TV View
Paul Flynn
IT has been ten years since Ireland’s football tribe packed their inflatable shamrocks, combed their leprechaun beards and set off for foreign shores in search of glory, craic and beer at a major tournament.
The police and the bar owners will have smiles as broad as the Vistula as Ireland’s football team do battle in the name of a bruised and bewildered nation. Just like Stuttgart in ‘88, the people need this.
If only the same could be said of RTÉ’s panel of experts, who greeted an expectant and pride-hungry nation with all the enthusiasm of an impending colonoscopy and, whilst the BBC’s coverage began with breathlessly surreal and quite alarmingly fascistic graphics: teutonic eagles storming Slavic battlements; celtic shield-walls repulsing bondholders and suchlike; RTÉ decided to splurge our licence fee on three nylon suits from Guiney’s of Abbey Street for John, Liam and chucklesome Bill O’Herlihy. Eamon, let’s face it, will be Louis Copelanded up to the max.
That and a lurid ultra-violet up-lit desk. The panel we have grown up with, groaned at, but learned from over the past few decades now look like three county councillors piloting a flying saucer.
Yet, for all RTÉ’s wobbly-wall production values, the football analysis is sound and as timeless as the Talmud.
Six games in and the ‘A’ team of Giles, Brady and that fellow who would make Simon Cowell hide beneath his waistband, are once again delivering their unique blend of equivocation and vivisection.
One welcome surprise is the introduction of the excellent Didi Hamman on the ‘B’ panel alongside Dunphy and some bloke called Richie Sadler who once took a throw-in for Bray Wanderers. Maybe he just wandered into the studio?
For the absorbing Denmark-Holland encounter, Hamman spoke with clarity, good humour and real insight. No hint of cliché and he seemed happy to be there which can only add to our experience. That is one classy scouser and I hope he sticks around.
Of course, it wouldn’t be anything without a couple of knock-down drag-outs between Eamonn and whichever panellist he decides to smack around the studio. Liam Brady got a little whiff of the Drumcondra cordite on Sunday night and Giles looks like he’ll have a bit of it if it’s going, so stay tuned.
Then there’s Bill. Like a geriatric labrador, he’ll happily accept a cuff around the lug just because he’s happy to be out of the cold. We all know it and we’re secretly longing for it.
We must be the only nation on earth who make the tea after 42 minutes of our team’s performance because we dare not miss the sight of a grown man being talked to like a slug on Mastermind.
RTÉ’s commentators are well-briefed, almost too well, in the case of Stephen Alkin who could tell us less without us having to digest his trivia whilst Spain are fizzing the ball towards the Italian goal at superwarp speed, but that’s probably because he’s attempting to drown out the mind-bending jackeen drivel of Brian Kerr.
I have nothing against the Dublin accent. I admit it isn’t my favourite, but when somebody using that methadone monotone abandons a sentence one-third of the way through in favour of another, then bungs in a few extraneous syllables, just for the craic (‘move’ becomes ‘mey-oove’) it sounds like the entire cast of ‘Fair City’ inside a washing machine set on a spin-cycle.
He’s watching world class football but he sounds like a geezer selling dodgy fireworks on Henry Street. Can’t they culchie it up a bit?
For all the glitz and bombast, BBC’s coverage will forever be mired in cack-handed and craven punditry. Alan ‘the passing, the movement’ Hansen rarely bothers to stir the pot amid the jingoistic fatalism (is that possible? - in England, probably) which gurgles from safe souls either side of him.
Which is why I’m sticking with the Irish coverage once more. The team may be but honest journeymen, but the old bruisers of studio one? Different class.
