Past comes back to haunt us

TV REVIEW: Where Was Your Family During the Famine?RTÉ1, Mon, Cromwell in IrelandRTÉ1, Tue, RawRTÉ2, Mon, Samantha Who?TG4, Thurs

'HIS DEATH IS the totality of the crime, multiplied by one million." So said journalist John Waters when parish records in a small country church revealed the death of a boy, also called John Waters, who had starved to death in a marshy field on the edge of a bog. That boy, one of nine children, was a brother of the journalist's great-grandfather.

In 1845, Ireland's population was 8.5 million, a figure that, 50 years later, had halved. Between 1845 and 1851, one million people on this island died and two million more emigrated. For many of us, our knowledge of this tragedy is from dusty chapters in graffitied school history books; paralysed information, unimaginable facts about a world that seems entirely unconnected to our own. As we flit past the verdigris-coated Famine art on our newly restored quaysides, sipping our skinny lattes, bite-sized telephones soldered to our ears, what do we know of those who survived to become our forebears?

The opportunity to answer that question, by tracing their family histories with the help of genealogists and historians, was afforded to Waters, economist Eddie Hobbs, and model and businesswoman Jasmine Guinness, in the beautifully shot documentary, Where Was Your Family During the Famine?. It was one of two powerful history programmes from the national broadcaster this week, both of which prised open the lid of our barbarous past, making our current credit-crunch travails look like a minor swell in a dolly's tea cup.

Of the three, Guinness's antecedents were the most readily accessible, with a smattering of decorous conversation in Iveagh House confirming her paternal ancestors' somewhat constrained philanthropy, and a relatively straightforward path to the forebears of her warmly glamorous mother, a small family called Casey, who survived on their barren Northern fields largely due to the generosity of the soup kitchen.

"To middle-class families the Famine was an inconvenience rather than a problem," Waters was told by one historian as they perused delicately scrawled recipes for lobster soup at Strokestown House in Co Roscommon.

Later, Hobbs faced the fact that his family had not only survived but prospered during the Famine, his great-grandfather, a weighmaster in Cork's Butter Market, dying in the following century with 20 houses to his name. (Given Eddie's fiscal talents, somehow the words "stones" and "licked it" spring to mind.)

The level of detail uncovered by each participant appeared to affect them deeply, Waters's sojourn with the hollow ghosts of Castlerea workhouse being especially sad. "The charms of infancy have entirely disappeared," wrote one observer, attempting to describe a cavernous area littered with dying children who would soon share a limestone grave with parents incarcerated in adjacent rooms. Quietly devastating, this was an excellent, provocative piece of television.

THE OTHER BULLWHIP from the past, sent to beat us into submission this week, was the first episode of a two-part docudrama, the hearty and pretty classy-looking Hidden History: Cromwell in Ireland, presented by Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú and based on his book, God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. This determined, feisty and invigorating programme outlined Cromwell's short and brutal military campaign in Ireland in the mid-17th century, a nine-month orgy of violence during which an estimated 500,000 people were shot, piked, starved or sliced by a God-fearing Puritan army or left homeless and feverish to die by the bloodied roadside.

Central to lifting this grotesque history out of the tomb was a potent psychological portrait of God's executioner by a freshly wart-ridden Owen Roe, who, in his depiction of barely suppressed fanatical rage, looked scarily like the real thing.

Cromwell, we learned, was a man fighting and winning a war with his conscience, and Ó Siochrú drew interesting parallels between the "lord protector's" justification for the unprecedented carnage he wrought at Drogheda and that of the US military in Japan in the second World War. Cromwell apparently described his assault on Drogheda as "an act of God, to prevent the effusion of blood for the future". However, possibly believing that the "barbarous wretches" (that would be us) hadn't quite got the message, he then repeated the medicine in Wexford. Hiroshima may somehow have been presented as a ghastly way to end the war, Ó Siochrú argued, but if that was the case, what on earth could justify Nagasaki? Part two of this engagingly vociferous tale bleeds all over the screens next Tuesday.

