Television: Terry Wogan’s legacy hard to spot in RTÉ’s portrait of a life well lived

The current series of Legacy series is wrapping up this week with Legacy: Terry Wogan (RTÉ One, Monday), about the late, great Limerick-born BBC broadcaster. I'm not sure about this series: it has departed from its original track, as an exploration of a person's legacy, and become a broad-stroke obituary series.

The first of the series’s three programmes did a good job articulating the legacy of the murdered journalist Veronica Guerin, but last week’s film, about the government press secretary PJ Mara, was less successful. Future historians exploring Mara’s role in the evolution of modern Irish politics may well conclude that he left a major national legacy, but this programme didn’t convince us. Instead the film was taken up with Mara’s pals saying how great he was. This is what pals do (at least when someone is dead).

The Wogan film is also more like a talking-heads-style obit, in which colleagues and acquaintances talk about his life. Many of them were on the airwaves when Wogan died in January, saying much the same things. With many of them there is no sense of being particularly close friends, and none of his family is participating.

There are some good stories, though, especially from Wogan himself, through interviews he gave to RTÉ. An interview with Gerry Ryan is particularly interesting.

The film gives a clear sense, as his former colleague Mike Murphy describes, that Wogan had a terrific career in the UK and a very happy personal life, but there is little sense of the broadcaster’s legacy.

History is always written by the victors – and so are celebratory documentaries. The Story of Yes (RTÉ2, Monday), shown to mark the first anniversary of the marriage-equality referendum, is a joyous, personal, uplifting and always emotional piece of work.

It is widely understood now that a key part of the Yes campaign’s strategy was to bring personal stories to the fore. LGBT people told their stories about coming out, about living in a society that treated them differently, about how much a Yes vote would mean to them.

Hugh Rodgers’s film follows that model, stressing the extraordinary change in society as well as, through interviews, the happy ordinariness of the lives affected by that vote.

In their kitchen in Drogheda, Co Louth, Anthony Kinahan and Barry Gardiner talk about campaigning and their fears that the vote wouldn’t go their way. Joey Kavanagh explains how his Get the Boat 2 Vote campaign, to bring Irish people home from the UK, took off.

Aoife O’Driscoll and Anna McCarthy Adams describe how they were trying to get pregnant through IVF just when the marriage debate kicked off. The posters from the No side, with their message that babies need a father, went up on every pole. The women are filmed at home now, putting together a cot, folding baby clothes, talking about how relieved they are by this vote for equality.

That’s the tone that comes off these women and all the interviewees whose lives have been affected by the outcome of the vote: a sense of relief without a hint of triumphalism about the result.

A Reeling in the Years element comes in when archive clips are shown of some of the many tense TV debates in the run-up to election day, the mobilisation of Yes campaigners in the weeks and months before, vox pops from the time, and ecstatic scenes from count centres and Dublin Castle. Sharp editing gives the film a feelgood momentum.

Watching the snippets of TV debates is the only time the No side is heard – reasonably, I suppose, because this is the story of the Yes side. During those debates they articulated fears, presented scary scenarios and made dire predictions about society if the referendum was passed.

So what do the No siders think now? The Yes win was decisive, but the film doesn’t do more than brush by the fact that two out of every five voters said No. Three-quarters of a million people is a lot; a year on, it would be interesting to hear what they think now.

Wallander in sunshine in the southern hemisphere? It's as bizarre an idea as Miss Marple sleuthing in the Bronx. In every other series of Wallander (BBC One, Sunday), the definitive Nordic noir starring Kenneth Branagh as the small-town police detective, the bleak Swedish countryside, with its dark, chilly days, has been so present it's nearly a character. The pervasive gloom has shaped so much of the action that it's hard to imagine Henning Mankell's creation anywhere else.

But here Wallander is, in The White Lioness, in sunny, warm South Africa, in the first of three feature-length dramas. It is the fourth and final series of the exceptionally absorbing series based on Mankell's bestselling crime novels.

It’s not just the weather that has changed: Wallander is different as well – outwardly, anyway. He’s at an international police conference, staying in a modern beachfront hotel. With all that blistering sunlight coming in those picture windows, this is definitely not what we’re used to.

Our first sighting of Wallander is in his hotel room as he peers in the mirror while sprucing himself up. He shaves, tucks in his shirt, slips on a tailored linen jacket.

The Kurt Wallander we’ve come to know wears shades of ill-fitting brown. He is a crumpled bag of a man, his shoulders slumped as if the grey skies are pressing down on him while he momentarily suppresses his dominant sense of disillusionment.

During the conference Wallander is pulled aside by the local police chief: a woman has been missing for several days from her home in Cape Town. She’s Swedish; perhaps the detective could reassure her troublesome husband that everything is being done to find her.

Wallander begins investigating the disappearance, which involves local politics, a big-money property deal and many scenes in the chaotic townships. The threads of the plot fray, and it gets difficult to follow, but Wallander does solve the mystery.

In the second film, to be shown this weekend, Wallander is back in Sweden. The opening shot features a car park on a dark night, the visibility even poorer because of a freezing mist .

I've cheated and watched both it and the final-ever episode of Wallander. They are terrific, though heartbreaking. This sunny one is an aberration.

tvreview@irishtimes.com