…Awards season that is. Some of the first ‘For Your Consideration’ posters

My interview with Julianne Moore in Day and Night in today’s Irish Independent

Julianne Moore is watching a YouTube video on Day and Night’s phone entitled ‘Julianne Moore Loves To Cry’, an edited compilation of all the scenes from her movies thus far where she breaks down in sobs. The clip lasts three and a half minutes.

“Yeah I’ve done a lot of crying in movies,” she laughs, sitting back on the sofa in Claridges hotel in London. “The thing is I just don’t get that many opportunities to do comedy, and I love it. I did some episodes of [US comedy show] 30 Rock last year and it was so much fun. Alec Baldwin is a genius. I probably watch more comedy than anything else.”

The 49-year-old certainly gets to show off her humourous side in the comedy-drama The Kids Are All Right, in which Moore stars as a hippy, wannabe gardener named Jules, who lives with her uptight doctor partner Nic (Annette Bening) and their two children – from the same anonymous sperm donor – 18-year-old, college-bound Joni (played by Alice in Wonderland star Mia Wasikowska) and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson).

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The London Film Festival wrapped tonight with a double whammy of very different new flicks starring man-of-the-moment James Franco – I was lucky to cram both of them in.  With these two under his belt, Franco can look forward to some major award-love next year – if there’s any justice anyway.

127 Hours: Brilliantly directed by Danny Boyle, and performed with intense commitment and empathy by Franco, this true story about Aron Ralfston, a climber who resorted to amputating his own arm to free himself from a trapped boulder, has a surprising thread of humour running through it even as the tension and Aron’s increasing sense of panic builds. Delirious and desperate, he sets about his grim task in a final bid for survival – and the viewer isn’t let off the hook for one moment of it. My audience tonight spent those last 25 minutes of the movie squirming in their seats, hands over their eyes and mouths all while simultaneously cheering and crying. It’s an extraordinary cinematic experience. I came out of the Odeon stunned, I’m sure a little pale, but feeling utterly exhilarated.

Howl: Documentary film-makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s affectionate, intelligent and wonderfully inventive tribute to and celebration of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg benefits immeasurably from Franco’s restrained, under-the-skin central portrayal of the ‘Howl’ author. What’s most impressive is how the movie interweaves that most famous poem into a wider narrative about the 1957 obscenity trial it provoked, deploying animation to give Ginsberg’s language, imagery and ideas a subjective, illuminating, cinematic hue. A really impressive and stirring – actually, quite moving -  film.

The Mr Men series of books tackles Mad Men

I met Julianne Moore in London yesterday to talk about her new movie The Kids Are All Right – full interview will be in Day and Night in the Irish Independent this Friday.

My feature about academic TV books in Weekend magazine in today’s Independent

Woody Allen once quipped that “in Beverly Hills, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into television”. But Woody should try to tell that to the ever-growing school of academics and thinkers who have been turning their chin-stroking, theory-based gazes upon some of the most popular and acclaimed American shows on television.

Over the past few years there has been a mushrooming in the number of books published that critically analyse the artistic and intellectual merits of shows like Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, The Office, The Simpsons, The Wire and The Sopranos.

The latest show to get the brainiac treatment is 30 Rock, the multi-award winning showbiz satire starring Alec Baldwin and comedienne-of-the-moment Tina Fey. Entitled 30 Rock and Philosophy: We Want to Go To There (borrowing one of Fey’s character Liz Lemon’s most memorable utterances), the book’s many contributors use episodes of the sitcom to explore some of the same kind of philosophical debates and conundrums that perplexed the likes of Confucius, Plato and Aristotle (the collection’s editor cheekily calls the study ‘Fey-losophy’).

So, for example, one writer addresses what 30 Rock tells us about the concept of friendship;  another probes what the show makes of the morality of corporate management. Elsewhere, Tracy Morgan’s character Tracy Jordan is used to examine race and white guilt in Obama’s (supposedly) post-racial America, while the workaholic, permanently single, biological clock-oriented Liz Lemon comes under the spotlight in an argument about Third Wave feminism.

The ‘..And Philosophy’ series of books has been extraordinarily prolific of late: other shows to get similar treatments include South Park, Family Guy, Battlestar Galactica, House, Mad Men, 24, The Daily Show, Heroes and True Blood. Given the open-ended nature of philosophy as a discipline, is it simply the case that these writers can pretty much read whatever they want into these TV shows? Or are they legit?

“I’ve always felt that there’s great scope for philosophical analysis of television,” says Helena Sheehan, a professor in the School of Communications in Dublin City University, and author of Irish Television Drama: A Society and Its Stories.

“That’s because every story, including every television drama, presupposes a world view, and every show and its characters embody different world views. The best drama then sets these world views in collision with one another.”

