John Hume - A Profile - RTE 1, Wednesday
Dead Man's Doctor - RTE 1,Thursday
Timewatch - BBC 2, Tuesday
Leargas - RTE 1, Tuesday
Questions And Answers - RTE 1, Monday
`He is somewhat absorbed in himself and concerned to maintain the leading position," said Garret FitzGerald of John Hume. Depending on how you choose to interpret these observations, Hume could be (a) deep-thinking and clearly focused or (b) egocentric and megalomaniac. Mind you, the SDLP leader has consistently attracted wildly opposing characterisations. In the past, attempts to explain Hume have swung between embarrassing hagiography and distorting hatchet jobs.
Olivia O'Leary's John Hume - A Profile did, in fairness, speak - albeit somewhat unevenly - to various shades of opinion on Hume. Opening with Ms O'Leary in a dimly lit, super-scholarly old library (Marsh's?), which seemed more appropriate for a profile of Felim O'Neill or Hugh O'Donnell, this 90-minute special was never going to be stuck for captivating footage. All of the period of the North's Troubles - from 1968 to the present - concerns John Hume in varying degrees of intensity.
Eamonn McCann spoke about "the selfconfidence of Derry Catholics" and the point was emphasised by Gerry Adams's comment that "the Short Strand (a small nationalist enclave in east Belfast) view of the world is very different from the Bogside view of the world". So it is. Sectarianism has always been more bitter in Belfast. Had Adams come from Derry and Hume from Belfast, it is unlikely they could have turned out as they did.
Anyway, the young John Hume, the eldest of seven children, was described as "studious", but "sporty" enough (football and cricket) to retain sufficient street cred. He left the seminary in Maynooth after three years because he couldn't hack celibacy. He returned to Derry and became a schoolteacher. In order to combat Catholic poverty and its exploitation by loan-sharks, Hume formed a credit union and became active against discrimination in housing.
"In order for Hume's arguments about it being possible to resolve problems peacefully to have worked, the unionists and the British would have had to agree with him. They didn't," McCann said. But middleclass Catholics, keen to remain law-abiding and reluctant to undertake radical action, were stirred by Hume. When he devised sit-down protests, he did so in places where traffic would not be disrupted. It wasn't tokenism. It was an appeal to reasonableness as he saw it - the mark of a man convinced not only of his own rightness but convinced too that opponents could be convinced of it also.
Footage of Bloody Sunday reminded viewers of how volatile and vicious the North was a quarter of a century ago. Just one week earlier, Hume and other civil rights marchers had encountered British paratroopers on the beach at Magilligan. Having been beaten and shot at with rubber bullets, they knew they were meeting a different "tougher" kind of British soldier. Hume said he cautioned against holding the march which would end, one week later, with 13 people dead and a another dying.
More or less chronological in structure, O'Leary's portrait dutifully picked its way through the seminal events of the Troubles. The first unionist it spoke to was Conor Cruise O'Brien of the UKUP. O'Brien was especially scathing about "Hume's influence over Garret FitzGerald". It is true the SDLP leader was closer - in working if not in ideological terms - to FitzGerald than to Charlie Haughey . . . not, mind you, that O'Brien suggested this represented any plus on Haughey's part.
The list of contributors - Haughey, FitzGerald, Reynolds, Adams, McCann, O'Brien, Ted Kennedy, Ivan Cooper, Joe Hendron, David McKittrick, Chris McGimpsey, Peter Robinson, Peter Brooke, Fergus Finlay and Noel Pearson among them - was impressive. It was, though, rather imbalanced. Was Ian Paisley, the other leading Northern politician active across the entire span of the Troubles, consulted?
It was notable that Hume's critics generally preferred to attack his actions rather than his character - the rightful focus of any profile. Peter Robinson did say, in the closing few minutes, that Hume has "a condescending view" of unionism and unionists. But, for the most part, resentment at Hume's access to US politicians and his way with words seemed to characterise unionist attitudes towards him.
The picture that emerged was of a man welded to his own convictions, conscious of his place in Irish history and sure of the rightness of the transformation he has centrally brought about in Irish nationalism. If persistence is the mark of the vocational reporter, John Hume would be Pulitzer Prize material. "He is the greatest living Irishman," said Fergus Finlay. Certainly, it's an opinion which could be defended, although it hints at a simplistic, Great Man view of history, which, ideologically, ought to be rather at odds with a Labour Party perspective.
Given the footage and the contributors, this programme was always likely to succeed. There was gossipy mention of the early SDLP members' "fondness for a drop" and of the fact that Hume is disorganised and "not great with kids" but mostly, it sought to explain its subject through his politics. As a history lesson, it was comprehensive. As a portrait, it was unsurprising. The most memorable line of all came from Hume himself: "Had Peter Brooke remained secretary of state, we would have had peace - and a lasting peace - an awful lot quicker." It was a pity neither Patrick Mayhew nor John Major was asked to chew on that one.
