Where history is skin deep

TV Review:Remember late autumnal afternoons in the schoolroom? Low sun through sticky windowpanes, a triangle of heat shimmering on the Formica desk-top, the buzz of an indifferent fly, the soporific drone of the history teacher and the waft of a blackening banana from your schoolbag? Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep . . . "Wake up, Fannin, and name your Fenians!"

The Catalpa Rescue, a great big dramatised historical documentary charting the intricate planning and execution of the rescue of six Irish rebels from a penal colony in Fremantle, Western Australia, in the year of our lord 1876, sailed on to the screen this week under the impressive spinnaker of RTÉ's Hidden History strand. The film faithfully reconstructed the story of the audacious escape, masterminded by John Devoy following a desperate plea from his Fenian brothers incarcerated in the snake-bitten cruelty of "the Institution" (not a jolly spot). The Catalpa Rescue wore its sensible and responsible use of its budget on its sleeve. The dramatised bits were dramatised to the max, with extras pumping lively fists in wood-panelled meeting rooms whenever the heavily bearded Devoy (Ronan Leahy) roused their rebellious passions. Other non-speaking roles included happily gruff-looking sailors in well-ironed Brittany sweaters and moustachioed prison guards with lively sneers. It all made for a good, honest, hard-working documentary that must have cost a small fortune to make, with square-riggers and gunboats, carriages with twirling spokes, galloping horses and sepia quaysides teeming with life, all of which were beautifully shot.

But that old schoolroom fly was a-droning and, as the film ticked its historical boxes, sharpened its unassailable fact list and got three gold stars in its copybook, one was engulfed by a familiar drowsy weariness. So, despite entertaining punditry from historian and writer Thomas Keneally (who described Devoy's mission as "a holy obligation, following a Christ-like cry from the grave"), this dramatised documentary was, like so many other examples of the form, an uncomfortable hybrid, with little room for characterisation or subtlety, ultimately boiling down to a humourless history lesson swathed in dressing-up-box play-acting.

'NOT QUITE UP to scratch when it came to being Irish" was how Graham Norton ("one of Britain's best loved entertainers", according to the BBC continuity announcer) attempted to define to an English audience what it meant to grow up an Irish Protestant, as he unravelled his antecedence in Who Do You Think You Are? Born in 1963 to a small and rootless family (his father, who worked for Guinness, moved the family around the country at breakneck pace), Norton initially appeared a somewhat reluctant participant in this popular TV parlour game. "Home was a place you sat in until it was time to leave," he said, driving through a soggy Bandon.

Norton's exploration saw him traipse through the heartland of loyalist Belfast - his mother was a Belfast "chicken-sexer", who met his father, a Carnew Protestant, in Dublin - to blow the dust off his family's baptismal records, revealing a great-great-grandmother with a pride of illegitimate offspring and a solid place in her community.

History Lite is the kindest definition one can give to the programme's commentary, which seemed to imply that the nationalist movement began in 1919 and which pirouetted over the Famine and the role of English landlords with one eye shut. However, back in Wicklow, remarkably well-preserved parish records and a helpful local historian revealed that his father's forbears had fought against the United Irishmen in the rebellion of 1798, with at least one of Norton's stock being rather decisively piked and shot ("They really mustn't have liked him," remarked Norton with his trademark sardonic amusement).

Norton is an interestingly obtuse character, and although his turn on the heredity roundabout revealed much about his lineage (he was able to trace his roots as far back as Yorkshire in 1672), the programme divulged little about the man himself, whose sexuality and nationality fit seamlessly into a mildly anarchic strand of British popular culture.

"It is comforting to be attached to something rooted so deep in history," said a sombre Norton, surveying his past, a tantalising glimpse of the man behind the mirth.

'WHEN IT IS raining, I wonder if he is getting wet; when it is cold, I wonder if he is shivering." China's one-child policy came under scrutiny in a courageous, shocking and heart-rending undercover documentary, Dispatches: China's Stolen Children, which examined the devastating social effects of a law which, since the early 1980s, has led to the selective abortion of an estimated 40 million girls. Focusing on an epidemic of child-kidnapping (particularly of boys, required by Chinese families for a variety of complicated economic and social reasons), the film followed the fortunes of the family of Chen Ji, a five-year-old boy, one of the estimated 70,000 children snatched in China last year.

