Back to the slums of old Dublin - and not a whiff of Celtic mist

TV REVIEW:IT'S ONE OF those inevitably true TV equations: the more times a presenter tells you how much fun a programme is, the more likely it is to suck the life out you.

"Lughnasa is all about fun," said Gráinne Seoige in her steady, unfun way at the start of Lughnasa Live(RTÉ1, Sunday), a most peculiar and – for all its potential – curiously flat programme. Most of us can't think of the word "Lughnasa" without putting "Dancing at" before it, but this marking of the Celtic festival had none of the spontaneity and giddiness so brilliantly captured in Brian Friel's play and Pat O'Connor's subsequent film.

The big idea seemed to be to give the facts and folklore of the harvest festival of Lughnasa in a celebratory way – a bit like Up for the Matchal fresco – and to temporarily haul Gráinne Seoige back from her day job on Daybreak,ITV's disastrous breakfast show. And the programme makers went to lot of effort. The live show was filmed in the open air in the replica Iron Age village at Craggaunowen in Co Clare – a brave choice in a cold, rainy July – with host, Seoige, interviewing a folklorist and some well-known faces about aspects of the festival.

Mixed in with the interviews and live music were films to illustrate some of the ancient rituals; so we had John Creedon panting up and down Croagh Patrick, and Mary McEvoy eating muff stew (no recipe supplied) on a hill. The Celts were big on mermaids, apparently – an excuse to show a clip of Colin Farrell in Ondine,together with a long feature about a woman in Galway who spends seven hours a day, everyday, swimming with a dolphin. Instead of prompting dreamy thoughts about mythological mermaids, however, it made you feel slightly sorry for the dolphin, which never seems to get a moment to itself.

Lughnasa Live was more hotch-potch than history lesson. And why go to the trouble and expense of a live programme? If it had been pre-recorded and edited, then they could have spared us the bit where Eddie, the impressively hairy seanachaí, proved to be almost comically boring, droning on about the awfulness of the youth of today, how nobody wants to listen to 90-minute stories anymore and how he was afraid of walking through Limerick.

"You're welcome back; you're missing a huge party," deadpanned Seoige after one of the ad breaks, though it wasn't clear in what way Lughnasa Livewas a party. Sure there was music and a pig on a spit sizzling away, but the sparse-looking audience perched in seats around the perimeter of the walls had the look of people who applied for tickets for the Late Late Toy Showand ended up in a field in Clare. It was all a bit too similar to those desperation-tinged "are we having fun yet?" New Year's Eve programmes that RTÉ used to make.

IN CONTRAST, there was so much to like about The Tenements, (TV3, Wednesday), a new four-part social history documentary series about life in Dublin's slums, particularly in those Georgian houses that were carved up in the late 1850s by wealthy landlords to provide accommodation for the city's poorest inhabitants. The 1911 census recorded that 104 people – 19 families – lived in one house in Henrietta Street, and the many historians who contributed to the programme gave vivid details showing how, 100 years ago, Dublin had some of the worst, most overcrowded, disease-ridden slums in Europe.

The census also showed that most families on that street had lost at least one child through illness caused by deprivation. As late as the 1930s, cholera, diphtheria and TB were rife, and the programme made clear that the desperate poverty wasn’t something from far back in ancient history – it was a living reality for some of the now-elderly contributors who, in the 1930s, were those barefoot children in the grainy black-and-white archive photos.

The actor Bryan Murray was an inspired choice of presenter: easy to listen to, thoroughly engaging and, being the son of a tenement dweller, clearly interested in the subject. The first episode in this well-made and well-researched documentary introduced us to the Winstons, a Dublin family with close tenement connections, their grandparents having lived on Henrietta Street. Seven of them from two generations have agreed to go back to the house and spend a few days living as their forefathers did. How they got on will be shown in the coming episodes.

THIS WAS by far the dullest TV week of the year, full of repeats that weren't worth watching the first time around – with the exception of Brendan Smyth: Betrayal of Trust(RTÉ1, Tuesday). First aired in two parts on BBC1 in March, it was shown on RTÉ this week as a single film. Director Michael McDowell's docudrama is a powerful piece of work about the paedophile priest's lifelong campaign of abuse, and the protection his superiors gave him which enabled him to have a long career as a child rapist.

The timing of the broadcast, so soon after the revelations in the Cloyne report, made it all the more stomach-turning and real. Based on investigative journalist Chris Moore’s book of the same name, it was simple, powerful and restrained – mostly due to the performances. Ian Beattie played Smyth, first as a charming young priest insinuating himself into family homes to gain access to young children, and then as evil old ogre. It was a genuinely creepy performance.

Maria Connolly and Patrick Jenkins played Anne and Patrick, working-class West Belfast parents of four abused children, who, once they realised what had been going in their own home, tried over several years – and in the face of intense opposition from the Catholic church they had so fervently believed in – to bring Brendan Smyth to justice.

There were flaws in the production. Its origins as a book were all too obvious; there was a sense of it being filmed chapter by chapter, which gave it an uneven pace. The dialogue in places was poor and there was an unnecessary and intrusive soundtrack.

That said, this wasn’t a docudrama that was trying to entertain. It was more about laying bare the truth through the story of one family, and it did reveal the impact on the victims and their bravery in coming forward, and the way Smyth’s superiors in the church behaved in protecting him and thus permitting him to abuse generations of children.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

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