There were, unfortunately, quite a number of memorable lines in Dead Man's Doctor, Donald Taylor Black's "observational documentary" on Dr John Harbison, the state pathologist. Accounts of what scavengers such as rats and beetles can do to a corpse were not easy listening. Pictures of splattered bloodstains and partly burned bodies and a long segment following a forensic post mortem were, in documentary terms, instructive. But they were also hideous.
Filmed over eight months, from April to November this year, Dead Man's Doctor was strong on access. However, the decision to use extended captioning instead of a script was less successful. It did allow for Harbison to remain seamlessly central, but it shifted the viewer's focus rather too bluntly and too often. Still, it was another fine documentary from Taylor Black, whose series on Mountjoy prison received deserved acclaim earlier this year.
Harbison presented himself as a kind of old-world figure: tweeds, cords and squared shirts. He said things like "Mother is a mediaeval historian and brother is an archaeologist". The omission of the little possessive pronoun "my" indicated as much about class as a post mortem could about cause of death. Yet, Harbison seemed as tough-minded - as anti-precious - as they come. Just as well, of course: a quarter of a century of his work demands not only a medical degree but a degree of detachment and dispassion which is staggering.
Combing through the pubic hair of a corpse, taking undernail scrapings, even cutting a scalp from a skull - it was verite alright - but I was glad that I watched it on video. Sometimes, fast-forward is your only man. Harbison explained how, after getting his medical degree, he "lacked sympathy for patients" and "didn't want to deal with sick people". Forensic pathology allowed him to "return to the lab".
His work is crucial, of course, and his contribution merits celebration. But in how much detail? One anecdote about a crab which, having burrowed inside a human skull, gorged itself so much it grew too big to escape, was revolting.
No doubt, Harbison could rattle off other tales of forensic horror. In taking us behind the news headlines to see the State pathologist in action, Taylor Black gave us a flinty and compelling picture. This was a case of two genuine pros in action - but there was information and description here which many of us could live without.
According to Timewatch: In Search Of Cleopatra, the Egyptian siren "came from a long line of incestuous marriages". She may also have been black. Whatever the truth, she was a cute hoor - well, cute anyway. At 22, she told Mark Anthony, who was 52 and bald, that she had a cure for baldness. The concoction was beyond even anything you'd find in John Harbison's lab but clearly, Cleo was a saleswoman of brio and stature.
The problems in profiling Cleopatra - as opposed to say, John Hume - is that there's a dearth of footage from 2,000 years ago and her contemporaries are all dead. So, the camera must point at academic talking heads, linger on sweeping vistas of the Nile and zoom in on hieroglyphics. Egyptologist John Ray made the point that hieroglyphics had a strong PR function in their time. They exude propaganda at least as much as truth.
So, is the Cleopatra of legend - the beautiful, promiscuous, romantic queen of the Nile - a lot of codology? Maybe she resembled Maggie Thatcher - even like a black Maggie Thatcher. "It was her charm and not her beauty which was her major asset," one contributor said. (Well, she still could have looked like Maggie Thatcher.) A black, female American academic, desperate to appropriate Cleopatra for "AfricanAmericans" suggested that Cleo was "an intellectual".
But really, nobody knew. As straight history - explaining the Mediterranean of the period - this was instructive. It couldn't, however, deliver much on the real woman who was its focus. Defining Cleopatra in terms of the politics she practised, Timewatch failed to excavate the full human being from the events of the times. Watching Liz Taylor's Hollywood portrayal of Cleo, you realised that myth remains more dramatic than history. We never did hear whether the cure for baldness ("Egyptian 2000, perhaps?) worked.
Finally, Leargas and Questions And Answers. Recognising the demand for programmes about sport - now that Rupert Murdoch has stolen the football - Leargas focused on the relationship between Ireland and Glasgow's Celtic football club. Confirming that soccer is now essentially about money, Celtic shareholder Dermot Desmond and stockbroker Conaill O Morain were among the principal interviewees.
Leargas has been consistently lively this season and its decision to include English subtitles has been justified. Cathal MacCoille showed himself to be not just an avid, but a knowledgable Celtic fan. It was a modest programme, but it did manage to include Tommy Gemmell's and Steve Chalmers's 1967 European Cup-winning goals. For that, we can be grateful.
We can, though, be less grateful for the speak of the week on Questions And Answers by Fine Gael TD Brendan McGahon. Referring to Annie Murphy's involvement with Eamonn Casey, he remarked: "She was a consenting adult. She had been over the course before." I think we can take it that Brendan would not be burdened by excessive sympathy for Cleopatra.