FROM MUDDIED ENCAMPMENTS around the fortified walls of our wailing historic towns, circa 1650, to the rainy, shivering glitz of Dublin town, circa right now this minute. Set "in the heady world of a top Irish restaurant", RTÉ's new six-part drama, Raw, is best described (if you'll forgive the cooking metaphor) as television fusion, an interesting-looking platter that appears edible enough but leaves you with a strange taste in your mouth.

Raw's classy Dublin restaurant kitchen (which operates on a scale of hysteria, hostility and violence vaguely akin to some of Cromwell's more venomous moods) plays host to an international staff/cast. Among them is a posh English manageress with a convincingly swishy dress, an operatic Australian head chef with a ubiquitous banana (I mean bandanna), a pretty northern English bloke mixing the sex-on-the-beach (or anywhere else he can find it) cocktails, a shaky Czech salad chef, a stoical African kitchen porter, and an amusingly dysfunctional commis chef called JoJo (the terrific Charlene McKenna). So far, so steaming.

The plot is decidedly twentysomething angst in trainers: JoJo and her house/workmates don't waste their leisure hours alphabetising the spice rack; they drink heavily, deal a little in class-A drugs, get beaten up by central-casting heavies, bleed, play pool, have casually interesting sex with interestingly casual cohorts and occasionally (and herein lies the rub) engage in disappointingly flaccid dialogue over the restaurant linens. Recently, more serious RTE dramas about contemporary Irish life, such as Pure Mule and Prosperity, have scored with terrific writing and solid performances, while buzzier attempts at nailing the zeitgeist have been pretty dismal. With Raw, however, the national broadcaster comes close to redressing this balance. Okay, Raw doesn't feel all that much like Dublin (the restaurant, flat and bars could be located in Manchester or Manhattan), but the production values are high, the cast are generally attractive, and McKenna and Keith McErlean (who plays her errant brother, Shane) are very good indeed. But to diminish all that potential with a sluggish script is more than silly. "Pick a window, pick a window that I could f*** your useless brother through" roars the histrionic Aussie chef at the end of an already cliche-heavy diatribe.

"This article could really push your profile," says the sanguine but closeted restaurant critic with the pretty wife, who also happens to have screwed the gay Aussie chef (the journo, not his missus), thus ensuring a spiffing review despite the fact that his dinner is seeping into the kitchen linoleum and the barman is having his head kicked in in the gents.

Lisa McGee, the show's writer, has come up with lively characters in a budding setting, but somebody should offer the girl a gag-writer. It's a real shame that the dialogue in Raw isn't smarter and that the plotlines are so predictable, because a lot of the ingredients for a sophisticated sex-in-the-pantry drama are already in the pot.

'YOU MIGHT WANT to switch drinking arms, you don't want to bulk up on one side." Talking of one-liners, Cecelia Ahern's sitcom idea (which she probably sold to Hollywood for more dosh than she could fit in her Prada handbag) is now a fully grown series, which premiered in the US last year and began airing on the wide-awake TG4 this week. Samantha Who? is a watertight, low-carb, shopping-and-sex indulgence with, as you would expect, a clever premise: girl, Samantha (Christina Applegate), wakes up after eight days in a coma to discover that she has retrograde amnesia - in other words, she still knows how to shop but she doesn't recognise her mother (hey, it could be worse).

As Samantha's life begins to reveal itself to her, it turns out she was a hard-headed bitch, a vice-president of a scurrilous real-estate company who, when she wasn't beating Imelda Marcos to the shoe shop, was cheating on her groovy, mild-mannered boyfriend and berating her staff. Samantha's redemptive journey is about as plausible as a chutney-making gorilla, but, you know what, the script is as sharp as a Sabatier - and that's the magic component that salvages the dish.

tvreview@irish-times.ie