Present Tense

  • Saturday column: Pitching it right

    May 25, 2008 @ 11:28 am | by Shane

    WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAS a long, long night of Champions League football and an even longer night of football coverage, although this applied more to RTÉ than to ITV or Sky Sports.

    If the stats had popped up on the screen, in football terms RTÉ would have spent far more time on the pitch than its rivals, because once half-time was done and dusted, the broadcaster didn’t go to a single commercial break until well after the last unused substitute had danced around the trophy. Instead, the Irish viewer was treated to analysis before extra time, during its half-time changeover and before the penalty shoot-out. A small screen - with mini-Giles, Dunphy, Brady and O’Herlihy - even slid into view at the appropriate moments.

    ITV, on the other hand, gave the viewer ads. Lots and lots of ads. It was only just short of squeezing one in between each of the penalties. And when it had run out of ads, it took a minute to remind viewers of what other sporting action it had in store. Finally, it got to analysing the action, although the important action was flashed through so quickly that its panellists had little time to actually talk about it. Instead, they clung to the platitudes that help them float at such moments. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Pictures and lies

    May 19, 2008 @ 9:36 am | by Shane

    THE NEW YORKER magazine has just run a fascinating profile of Pascal Dangin, the fashion and publishing worlds’ most sought-after retoucher of photographs.

    In the March issue of Vogue alone, he “tweaked” 144 images: 107 ads, 36 fashion pictures and the cover. From his desk, he splices skyscapes, changes the colour of the sky, makes the grass more grassy and gives actresses digital boob jobs, knee lifts and neck transplants.

    “Maybe we could redo the ass,” a photographer suggests. “Yes, the ass is quite heavy,” Dangin replies. (more…)

  • Saturday column: History or histrionics?

    May 3, 2008 @ 7:48 am | by Shane

    ‘THERE IS, of course, no ending to history,” Bertie Ahern told the joint Houses of Congress on Wednesday. History was a popular word in his speech, mentioned nine times. And history was a word commonly used in the run-up to his big moment. It would be, we were told repeatedly, an “historic” address. Afterwards, it was confirmed across the board that the Taoiseach had indeed “made history”.

    We’ll come back to that later, because history was created elsewhere this week. At the Crucible theatre in Sheffield, in fact, where, according to several newspaper and radio reports, the English player Ali Carter “made history” by making this the first World Championships in which maximum 147 breaks have been scored twice in one tournament. “Made history,” no less.

    Yes, the name of Carter, Slayer of the Baize shall be uttered through the aeons.

    In the media, history is made every day. Sometimes it is made several times a day. It is reported so much, in fact, that the term now holds as much value as a Zimbabwean tenner. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Hopelessly Lost in Lisbon

    April 26, 2008 @ 8:04 am | by Shane

    EVERY ONCE IN a while an issue comes along that is of great importance to the State and its citizens, which must be discussed openly and about which the people will ultimately have their say.

    But which just happens to be so dry that people’s eyelids involuntarily droop at the very mention of it, their brains rebel 30 seconds into every debate, and their breath quickens when anyone asks them for their opinion. Because they realise that, yes, it’s a terrifically important issue - it just happens to be really hard to pay attention.

    You’ll have guessed by now that this is a column about the Lisbon treaty. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Deathwatch

    April 21, 2008 @ 9:27 am | by Shane

    If you were so inclined, you could get up this morning, turn on the television and watch women giving birth for the rest of the day.

    You would have a selection of channels on which to watch it, and a variety of methods.

    Water births, standing births, Caesarean sections, emergency births, routine births, American births and British births.

    You will not be able to watch deaths. You will not be able to find entire channels dedicated to helping people face up to the end of their life. There are none that offer advice to family or friends; that follow the last moments of the terminally ill so that you might better appreciate how it will be when your time comes. Death happens about 150,000 times a day, and will happen to each of us. But there is no Death Channel. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Bertie’s big twist

    April 5, 2008 @ 9:57 am | by Shane

    ON WEDNESDAY, it became obvious where Cecelia Ahern had inherited her narrative skills from.

