginnings.

In Ireland, it’s more or less impossible to start a new party from scratch, for lots of reasons. The only hope is that one of the three major parties throws up a Gorbachev, an FW de Klerk or a John Hume.

Men who see the big picture and realise that they have to put a bullet in their own party to destroy their own politics to build a new system, as the old one is dead and stinking. We can only hope there’ll still be an Ireland when he or she rises. Go bhfóire Dia orainn.

Is TV Really Better Than the Movies?

Is TV really better than the movies? The debate is in the ether. An Spailpín was discussing the issue only a fortnight ago with a man acclaimed by many as the Pride of the Ross, and now I see the matter mentioned in passing in the Telegraph and in Edward Jay Epstein’s Hollywood Economist blog.

The Telegraph and the Hollywood Economist concentrate on the parlous state of the movie industry, and do a fine job of it. An Spailpín recommend’s Tom Shone’s Blockbuster of some years ago for further study. But this notion that TV is better than the movies is one that concerns us more so than the future of Hollywood.

That the movies are particularly bad at the moment is more or less beyond dispute. With the exception of shooting stars like The Hangover the output of the industry is generally dreck. But is TV really that good either?

The rise of cable TV in the States is the reason behind the rise in the status of TV drama. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Sex in the City on cable in the past ten years have elevated TV drama to a more adult and serious plane, while the rise of the cheap DVD boxset and Sky plus means that TV watching isn’t as time-constrained as it once was. You can consume TV on your own terms, in your own time.

However, An Spailpín can’t help but think that TV as an art-form is denied the most important thing that an art-form needs: permanence. Because TV shows are so very long through their runs, who is going to be able to sit through all of a particular series that didn’t catch it first time out?

Most people of this generation love The Sopranos. In ten years’ time, who is going to want to sit down and watch a six-series, 28 disc box set in the hope that it will be worth his or her considerable time?

You can call a friend, tell him or her you’ve just seen this great movie from the 1970s called The Godfather and recommend it highly. Within a week your friend can have called around, borrowed the DVD or downloaded it him or herself, and report back. Your discussion of your shared aesthetic experience can enrich both your lives.

But if he or she has never seen any of The Sopranos and you make your recommendation this week, he or she won’t be able to report back until the Six Nations rugby starts, unless he or she has a most remarkably dull Christmas and might then make the finishing line before the end of the FBD League.

And even then, the experience of an intense exposure to those 28 discs isn’t the same as the slow exposure that our generation has had to the Sopranos, when it wove itself into our consciousness over ten years. It’s the difference between letting the pint settle or draining it white.

And as every year since the Sopranos was in its heyday goes by, the references to Tony Soprano will become more and more obscure and will become meaningless, like those to Poldark or The Onedin Line.

Poldark or the Onedin Line? They were big deals in the 1970s, along with I, Claudius, Rich Man, Poor Man and Washington: Behind Closed Doors. All of them thought revolutionary, must-see, appointment TV in their day. But who bothers sitting through 20 discs of the Onedin Line now? What would be the point? That was then, this is now.

Fathers can watch Shane with their sons and share an artistic experience. Mothers can watch Gone with the Wind with their daughters, and everybody can watch It’s a Wonderful Life. You can’t do that with TV series. It takes too long.

The Sex and the City TV show was the most revolutionary cultural experience for fifty per cent of the population of the west. But will the woman to whom that show spoke be able to share that with their daughters when they’re old enough to understand?

It’s difficult to see how. The DVDs will be kept at the back of a press somewhere, only taken out in punishment towards delinquent gentlemen of the house who do not leave out bins, do not put down toilet seats or talk during the X-Factor. Time’s fell hand will have obliterated the rest.

Vote Bono. Because He Likes Money Too.

There may be a point to Bono. The man may be finally fit for purpose. Bono’s attitude to money is exactly in synch with the spirit of the nation, and we can all come out together in our fecklessness and greed by acclaiming the U2 frontman as Ireland’s Greatest in the TV gameshow of the same name. He is who we are.

At first glance, John Hume would seem the obvious candidate to win from the five nominees (James Connolly, Michael Collins and Mary Robinson (Mary Robinson!) being the three others). Hume’s inclusion among so motley a crew is rather like seeing Mr Lionel Messi on the first eleven of the Dog and Duck in the Sunday League, or Ms Nigella Lawson, pre-Raphaelite tresses confined to a hairnet, heaving bricks of lasagne onto the expectant plates of the masses in the Kylemore Cafe, all the while smiling and saying “Mmm, scrumptious!”

But John Hume doesn’t need some penny-ante TV show to tell him he did his country some service. John Hume doesn’t need to try out. Best then to use the show to come to terms with the real two faces of the nation, and who better to do that than The Fly himself?

Money has always been closer to Irish hearts than either rock or, indeed, roll and Bono’s hare and hounds attitude to lucre is perfectly in synch with the genius of the Irish nation. The music doesn’t matter – as a friend of mine delights in pointing out, the real star of U2 is David “The Edge” Evans, because he has to not only play his own guitar part but he must cover for the hopelessly incompetent bass-playing of Adam Clayton as well. Busy man.

Bono’s attitude to money, like everyone else’s in Ireland, depends on whether the money is his own, or whether it is someone else’s.

When the loot in question is someone else’s, the coin gushes hither, thither and yon, with no-one stressing very much about where it goes or what it does. Consider the story in the New York Post and Thejournal.ie last week about one of the many charitable causes to which Bono is devoted. Bono’s ONE Campaign, based in Washington, DC took in $14,993,873 in donations in 2008. From that fifteen mil, it gave $184,732 in donations.

That’s 1.2% percent of the loot, for those who are scoring at home.

The ONE Campaign has responded by saying that they are an advocacy group, rather than a wealth redistribution group. What, then, happened to the other $14,809,141? Well, eight million went in salaries. The other six million clams must got have got redistributed somewhere else.

When the money is Bono’s own, however, we discover a horse of a different colour. Edun, the for-profit ethical charity fashion house run by Mr and Mrs Bono has a mission statement to raise awareness of the fashion possibility of Africa, but the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that 85% of Edun’s 2010 fashion lines were made from materials from either China or Peru. And as soon as the taxman started eying the artists’ tax exemption here U2 famously decamped to the Netherlands, the better to hang onto their guilders.

Bono spends other people’s money like a sailor on shore leave but hangs onto his own just a badger will hang onto a wellington once his teeth have sunk home. One life, but we’re not the same, as it were. Who else so exquisitely sums up the State as we’ve been running it?

Vote Bono. You know there's no alternative.