TV REVIEW: Avenging Terror, RTE1, Tuesday and Thursday Townlands: Island Life, RTE1, Wednesday Fair City, RTE1, Sunday Origins: Ice World, Channel 4, Monday
President Bush was not interviewed in Avenging Terror; neither direct to camera nor circuitously through clips of previous interviews. It was a pity, given that the first hour of this documentary was subtitled Dubya's Posse, and the second The Posse Rides Out.
This was the story of the Afghanistan invasion, of how his government pulled together an uncertain coalition of volatile states, successfully overran a country that had proven a graveyard for many armies and toppled a regime loathed by governments and human rights groups alike. If it had been Clinton in charge, he would have jumped at the chance of having his say and getting the glory, just as he did for Endgame in Ireland. But Clinton always came across as a man who knew he was born to be president, while Bush still has the gait of one who has inherited the hand-me-down suit. He walks as if overly conscious of the watching cameras. His gestures seem clumsy stabs at what might be presidential rather than a natural adoption of what is. He smiles at the wrong times, yet often looks comical when he wants to be serious. He is also famously inarticulate, which may explain why he so rarely puts himself up for even the lightest of television interrogations. In Avenging Terror there were plenty of anecdotes from the likes of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell in which they told of the President making a particularly bold decision, or of smoothly directing the diplomatic traffic.
There were pictures from inside the White House of Bush peering at documents over glasses, on the phone to world leaders and engaged in pensive discussion with his staff. Clinton used similar tricks during the Balkans, but he was also a man who could do his own sales pitch. Bush seems to need a layer of protection from himself. It only increases the sense that he is a rider whose horse has a better sense of direction than he does.
Avenging Terror was that kind of documentary, one in which you were being told a lot while at the same time nothing was being given away. World leaders and diplomats lined up, each more self-assured than the next. A narrative was woven in which victory was routinely grabbed from the jaws of defeat, in which triumph blithely overcame adversity. Given that most of these people still hold their grip on power, you had to presume that self-serving spin may have regularly been camouflaged as candour.
Besides, that this chapter of history is still unfolding makes retrospection a blunt instrument. We are documenting now, but only by the fifth or tenth anniversaries will we really learn.
In Island Life, Tony Smith had the gaze of a man in the grip of compulsion. He spoke to the camera with the calm conviction of one who knows he has crossed the boundaries of sense. On a trip to Donegal, he visited the mile by mile-and-a-half rock that is Inishbofin and loved the place so much that he decided to buy property there. This would be a less than remarkable fact if he hadn't become the first non-islander ever to do so.
He left behind his car dealership in Drogheda with a plan to set up a backpacker hostel; neatly described as a way of delivering young people to an island abandoned after the last school shut in 1981. Until recently, there was no running water or electricity on Inisbofin. The dampness gets into everything, rusting tools and softening accents. "It's quite aggressive when it comes to things rusting out here," said Tony, standing over a rotting saw, while yanking at a jammed pen-knife.
He built the hostel over the past two summers, returning to Drogheda in between. The weather was his greatest challenge and as he fought against the clock during that first summer, there were times when the waves rose on the shoreline and the rain came down as if they had a personal grudge against the island. On the last day of his first summer, as he left the half-built hostel behind for the winter, the sun shone like it was the first day of creation.
He managed to complete the job and on the opening day in July, the Tory Island ferry docked for the first time, and Tony's friends and family poured ashore. The locals looked on in wonder, their brains, perhaps, attempting to adjust to the sight of masses arriving rather than leaving. "I've got the place open. Now the trick is to keep it open." Let's hope that turns out to be the easier half of the deal.
They've finally found Billy Meehan's body, his chest hair growing wild in a patch of the Wicklow Mountains (Fair City).
There were maggots all over it, we learnt early on Sunday. Billy was a pretty rotten individual, so it would have been nice to know if they had crawled in from the outside, or out from the inside. Last November, his stepson Lorcan ended his brutal reign over the people of Carrigstown by clocking him over the head with a golf club. Lorcan has since joined the army, where they're teaching him how to kill properly.
At Billy's removal, the mourners stood around like extras from The Sweeney on a lunch break. There were so many leather jackets present that they could have qualified for headage payments. There were a lot of men with mopped hair and stubble, as if they were already modelling themselves on their identikit photos. Even the cops look like Billy. Detective Sergeant Byrne asks the questions while his partner Detective Deegan stands to one side and holds up the set. Both have bad suits and hair that's been doused in Brylcreem. They have been watching too much Miami Vice and not enough of The Bill. They seem quite content to drag this murder investigation on for as long as it takes. Given that the ratings aim for the sky every time this plot appears again, that could be quite some time yet.
Everybody involved now acts through gritted teeth. The mouth is pulled so tight that it drags hard on the forehead, until their whole face is rigid with anger. It's a look that's always had a recurring cameo in Fair City, but now it has taken centre stage.
Things are veering dangerously towards high camp. Pauses are overly dramatic, revelations arrive by the bus-load, scenes increasingly end with someone staring off into the middle-distance. All that's missing is the zoom of a camera that would lift the head off you. Any day now Billy will burst through the door very much alive, having wandered the city for 10 months with a bout of amnesia. His more evil twin will follow him close behind. Then, he will get amnesia.
According to Ice World, if you had stood in Central Park at the peak of the last Ice Age, you would have found yourself beneath half-a-mile of snow, which is more than enough to bury the Empire State Building. About 24,000 years ago, there was no ice at the Arctic, until, among other things, the creation of the Isthmus of Panama and the shifting of the earth's axis altered the flow of the planet's temperature, triggering a winter the Irish would have to invent new words to complain about.
We're still living out the tail end of it now, a nugget of information relayed to us by climatologist Richard Alley. He is a man who gives the impression that nothing would make either his personal or professional life more complete than to wake up one morning and find his house under half-a-mile of snow.
Ice World was an endearing bit of infotainment, real science mixed with a dramatisation of three Ice Age dwellers trying to escape an ice sheet advancing at 20 metres a week. If it was anything to go by, we were an attractive people back then, mostly of child-bearing age, and dressed from mullet to toe in the finest furs. There have been plenty of these ancient history reconstructions over the past couple of years, but these actors avoided the indignity of being given extra-large foreheads or grotesquely swollen jaws. The trade-off was that they had to speak a "highly complex" language that nobody has ever heard.
Attempting to pronounce the names of small Welsh villages seemed to do the trick.
It packed in a pub conversation's worth of fascinating facts. There were then less people in all of Europe than there are in modern day Birmingham. The ice sheet trapped so much water that the sea level dropped by 120 metres, so that you could have walked from here to Germany. In freezing conditions a beard is a liability. Exotic creatures roamed what is now your back garden. Darwin once found a rhino's tooth in a cave in Wales. He heard out the common explanation - that it had been left there by an animal drowned in Noah's Flood - before politely suggesting that the rhinoceros had in fact been native to this part of the world before the glaciers came. Lions and hyenas, apparently, would have been as much a threat to Europeans as the ice.
After years of living in isolated tribes, the Ice Age forced mankind to pool its intelligence, and proved a great leap forward in our development. Regular gatherings were held that acted as a showcase for the latest innovations. New weapons, say, or more attractive jewellery for trading with. That the hot water bottle wasn't invented until 23,000 years later seems to have been a major oversight.
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