Dear Boy - The Story Of Micheal Mac Liammoir (RTE 1, Thursday)
Millennium (BBC 2, Monday)
Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure (BBC 1, Sunday)
Would You Believe (RTE 1, Tuesday)
In the early 1930s Micheal Mac Liammoir had, it appears, an affair with General Eoin O'Duffy. Allegedly Mac Liammoir wouldn't have fancied a pretty boy so he took up with a man's man. O'Duffy, after all, served as chief of staff of the Free State Army and became a fascist leader, albeit quite a fluffy, cuddly-toy version by the European standards of the period. Still, bizarre as such an affair sounds - and it does, doesn't it? - perhaps it finally explains the "blue" in Blueshirt!
It's true too that in spite of the apparent absurdity of the pairing, we should do well to remember that many generals, like most actors, enjoy costumes, posing and posturing. Maybe Micheal and Eoin were well-matched. Dear Boy - The Story Of Michael Mac Liammoir was screened to mark the centenary of its subject's birth. Although he died in 1978, it was only in 1990 that it was shown that, contrary to his own version of his early years, Micheal Mac Liammoir was not Irish. He was, in fact, born Alfred Willmore in London of English parents.
We saw Alfred/Micheal tell Gay Byrne on a Late Late Show in 1969 that he had been born in Cork and left for London only when he was seven. The idea of Micheal Mac Liammoir as an early century Plastic Paddy - a kind of Edwardian Pogue - is no less bizarre than hearing that he had the hots for Eoin O'Duffy. I mean, if you put all that in one melodrama to be staged at The Gate, it would seem as overblown as a Jeffrey Archer plot. And yet, such is the story, or, more correctly, such are elements of the story of Alfred Willmore.
He came to Ireland, some (and not just his enemies) maintain, to escape being drafted into the British army. Well, it's hard to blame him for that. Once here, he did the old Norman trick of becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves. "The story of Alfred Willmore, who became Micheal Mac Liammoir is a great and serious and profound and inspiring parable of what it means to be really human," said Paul Durcan.
No, it's not, Paul. The story of Alfred Willmore, who became Micheal Mac Liammoir, is an engaging and unlikely yarn about a feisty, gay thespian operating in a very conservative, initially foreign country. He was, in fairness, ahead of his time - out of the closet before many people even realised that the closet existed. It is colourful, funny and sad but so are myriads of lives. It wasn't merely irritating that Paul Durcan should pronounce in a fashion as overblown as the most inflated Mac Liammoir melodramatics - it was distorting.
In general though, this profile, produced and directed by Donald Taylor Black, was illuminating. Mac Liammoir and his partner Hilton Edwards established the Gate Theatre in 1928, moved into their home at 4 Harcourt Terrace in 1944 and enjoyed a larger-than-life status in the characteristically repressed Dublin of the De Valera era. They did leaven versions of art and culture on offer to Dubliners by looking to Europe and not disproportionately to the Aran Islands as The Abbey, with its national project, too often did.
They seldom had money and yet they did contrive, Mac Liammoir especially, to live as bons viveurs and Renaissance men. But, in truth, Alfred could be as difficult as he was difficult to dislike. One anecdote told of his fit of on-stage jealousy when he was being outacted by the black American, William Marshall, in a production of Othello. Muttering on stage to distract attention from Marshall, Micheal, it was clear, was one of those actors who did not like to stray too far from centre stage.
Indeed, Micheal (or rather, Alfred) as actor Bill Golding pointed out "created a character to play in real life". Well, everybody does to a degree, of course. But the Mac Liammoir persona must have put great strain as well as added great spice to the Willmore self. Alfred Willmore had been a successful child actor in London. The reasons he had for transforming himself into Micheal Mac Liammoir, a legendary adult actor in Dublin, are undoubtedly complex. "To be himself, he had to create Micheal Mac Liammoir," concluded this documentary.
Maybe so. But you've got to wonder if there isn't an excessive degree of theatrical licence to such a pronouncement. Had Mac Liammoir been, say, a blue-collar worker, would he have been granted such a dispensation to indulge an alter ego to such a degree of ostentation and, arguably, distortion? In the long run, it probably doesn't matter that much. But there are theatrical truths which are not necessarily synonymous with fundamental truths and very often, professionals in the arts are the poorest of all in discriminating between them. None the less, a commendable portrait even if its separation of art from life was, ironically, for anything to do with Micheal Mac Liammoir, understated.
THE scope of Millennium, BBC's "history of the last 1,000 years in 10 chapters" is certainly not understated. For `chapters', read `episodes'. At 50 minutes a century-spanning chapter/episode, with five short films in each, there is just an average of 30 seconds devoted to each year, or, if you wish, about one second for every 12 days. Given such constraints, there will inevitably be arguments about the selection of themes and historical events for inclusion. This is indeed history painted with the extremely broad strokes of a yard brush.