The upsurge in publishing on individual shows is obviously a reflection of the high quality of American television, in particular, over the past decade. What’s interesting is that television – long derided as chewing gum for the brain (and often rightly so) – is now apparently held in such high esteem as to warrant serious professional interpretation.

“I think it’s a reflection of the higher level of education of the television audience,” says Prof Sheehan. “It also stems from a realization on behalf of the people who are making television, and especially their advertisers, that they didn’t have to reach absolutely everybody in the audience, and that there is scope for producing more intellectually stimulating television drama.”

Despite, or perhaps because it’s her chosen specialist field, Prof Sheehan admits that even she is surprised by how much the study of TV has grown over the past 10 years. “That’s a reflection of the strength of media studies as a discipline,” she suggests.

“Up until the 1980s you could never study these things in university. I started teaching in third level in the 1960s and most academics at that time didn’t even have a television. If they did, they were apologetic about it, calling it “the idiot box”. It’s really quite amazing.”

Clearly, such attitudes towards television are no longer commonly held. In some ways it’s astonishing that it took so long for the study of a medium so phenomenally and universally popular to get an inkling of credibility.

“Television is the prime cultural medium for the masses, for all of us,” says Dr Bernice Murphy, director of the MPhil in Popular Literature in Trinity College Dublin. “Very few people don’t watch television. It’s quite similar to the standing of popular literature, which has often been held in disdain because it’s popular. It’s what most people read most of the time.

“You could say that 90pc of TV is rubbish, but 90pc of anything is rubbish. At the moment, particularly with American TV, we’re having something of a golden age. I think that’s because the writers on shows like 30 Rock, Mad Men, and The Sopranos tend to be extremely intelligent people. The Simpsons, famously, almost exclusively recruited writers from Yale and Harvard. In another life these people might have been academics themselves.

“What’s more, if you look at the online message boards about Mad Men, the level of discussion going on is at a very high level. These people are not academics; they’re ordinary people who are just extremely interested in these shows. So it’s not surprising that enterprising publishers would try to latch onto that.”

Another major reason for the proliferation of books about TV is due to the dominance of DVD boxsets. In a way, books such as the one about 30 Rock are like DVD extras, which specialise in behind- the-scenes titbits, and revelations about the machinations behind and ideas running through the show’s narratives.

“The boxset is a much more immersive experience,” Dr Murphy explains. “People can watch it in their own time, devouring huge amounts of it in one sitting, like a great novel.”

In Dr Murphy’s opinion, 30 Rock, which is about to start its fifth series in the US (to be broadcast on 3e later in the autumn), deserves to be taken seriously. “It’s slapstick and very silly in many respects, but it’s also incredibly smart at the same time,” she says. “It will have jibes at whatever is happening in pop culture and American politics, but also have fart jokes. That’s a good combination.”

As well as 30 Rock, the recently-departed Lost also gets the academic treatment, though that show is probably a more obvious candidate for critical study than any other TV series of the last decade. “Lost was an adventure show, but also a deeply philosophical, if ultimately quite confused drama as well,” argues Dr Murphy.

“The websites, and authorized and unauthorized material that spun off from that show were incredible. Lost had people running out to buy Flann O’Brien’s books because they were mentioned in an episode.”

Alas, as all regular viewers of the box can painfully attest, there is still a shocking amount of dreck clogging up the television schedules. However, that doesn’t mean that those programmes and genres (*cough reality television cough*) should be sidelined by the boffins.

“Even bad, superficial television needs to be written about to expose why it’s bad and why it’s superficial, especially if it’s getting a mass audience,” says Prof Helena Sheehan. “If people can put up with them, they should write about them. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to write about television you admire. In my writing about Irish TV drama, I gave time to the ones I felt were awful and to ask why RTE made them in the first place. They have their place too.”

*30 Rock and Philosophy is out now, published by Wiley.

My interview with Elton John from Day and Night in today’s Independent

The cavernous screening room of The Electric Cinema on London’s Portobello Road might be hot and sticky on this late autumn afternoon, but a chill has just passed through the assembled crowd.

Everyone is here to listen to the first playback of Elton John’s new album, The Union. The 63-year-old has a notorious aversion to the press and something of a reputation for being — to put it politely — difficult.

Shivers run down the spines of all those in attendance as fears grow that the Elton of the (in)famous fly-on-the-wall Tantrums and Tiaras documentary has turned up today.

“Elton requests no talking during the playback,” a handler sternly instructs Day & Night on the way in. “No flash photography please — it upsets Elton. He will not be sitting in for the playback and will answer questions afterwards for 30 minutes only.” Well, that’s us told.

However, when the artist formerly known as Reginald Kenneth Dwight finally ambles into the room, it immediately becomes clear that we were worried over nothing. Dressed in a simple black suit with a green T-shirt, tinted glasses disguising his eyes, the star seems shy, humble, and positively embarrassed to be there. Luckily, he’s also affable and in a frank, open mood as he speaks well past the designated time slot.