Chen Ji's parents' raw and desperate search for their son revealed a society that has been thrown into disarray by gender imbalance: China's "little princes" are growing up without the prospect of marriage, but, given that girls eventually live with their husbands' families (thus leaving elderly parents alone and unsupported), the practical need to have a boy in the household is stronger than ever.

Most kidnapped children are never found. Local and provincial governments - desperate, it would seem, to keep this uncomfortable truth under wraps - forbid parents to put up "missing" posters, and official torpor means the traffickers are able to continue their work largely unimpeded. The powerlessness of the victims of China's extraordinary legislation was shocking to witness, as they faced enforced late-term abortions and punitive fines for having a second child.

The film showed the aching loneliness of an unmarried teenage mother, who, unable to apply for a birth permit without first having a marriage certificate, had no prospect of being able to take care of her unregistered infant daughter, a non-being, and was forced to sell her. "Unofficially adopted" was the phrase the programme-makers used; there are countless others like her. Indignation is a comfortable island. The parents of Chen Ji, and tens of thousands like them, are denied even this relief.

In this stunning and uncompromising programme, the last word went to the Chinese government, whose statement essentially denied the links between child abduction and the one-child policy, while acknowledging some social fallout from a strategy it intends to keep in place at least until 2010.

SINCE INHERITING THIS column I have witnessed so many TV breast-enlargements I feel I could carry out the procedure myself. Now, with the schedules smothering under the weight of silicone bags and cosmetic surgical detritus, programme-makers are straining to find a fresh angle to examine a phenomenon that is ceasing to be phenomenal. Come on down, Louis Theroux Under the Knife.

The slick Theroux, with his innocuous crewneck sweaters and manufactured naivety, spent an untaxing hour shooting dead fish in a barrel in the company of plastic surgery addicts in Beverly Hills. Flinging us handfuls of his plentiful glassy-eyed catch, he treated us to "pectorally-augmented" men (their nervy, Botoxed mouths twitching with desire for an "all-over Schwarzenegger") and "grade-three tosis" (saggy-breasted) girls, who forked out $2,000 (€1,400) a day to have some Pam Ewing-lookalike stylist tell them which particular "Michelangelo" of the surgery world was best qualified to make them "Playboy perfect". One documented race for perfection saw a young woman's navel being thrown around her "tucked" stomach like a lonely dice on a crap table.

This was a predictably awful rehash of painfully familiar territory until the daring Theroux, with his documentary sagging like an unmodified abdomen, upped the ante and signed himself up for liposuction. Continuing to interview his surgeon as long, thick needles were inserted under his skin (and poked around under there like twigs in mud), the man suddenly looked deeply uncomfortable. The procedure eventually produced litres of "extra virgin Theroux", which coagulated orangely in a cylindrical plastic sack. "That's a funny colour for a human being," said our bluey-white presenter.

Days later, his suppurating wounds seeping all over a bin bag delicately placed beneath him to protect his hotel's mattress, Theroux was still looking queasy. Quite what his sacrifice will offer to the genre is difficult to assess. Vanity and guilt were his abiding emotions, apparently; maybe he should also throw in a tincture of "grade-three" hubris.

LAST WORD FOR four short films under the banner title Limelight, which celebrate the 50th Dublin Theatre Festival and which have been scattered across RTÉ's schedule like high-grade confetti. Limelight features a crisply perfect performance from Eileen Walsh in Tom Murphy's witty Maid of Farce, Niall Toibín as a riveting ageing Brendan Behan in Patrick McCabe's The Forgotten, David Kelly as a dying playwright in Hugh Leonard's Heaven and a deadpan, dustpanned Bronagh Gallagher in Frank McGuinness's Clean the House.

Each film is tightly directed by Shimmy Marcus and is an exuberant testimony to just what can be achieved dramatically in a mere one minute and 30 seconds when you're dealing with quality.