Magnificent Seven and the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight under fire

IS Eamon Dunphy grateful to Gay Mitchell? He should be. He should be SO grateful. There Dunphy was yesterday, in the Newstalk studios, having been turned down by a bunch of presidential hopefuls he had invited onto the programme.

Out of the Magnificent Seven, he had Martin McGuinness and Gay Mitchell, full stop. His loyal listeners would have been looking out at the dire weather and resigning themselves to more presidential hopefuls being presidential.

“Being presidential” means standing four square behind enterprise, volunteerism, community effort and whatever you’re safely having yourself.

All of which is fine and will be part of the job facing whoever wins the election, but it makes for godawful boring broadcasting. Which, in turn, is why so many broadcasters (and print journalists) have been trying to get behind the pious aspirations in the effort to locate something personal, whether it’s the intensity of Dana Rosemary Scallon’s affiliation to the Catholic Church, the enviable omnipresence of Mary Davis on state boards, the precise wording of letters sent by David Norris to more people than he cares to remember or the possibility that Martin McGuinness belonged to Jimmy Breslin’s Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, since he makes no bones about having used a gun, but claims never to have killed anybody with it.

Almost all of the named candidates, asked about those aspects of their past, have got good and shirty, with the exception of Mary Davis, who, a little like Adi Roche before her, looks as if she is astonished by media people who, up to now would have treated her with wonder and joy, suddenly going over to the dark side on her.

Dana does a great version of shirty. It’s sort of halfway between Joan of Arc and a kitten. She got shirty with one interviewer for implying that because she’s a singer, she’s stupid, and got even more shirty with Ryan Tubridy for — as she saw it — implying that Dana is the mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, when in fact she is the voice of the whole people of Ireland.

Because she is a native speaker of television, because she also has an exquisitely calibrated sense of how it intersects with her personality, and because populism is meat and drink to her, getting mad works for her in a way it would not for many of the other contenders.

David Norris got mad on the Late, Late Show debate over being painted into the same letters/sexuality corner and he wanted instead to outline his vision for Ireland.

The problem with the way he shaped up to Ryan Tubridy is that he should have shut all this pederasty stuff down 10 or 11 years ago, when Helen Lucy Bourke invited him to join her in her role as restaurant critic and — the way he tells it — kept asking him questions about younger people being introduced to sex by older people.

Anyone with a titther of self-preservative wit would have gone silent at the dinner table, thought for a bit, and then told the hostess they found her line of questioning odd, inappropriate and designed to stereotype or caricature them, and that, thank you very much all the same, it was now time to leave her to have the rest of the meal on her own and go home to eat a couple of convenience store sangers. Instead, his desire to be helpful and entertaining painted him into a corner that Ryan Tubridy could not, in good conscience, avoid.

Michael D had a quite different problem. He had no difficulty answering questions about his past, he just wanted to point out that his past didn’t go back as far as people might think. He also neatly explained the origin of his limp, lest anybody think him footless.

THE Late, Late and its presenter came up with an interesting set of approaches to Friday’s programme. First came the formal interviews with everybody except David Norris, which allowed viewers to get a sample of what each was like, then came the debate proper. Which it wasn’t. It wasn’t a debate at all, and that’s not a criticism.

The production team obviously felt that in a choice between seven people jiving each other to death on the one hand, and a tightly orchestrated formal cotillion, the cotillion was your only dance.

Given that every one of the candidates would have had supporters standing off stage timing every second allocated to everybody else, it was the only way RTÉ could ensure any kind of balance.

In essence, then, what followed the interviews wasn’t a discussion, but hub-and- spoke questioning of each of the participants with minimal mutual interplay.

It was also a demonstration of just how difficult it is to sit in one of those upright chairs with nothing in front of you. You’ve got two choices. Jane Austen or sheep farmer. Either you sit with your hands neatly folded on your lap or you sit, legs apart, palms on thighs, looking ready for a good “Yee Haw.” Mary Davis and Dana rightly avoided the sheep farmer position.

Having, just a few minutes earlier, survived an encounter with Jedward, the living personification of repetitive strain injury, who were so sweaty from leaping around that their make-up had taken on the waxy texture of mature Gouda, Tubridy was taking no further nonsense from anybody.

He even became severely strict with the audience when, at some stage, they got enthusiastic about something and applauded.

There was to be none of that, he told them. So we watched each of the contenders in concentrated close-up with no audience participation.

The only one done no favours by this close-up was David Norris, who’s like a stage performer who doesn’t realise that he needs to reduce the volume and intensity of his performance when a camera is up close, if he wants to avoid looking slightly boiled and as if he is over-acting.

Sean Gallagher weathered the accusation of once upon a time having breathed the same air as was being inhaled and exhaled by Fianna Fáil-ers and Gay Mitchell didn’t get much of a going-over about HIS past. Who’d have thought that yesterday morning, with the breakfast only beginning to settle in stomachs all around Ireland and the newspapers still mucking up the bedclothes, that he’d set fire to Newstalk’s special presidential debate? He did, though. I can mention it because I’d nothing to do with it. Repeatedly, he did it. He would sink his teeth in McGuinness’s leg and when McGuinness, who seems reasonably comfortable with a bit of shin-chewing, shook him loose, he’d sink his teeth in Dunphy’s leg instead and refuse to let go, even with a commercial break bearing down on them all at speed.

When Dunphy got the two men back in their proper corners, he indicated that the programme was now back to reasoned discussion, as if that was what listeners wanted.

Uh, uh. In fact, Dunphy’s listenership probably doubled at the peak of the fight. The increase would have been made up of people who are good and fed up with candidates being presidential.

It’s safe. It’s dignified. It’s proper. But it sure isn’t interesting.