Made by Jeremy Isaacs, who has produced an excellent television history of the second World War and a commendable one of the Cold War, the focus in this latest series is deliberately away from Europe and the West. Consequently this opening chapter, dealing with the world between 1000 and 1100, centred on China, India, the Islamic World, Japan and, only finally, Europe. Local spats such as the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 or the Battle of Hastings in 1066 - the 11th century dates best-known to Irish and British schoolgoers respectively - don't feature.
Instead, we heard that China, with its printing, paper money, compasses, waterpowered clocks, acupuncture, gunpowder, earthquake-detectors and kites to carry even people was top dog at the time. In food too, China led the world and Ma Yung Ching's "bucket chicken house" in Kaifung is, apparently, the world's oldest restaurant. (Don't ask - I don't know what the "bucket" means either but perhaps Colonel Saunders got the idea for his cut-price buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken from Ma.)
And this is a difficulty with such a gigantic perspective - not everything can be explained. This is, unavoidably, an impressionistic history and its generalisations cannot but invite quibbles. You could argue that even being deliberately non-Eurocentric is a particularly European approach at the end of the 20th century. It would certainly be interesting to contrast the attitude of this BBC series with those of other foreign broadcasters making and screening history series to mark the last 1,000 years.
Still, it is not merely impressions that feature. The opening chapter did cram in facts so that the dominant sense was of an impressionistic collage of news reports - a flurry of facts straining to depict an overall picture. Certainly, many of the facts, in themselves, were engrossing. For instance, Cordoba in southern Spain, then a Muslim city and the largest in Europe, had a caliph's pad with 3,000 slaves and a harem of 6,000 women. If such a set-up sounds like a recipe for a culture of industrial-strength Ansbacherism, it should also serve to remind us that 1,000 years is, from a truly comprehensive perspective, just a blink in human history.
Anyway, Isaacs's concentration on such themes as "explorations, innovations, empires and trade" is about right. Using the diary of Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court (and clearly the Bridget Jones of her time) we can see that gossip and sex were staple preoccupations even then. Sei's Pillow Book lets us know that she didn't like those blokes who, lovemaking concluded, just turned over on the futon instead of sharing their feelings. Well, it just goes to show that lad culture is nothing new. In all then, an engaging opener to an ambitious project. Like a Rolf Harris drawing, more will become clear when more broad strokes are added. We'll look at it again.
MILLIONS will, no doubt, also look again at Michael Palin travelling. After Around The World In 80 Days, Pole To Pole and Full Circle, the former Python has now set out on Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure.
Given Palin's affability and self-deprecating style, he seems an unlikely fan of the testosterone-fuelled Hemingway and his sad, mucho macho obsessions with hunting, shooting, bullfighting, womanising and drinking. Anyway, for this week's first of four episodes (not chapters) Palin travelled to Spain and Kenya.
In Valencia, he spoke to Vincente Barrera, one of Spain's top 10 bullfighters. Vincente said that matadors "really respect" bulls. Well, you can guess what he meant but is it the kind of respect that you'd like for yourself? Palin, eating bulls' testicles (allegedly unknown to himself) grimaced at Barrera's explanation but didn't really put up any opposition. Hemingway, presumably, especially with a mouthful of such essence de toro, would have nutted people with whom he disagreed.
Hemingway's justification for idolising bullfighting was that, when confronting death, people can experience life at its most intense. This is undoubtedly true but he could have got drunk and played in highway traffic if that's what he was seeking. Anyway, leaving Spain for Kenya, Palin switched from bullfighting to big-game hunting mode. Blowing wild animals' brains out with highpowered guns might well be a big game for the prats with the guns. It's unlikely, however, that the animals share this sentiment.
At one point we saw - thankfully, from a distance - a 13-year-old Masai boy undergoing ritual circumcision. In order to become a warrior the lad had to suffer the unkindest cut of all. We were told that he would experience two weeks of intense pain, during which time he would recuperate by drinking a mixture of milk and cow's blood. Palin, not surprisingly, didn't seek this experience for himself. Neither, at least as far as I'm aware, did the wannabe warrior Hemingway.
FINALLY, the still question-mark-less Would You Believe profiled the Jesuit priest, Fr Micheal Mac Greil. Trained as a sociologist, Fr Mac Greil, whose 1972 book Prejudice And Tolerance In Ire- land examined institutionalised inequalities here, fears that the situation has actually deteriorated since. He's right, of course, even if his appraisal of travellers seemed unduly simple-minded. As with the settled community, there are fine travellers and utter villains too.
But in an age when the Catholic Church is suffering great opprobrium - much of it fully warranted - Mac Greil's justice-seeking voice rang out with the distinctiveness of Micheal Mac Liammoir's spinning a yarn. As a total abstinence pioneer, he may well be rather partisan about that organisation's "radicalism". But his warning that millennium celebrations "shouldn't be a drunken orgy" rather clashed with his suggestion that if punters must go out this New Year's Eve, the drinks should be free. Nice idea - but just imagine the results as our equivalents of wannabe Masai warriors and wannabe Sei Shonagons crawled out into the third Christian millennium.