    Her father, it seems, has passed on not his penchant for tortuous, intricate and confusing plotting, but his ability to introduce a sudden twist at the moment you least expect it. This week’s was surprising, effective and satisfying. Most important for the general public, it was tremendously good fun.

    Every story needs a twist, but this is an era in which surprises come rarely. The weekly glossies have destroyed the suspense of the soap opera, whose plots are now revealed weeks before climaxing on screen. Instant media means movie twists are spoiled before they hit the cinemas; books are scanned and posted online for those who want to skip straight to the end; US TV dramas are reported, dissected and spoofed in the few days it takes them to cross the Atlantic.

    Meanwhile, because it knows the public gets a kick out of a newsflash, Sky News has devalued the concept by running “news alerts” all day, even for the most minor stories.

    Bertie Ahern, it seems, appreciates just how much the public loves a good shock. In hindsight, when the discussion gradually turned to the question of when he might go, the answer should always have been “when we least expect it”. He had already proven his narrative élan last year when he allowed the rumours about the date of an election to stretch out almost to the point of tedium. Then, at possibly the least likely moment imaginable, dawn on a Sunday morning, he travelled to Áras an Uachtaráin - trailed by political correspondents so unprepared they might as well have been half-dressed and had toast sticking out of their mouths. (more…)

  • Saturday column: The percentage game

    March 30, 2008 @ 7:05 pm | by Shane

    IF YOU picked up a copy of Metro or Herald AM on your way to work on Wednesday morning, you would have learned this stunning statistic: almost half of women love doing the washing-up.

    What’s more, 70 per cent dream of a pampering experience, such as a spa break or a manicure, as they are doing the washing-up.

    And who brought you this vital research? Fairy washing-up liquid.

    Surely this was done as a bet by a marketing man, insisting to his naive colleagues that no matter how ridiculous, how un-newsworthy, how skewed, how obviously a survey is an advert disguised as “news”, that he would be able to get it into the papers? But there it was, accompanied in Metro by a big picture of Fairy’s new “hands” model.

    So what, you might think. It was a jokey survey in a tabloid freesheet.

    Yes, but the brand got itself a cheap ad, potentially seen by millions of commuters across Ireland and Britain. It’s good going for a washing-up liquid, and sets the bar a little higher for those PR companies who use surveys to get column inches. And that’s pretty high, because the bar has been going up a notch almost every day since the mid-1990s. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Marching to the lifestyle fascists

    March 26, 2008 @ 9:56 pm | by Shane

    (Due to technical difficulties, this didn’t appear on Saturday.)

    *

    ON WEDNESDAY night, RTÉ1 broadcast a new series, Not Enough Hours, in which a man with a clipboard and a camera crew came to the aid of a workaholic.

    At the start, the workaholic was filmed slogging all the hours he could.

    After half an hour, he had transformed into a contender for Dad of the Year. This is the miracle of television. A man with a clipboard and a camera crew can improve a life in less time than it takes you to realise that there are not enough hours in the day to waste on watching Not Enough Hours. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Teeth returned to food critics

    March 17, 2008 @ 5:00 pm | by Shane

    During a four-year spell as this newspaper’s TV reviewer, I would get an occasional, but forceful, sense of a subject’s displeasure.

    I was once called a cretin on live radio.

    A passing remark about a particularly ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer was followed by a letter accusing me of having an anti-Northern bias. I didn’t, but I had developed an anti-ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer bias. (more…)

  • Saturday column: RTÉ’s taxation programme

    March 8, 2008 @ 4:47 pm | by Shane

    Taxes, you will not be amazed to hear, are not popular. Politicians spend their careers promising to cut them. People spend their days whingeing about them.