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Some real 1960s adverts in honour of the season 4 finale of Mad Men tonight

My feature on the new series of Reeling in the Years in today’s Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

It has been voted the most popular Irish television programme of all time and consistently tops the TV ratings through annual repeats. There are even anecdotal reports that at least one foreign embassy in Dublin directs its new staff to watch the show as an introduction to Irish history and culture.

Now Reeling in the Years is coming back to Irish TV screens with a new series covering the tumultuous decade just gone – the Noughties.

Just as its previous four series looked at the stories and soundtracks from each year of the period 1962-1999, Reeling in the Years – The 2000s will cover domestic and international news, events and pop cultural emphemera as diverse as the Millennium Bug, the triumph of George W. Bush in the chaotic 2000 US presidential election, 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, the Jumbo Breakfast Roll, Roy Keane and Saipan, the Special Olympics, SSIAs, the smoking ban, Bertiegate, the rise of reality TV shows like Big Brother and Popstars, Thierry Henry’s ‘Hand of Gaul’, and the phenomenon of fake tan.

The show is the brainchild of Cork-born producer and director John O’Regan, who, prior to joining RTE, worked in British television on shows like World in Action, This Morning with Richard and Judy and The Russ Abbot Show. It was through his work in the UK that he happened upon the initial idea for what would become Reeling in the Years.

“The BBC had made a retrospective-type show in the late 1980s called The Rock and Roll Years,” John explains to Weekend. “When I was at Granada we produced a programme called The Rock and Goal Years about soccer clubs in northern England that married the music of the year with the soccer events of the year.

“Reeling in the Years is essentially an Irish version of that. When I came back to Ireland in 1998, I put the idea forward to RTE, we made a pilot, and then they were happy for us to make a series. The 1980s series was broadcast in 1999, the ‘90s in 2000, and then the ‘70s and ‘60s in 2002 and 2004 respectively.”

John says he originally decided to focus on the ‘80s for the first series not only because RTE had already made archive series’ about the ‘60s and ‘70s around that time, but because he had a “natural familiarity” with the ‘80s.

“I could glance at the Irish and British charts of the 1980s and know every song in any given week, as well as the lyrics and the bands’ other songs, because that was the soundtrack of what was on the radio when I were growing up,” he explains. “The 80s were also far enough away to be recalled while also close enough for a generation to remember.”

John, his two researchers Ronan Murphy and Rhenda Sheedy, and editor Ray Roantree started work on the new series in January of this year. “It takes about 10 months to make a series between research and balancing the workload with my other role as RTE’s Executive Producer for Current Affairs Special Events,” John says.

“The way we work hasn’t changed since the first series. We start by looking at newspaper and TV reviews of the year, and then make a list of the stories and items to be considered. That covers TV commercials and programmes, sport, politics, movies, current affairs, and music.  We don’t exclude anything.

“Once we’ve made the initial list, we start looking through footage. I’ve deliberately never counted the amount of hours we process because we’re better off not knowing! We keep going until we think we have enough. At the same time I’ll go through the charts for every single week here and abroad and make a list of songs that I think might suit the mood of certain events and items.

“Then we go into editing. To make one half hour takes about 10 days in the editing suite, where there’s a lot of juggling and debate about what works and what doesn’t. We usually end up with about 30 items for a 25 minute show.”

The key objective, John believes, is for the show to balance, in both music and content, the serious and the light, the entertaining and the educational. “Obviously, 9/11 and its consequences – Iraq, Saddam Hussein, the Bali, Madrid and London bombings – dominate the foreign footage for most of the Noughties,” he says.

“We thought a lot about how to appropriately treat 9/11 in the 2001 episode because it’s a defining moment of the decade. Whether or not we’ve done it right is up to the viewers. But then, on the other end of the scale, I’m editing the 2006 episode at the moment and we’ve included a clip of Pat Kenny demonstrating the Nintendo Wii on the Late Late Toy Show. That’s the balance we want.”

Despite, or perhaps because, of Reeling in the Years’ enduring popularity, John is reluctant to speculate on why the show seems to have struck such a chord with Irish viewers. “We never expected the show to be so successful, but perhaps it’s because it doesn’t have a presenter or talking head to mediate or get in the way of people’s memories,” John says.

“It may have a more direct connection for people who can remember the time, and a more indirect one for people who weren’t around or didn’t notice these things. I always liked to think that you could watch this programme and still get something out of it if you weren’t alive at the time,” he says.

“If we’ve done our job, you should be able to put three generations in front of a TV – grandparent, parent and child – and they all get something from it. The text captions should ideally give you enough information to follow events being described, but also hopefully trigger curiosity in a younger generation about the events they’re seeing. If viewers don’t notice the 25 minutes going by, that’s when you know it works.”

*Reeling In The Years – The 2000s begins on RTÉ One at 7.30pm tomorrow night (Oct 17).

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