'Battle of the Sexes'

My favourite bit on RTE's Battle of the Sexes – a segregated discussion programme in the first part of which a diverse panel of women led by Miriam O'Callaghan discussed gender issues in modern Ireland – was an inane video essay from John O'Keeffe about how women were less ladylike nowadays and didn't appreciate him enough.


Wandering around Dublin looking angrily thoughtful and drinking coffee, O'Keeffe bemoaned all the things that women had lost thanks to feminism – passivity, demureness, the condescension of the menfolk, and unquestioning adoration for the males in their lives.


"You threw away your femininity and embraced our worst excesses," he complained, before listing a bunch of these excesses (drunkenness, promiscuity, aggressiveness and greed – basically the hallmarks of most great historic figures). O'Keeffe had, like many males, been "happy with his lot" until feminism made him very, very sad: "We loved you, and in our own naive way we still do, yet at every opportunity you seek to undermine and diminish us."


"We remain the kings!" he said, "but we have lost our queens," he added sadly.


He was at the end of his tether. These assertive, belching, career women and ladettes had clearly been plaguing him for no-frills, brace-yourself-Bridget sex-action, but thanks to feminism he wasn't in the mood. He just wasn't interested in putting up with their "breakdowns" anymore.


Now, I'm not exactly sure what his point was, but I think he was threatening to withhold sex until the women of Ireland rolled back 30 years of progress. "I'm sorry, ladies, but the love doctor is closed for business!" he seemed to say in a sad, tough-but-fair tone of voice. It was the middle-aged male equivalent of: "If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it!" or more accurately "if you liked it (having me holding doors open for you occasionally), then you should have accepted the marriage bar, your status as chattel, and, probably, death in childbirth after spending the bulk of your adult life pregnant."


Back in the studio, the women had a choice to make – the right to work, property rights and legal protection from marital rape, or being put on a pedestal by John O'Keeffe. Now, he was hardly the alpha male some of the still-dating younger women craved. Back in the halcyon days when women were real women and men were real men, alpha males were largely silent, stoical, emotionally-repressed types who wouldn't have been caught dead having a whinge about relationships on national telly. So John O'Keeffe is actually a product of feminism, and as such he's the only good argument against it that I can think of.


Even apart from this, Battle of the Sexes was undermined by a more general silliness. Although the subject matter was worthy, having women on a panel one week and men the next was daft (tonight, it's Ray D'Arcy with a bevy of blokes) because if you're advertising a 'battle', what's the point of keeping the combatants apart? It's well-meaning and egalitarian, but it also means that there are far too many voices for either coherence or a good scrap. Whenever a promising discussion gets underway, someone with a third agenda is always sure to grab the ball and run off the field in a different direction.


As for the public-attitude statistics which punctuated the programme, they may suggest pseudo-scientific sociological thoroughness, but they're actually beside the point, because next week someone will do another survey and we, the whimsical people of Ireland, will have totally different opinions. Such surveys don't really tell us much about the real pros and cons of change, and their real purpose is to give perpetually surprised columnists something to write about and content-hungry television producers something to screen. That said, I'd be interested to see how the attitudes of Irish womankind are affected by the John O'Keeffe sex-ban.


O'Keeffe isn't the only one perplexed by the modern world. Dr Christian King (Emun Elliott) in BBC's new sci-fi drama Paradox is similarly bamboozled by modern ladies and their inscrutable ways. "If I kissed you now, would you hit me or scream?" he asks detective Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite), a woman he has just met. "Would we end up making love or would I be arrested for assault?"


"Jesus Christ, man, you're in the workplace!" I shout. But the writers must intend Dr King's pervy spiel to sound gnomic and deep, because instead of reaching into her handbag for a can of mace (as I found myself instinctively doing), Flint smouldered. You see, apart from being a human resources time-bomb, the brooding Dr King is also a genius "space scientist" (this is how he's described on the BBC website) who operates a UK Ministry of Defence super-computer which, for some unexplained reason, receives amateur photographs of catastrophic events in the future from somewhere in outer space. Flint's job is to stop these events from happening. So as well as misfiring sexual tension, we also get some dull 'time'-related dialogue between the sceptical detective stereotype and the creepy, emotionally-repressed, conceptually-aroused scientist stereotype.


"My time is valuable!" insists Flint (like B-list Batman villain Time-Twister).


"You know nothing about time, Detective," says King smugly (like B-list Batman villain The Clock King).


"I know when my time is being wasted!" says Flint fierily (like B-list Batman villain Professor Arturo Von Time) before she and her team of cops attempt to stop the future from happening anyway, egged on by overly dramatic music and the sight of King mugging and looming in the background like a big freak.


They shouldn't have bothered. Our heroes fail; a train collides with a gas tanker and 73 fictional people die. If such downbeat endings were to occur every week, it would be a truly ground-breaking programme: a Beckettian drama about the futility of fighting fate. I wouldn't watch it, mind; it'd be far too bleak for me. But right now that touch of nihilism is all it's got going for it.


You think trying to change the future is hard? Well, enter the nightmarish world of a rural backbench TD ham-fisted by proportional representation, dynastic politics, clientelism and his own ignorant vanity. It was inevitable that someone would eventually set a sitcom in this milieu. It was less inevitable that it'd end up being very good. Val Falvey TD stars Ardal O'Hanlon as the eponymous TD, is written by Arthur Mathews and Paul Woodfull, and features plenty of laugh-out-loud bits (one constituent reveals to Val that she swam in a toxic waste-infected lake because there was "a nice Jacuzzi effect"). It's hampered sometimes by lack of budget, but in general it successfully occupies that space between surrealism and kitchen-sink realism with which most Irish townsfolk are only too familiar. It also reminds me that if I didn't have this weekly outlet in which to vent my various telly-based neuroses, I'd probably just call my TD.