    When it comes to the television licence fee, some spend their lives dodging them. About 15 per cent of households don’t have one, RTÉ recently complained. Although, given the attitude of the licence fee ads - condescending, scornful - even the most conscientious citizen must feel like rebelling. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Once upon a time…

    March 2, 2008 @ 12:21 pm | by Shane

    For an industry that is hell-bent on entertaining the public, Hollywood has yet to figure out how to put on a decent Oscars show. Poorly produced, overly-scripted and with its set cobbled together from the uncharred bits of the Towering Inferno , this year’s telecast dragged on for 200 minutes - longer than most trilogies.

    Even the highlights package on RTÉ the next night seemed to run longer than a cricket test match. And yet, it still left out the event’s one true highlight: Marketa Irglova’s speech. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Just say no to the same aul’ jargon

    February 11, 2008 @ 8:33 am | by Shane

    More than €10 million worth of cannabis was seized in a raid on a criminal gang in Kildare this week.

    The amount was so large that, added to the €1 million worth seized in another recent raid, we are already close to topping the €15.6 million total seized in all of 2007. And will this make a difference to supply? Barely.

    In the current issue of Hot Press, there is an interview with the Minister of State with responsibility for drugs, Pat Carey. “The ‘war on drugs’ business, let’s stop using that aul’ jargon,” he says. “This kind of top-of-the-head stuff to grab headlines is irresponsible . . . this does not contribute to the public debate.” How sensible. Except that Carey is pictured wearing a large badge containing the phrase “Say no to drugs” - which is aul’ jargon that is as empty-headed now as it was when championed during the 1980s. Saying no to drugs is not something this society has done before. A bright shiny badge isn’t going to be the tipping point. (more…)

  • Saturday column: The happiness story gets old

    February 4, 2008 @ 9:57 am | by Shane

    A report this week came to the conclusion that middle age is, on average, the worst age. Across the US and western Europe, especially, people in their 40s are least happy with their lot. The mid-life crisis, it turns out, is the crisis.

    But we know that already. Enough novels, plays, comedy sketches, and country and western songs have reinforced the stereotype. But what was more interesting in this report from the University of Warwick is how things improve. Life doesn’t continue on a downward slope. The graph doesn’t sag like the skin. Instead, as people move into old age, they feel happier about their lives. Which is revolutionary, because, in a society obsessed with putting off ageing - with reversing it, with ignoring it whenever possible - it suggests that we should instead embrace it. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Recession - a beginner’s guide

    January 26, 2008 @ 11:25 am | by Shane

    During the week, a great many Irish people will have heard a lot of talk about something they had doubted really existed.

    They might have presumed it was a myth; a bogeyman; something parents use to scare their kids. But now there was something coming and, even if they couldn’t recognise it, they knew it was ominous. It was the sound of unsold villas and unsailed yachts; of restaurant shutters and bank managers’ frowns. This was the sound of an approaching recession. And they may have wondered: so what that they’re losing all this money on the stock market. Can’t they just get a bank loan?

    Anyone entering college this year - and plenty of those who have left - will have no memory of economic gloom. They have grown up in a country that got itself together just in time for their arrival into this world.

    The tales of the old Ireland are to Irish teenagers what stories of the second World War are to a generation of British kids. There goes the old man with his recession stories again. Yes, we know you didn’t have lattes in the 1980s. And that you only went on one foreign holiday a decade. And that you couldn’t have gone for a shopping weekend in New York for fear of screwing up your Morrison visa. You’ve told us about it a thousand times already. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Teenage kicks, so hard to delete

    January 21, 2008 @ 10:20 am | by Shane

    Most of us did dumb things in our teenage years. None of them, however, led to the deployment of 30 cops, including two dog squads, a critical incident response team and a police helicopter.

    None of them entertained the world’s press. None of them led to dedicated computer games, websites and YouTube fame. None of them inspired T-shirts.

