Freedom on the agenda

TV REVIEW: EndgameChannel 4, Monday Compulsion  UTV, Monday Bear Grylls: Mission EverestChannel 4, Monday Maddie: The Oprah Special  TV3, Thursday

I DON’T really like bank holiday weekends. There is something tedious about having to put on hold a week that is going to get you by the short-and-curlies anyway as soon as you wake up on Tuesday. However, by way of compensation for the dwindling break, there are often pretty good pickings for the slumped three-day-weekend TV viewer.

Two new one-off dramas hit the screen for the occasion: the first was Compulsion, an absurd reworking of a Jacobean tragedy, the second a riveting drama about far more recent history – the beginning of the end of apartheid.

Endgame, by award-winning screenwriter Paula Milne, focused on the true story of secret talks held in an English country house in the late 1980s between representatives of the South African government, prominent Afrikaaners (including Prof Willie Esterhuyse) and ANC exiles (including Thabo Mbeki). This extraordinary group of characters was brought together through the covert brokerage of Michael Young (played by the brilliantly understated Jonny Lee Miller), the public affairs director of Consolidated Goldfields, and worked together to secure the release of Nelson Mandela and kick-start a political process which ultimately led to the end of the apartheid regime.

This was an intimate film distilled from a massive canvas, and it is to the tremendous credit of Milne and director Pete Travis that such a comprehensive and coherent play was drawn down from such intricate material. Although a factually based interpretation of the actual talks, the film seemed to operate on a higher level than a mere dramatised documentary or journalistic recreation. At its heart was the understanding, vocalised by a minor character in the film’s opening sequence in Soweto, that a person’s humanity is measured according to their relationship with others, and that those who perpetrated and supported the regime were as much the victims of apartheid as anyone else.

“There is a deep-rooted fear in us that we will be punished for all the terrible wrongs we have inflicted,” said Prof Esterhuyse, in a beautiful, moving performance from William Hurt. Esterhuyse, a liberal philosophy lecturer but a man steeped in Afrikaaner history and culture, slowly developed a deep and affectionate friendship with the passionately articulate and personally wounded Mbeki (a flawless and riveting interpretation from Chiwetel Ejiofor), their relationship a metaphor for a broken country.

The film ended with poignant and nostalgic real-life footage of Nelson Mandela’s release from jail. Having travelled the long road with the characters assembled around the table in this emotionally turbulent drama, watching Mandela’s walk to freedom, once again, felt like a moment of spiritual release. Wonderful.

OH, BUT YOU have to kiss a hell of a lot of frogs before a piece of work as fine and resonant as Endgame comes along. From the sublime to the farcical: move over, Endgame, and hello, Compulsion.

A reworking of the 17th-century Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling, the film was entirely predicated on the idea of a beautiful young woman, Anjika (a dull Parminder Nagra), becoming sexually transfixed by Ray Winstone (playing a corpulent chauffeur who says "get in ve car, dahlin" with the ferocious repetitiveness of a plastic dolly with a string in its back). The Changelingmay have been a tragedy, but Compulsion, with all the passion and urgency of a wet cardigan, turned into a laugh-out-loud comedy.

Opening in Anjika’s blisteringly luxurious familial London home, the film began with the young Cambridge-educated Indian woman battling her conservative father, who wants to arrange a marriage for her. But Anjika, madly in love with her chap, Alex, whom she met in university (his goofy scarves proving him an educated and sensitive type), has no intentions of succumbing to tradition. And when she hits the sack with Alex in his airy London flat, on his lime-green sheets, she seems like a thoroughly modern girl who is as happy as a lark.

However, when her father’s chauffeur, Flowers (Winstone), offers to get her father’s chosen suitor off her back in return for a sexual favour, she acquiesces in a most old-fashioned way, delivering herself to Flowers’s hotel bedroom like a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter.

Oh no, Anjika!, we cry. Forsooth, give not your troth to the brute in the cheap suit! But hold on to your periwig! After one turn on the merry-go-round with Winstone, Anjika becomes a slave to her passion! And, as her pretty doll’s house world crumbles, it’s only the power stored in Winstone’s pants that can sate her.

Oh, don’t make me go on. In the end, Flowers helps Anjika stab him in his hearty stomach, killing him, so that she can be free of him, free to dress up in a pretty little shot-silk party dress and trot off down the aisle with the perennially unsuspecting Alex. Oh God, the tedium, the crushing boredom.

From brutality to sentimentality (Flowers offers Anjika a weekend in his mobile home in Dungeness), this was a walk in the park for Ray Winstone, a phone-in performance we could all have lived without. This was 17th-century porn in celluloid, the go-on-you-know-you-want-it fantasy of some stockinged old geezer with the hots for the chambermaid.

FULL OF GUSTO and unintentional comedy, and truly far more entertaining than the endless steamy machinations of the princess and the chauffeur in Compulsion,was a passionate tale of derring-do on the icy slopes of Mount Everest.

Bear Grylls: Mission Everest was an extremely long programme, during which my arteries hardened with lack of exercise, in which Bear, endurance king and adventurer, attempted, along with his mate, Gilo Cardozo (who actually names these people?), to fly over Everest with tumble-dryer-type engines on their backs. “Paramotors” they were called, these buzzy little machines that Bear and Gilo (I cannot even write “Bear and Gilo” with a straight face) assembled in order to fly above the height of the jolly big mountain.

Now someone else can fill you in on the exceptional-bravery bits and the fascinating-statistics-about-temperature-and-altitude bits, but I’m just here to report on the extraordinary number of emotions and sherpas that Bear and company went through in order to get the damn machines to base camp and hover for a while over the mighty peak. We had daddy Bear saying goodbye to his weeping wife (who didn’t think flying over Everest in a washing machine was hubby Bear’s brightest idea) and three baby Bear sons (possibly best not to mention that one of them was named Huckleberry). We had impatient Bear on the mountain while his fluffy-headed sidekick, Gilo, tried to rub two sticks together to get the engine fired up. We had chilly Bear with frostbite on his manly, Eton-educated cheeks. We had cross Bear when his mission was aborted because the weather balloon burst and Gilo lost his catapult. And then – at last! – we had brave Bear snuggling up to his propeller for take-off, which was quickly followed by ecstatic Bear and weepy Bear before been-Bear-done-that trotted off back to the family den.

Christ, I was exhausted, and I hadn’t even managed to lift myself off the couch.

tvreview@irishtimes.com