    But the misadventures of a teen can now become a global phenomenon within hours. This week, the honour belongs to the Melbourne 16-year-old who, while his parents were on holiday, advertised his party on MySpace. Some 500 people turned up and triggered a near-riot of drunkenness, streaking, vandalism and, reportedly, semi-naked Twister. Accompanied by a public display of insolence bigger than Australia itself, the young man’s dedication to living life as if it were a 1980s high-school comedy has made him one of the most talked-about people in the western world. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Games stop

    January 12, 2008 @ 10:48 am | by Shane

    This column will be about computer games. Please don’t turn away.

    I mention that only because the subject appears to be regarded by newspapers as an effective reader repellent. Millions play computer games, but it seems that few want to read about them. It is a thriving, multi-billion-euro cultural behemoth, but there are more interesting thriving, multi-billion-euro cultural behemoths elsewhere.

    For the first time in about a decade, I’ve been playing computer games. I’ve been spending time on an Xbox 360, a machine that plays games, downloads movies and is so addictive that if it housed a microwave and a mini-fridge then you’d only have to get up whenever the sofa needed replacing.

    Largely, I’ve been playing Halo 3, the final instalment of the best-selling series in which the player takes the role of “a biologically-altered super-soldier who must defeat the Flood unleashed by the Covenant”. More accurately, the player must ignore the story and just shoot lots of things to survive and reach the next level. Which makes it, in a way, not that much more advanced than Donkey Kong. Except that its barrels actually look like barrels. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Shortt shrift for the critics

    January 5, 2008 @ 11:20 am | by Shane

    A company is offering Killinaskully-themed holidays. You can tour the Tipperary villages of Ballinahinch and Killoscully in which Pat Shortt’s sitcom is made. There’s a complimentary jumbo breakfast roll upon arrival, followed by a power walk down the street.
    You can have a pint and a pink Snack in the pub which doubles as Jacksie’s. And then you can go home and a) tell your friends all about it or b) never ever mention it again. (more…)

  • Yawning in the face of apocalypse

    December 15, 2007 @ 3:10 pm | by Shane

    Climate change is the “defining issue of our time”, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it in Bali this week. He is right, this is the greatest story of our time.

    Which is why it seems a little churlish to ask this question: why isn’t it the most exciting story to listen to?

    It is not that the threat of global chaos and mass extinction is boring. Hollywood would be extinct by now if it were. But the snappily-titled 13th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change proved that this looming Armageddon is too often presented as if it is some type of bureaucratic conundrum. (more…)

  • Saturday column: The coming “War on Christmas”

    December 8, 2007 @ 11:12 am | by Shane

    This week, an Irish chain of creches decided not to put on nativity plays for fear of offending non-Christian parents. Later in the week, there was the controversy over the removal of the word “crib” from the Veritas shops’ radio ads. These were diverting tales of our times, tailor-made for those who can’t say the words “political correctness” without adding “gone mad”. But more ominously, they were the first signs that the War on Christmas has reached our shores. If you tolerate this, your Easter will be next. (more…)

  • Saturday column: Beware the faulty moral compass

    December 1, 2007 @ 2:29 pm | by Shane

    Should you be looking for film reviews, you should try MovieGuide.org. It’s a hoot. The Christian website views movies on a scale from “Wholesome” to “Abhorrent”, and summarises plots through their supposed theological standpoints (Beowulf: “light, undeveloped Christian worldview with strong pagan elements”.)

    Right now, its chief concern is with The Golden Compass, a movie based on the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy written by Philip Pullman. Or “an avowed atheist”, as MovieGuide.org clarifies. It concludes that: “A society shaped by the materialist and godless ethic promoted by films like The Golden Compass is a society without hope.”

    The site’s founder, Ted Baehr, has explained that when the trilogy ends, “All [ the central character] Lyra wants to do in her life at the end of the trilogy is sexually pleasure herself with her friend”. Readers of the book will recognise that as a statement that proves only that there is nothing filthier than the mind of a religious puritan.

    Pullman’s reaction? “Oh, it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world,” he told Newsweek. (more…)

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