Untameable (RTÉ One, Thursday, 10.15pm) is an unusual documentary fished out of a deep, dark place. Or two documentaries, uneasily entwined and each about the Irish bog. The first strand focuses on Seamus Heaney, for whom the bog was mystery and muse – and a portal to understanding Ireland’s restless relationship with its past. So far, so heady. The other component is a more straightforward consideration of Ireland’s relationship with its bogland; specifically, the tension between the preservation of the landscape and its exploitation.
There’s a lot to wade around in here, and the mood is sombre, if never pretentious. But, just as there is something comfortingly mournful about a swampy grey Irish landscape at dusk, so Untameable makes for gently absorbing viewing. This is slow television that has the stillness of grey water reflecting cold sunlight. What should be dull is instead gripping.
It does help if you like bogs, though. Fortunately, everyone involved loves them. There is brooding narration by Ciarán Hinds, speaking words by the novelist Colm Tóibín. The tone is elevated, as you would expect from a documentary about bogs narrated by Ciarán Hinds from a text by Colm Tóibín. Bogs, we hear, “have been places of landscape, myth, sacrifice” – “while the sense of compressed life that the bog contains has had a strange allure for artists and poets”.
Nobody got stuck into the bogs like Heaney, who – so one gathers from interviews with Tóibín and the historian Roy Foster – never saw one he didn’t want to serenade. In their deepness and mystery he glimpsed something of the soul of Ireland. He glimpsed secrets too – in the bodies they would cough up now and then, distorted by time yet often bearing still marks of violence that reminded him of the Troubles.
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This is heavy, heady stuff – and there is a rewarding novelty in hearing the Irish landscape eulogised so tenderly via readings of Heaney by the Game of Thrones actor Michelle Fairley.
The second element of the film is more grounded: we visit Lullymore Heritage and Discovery Park, a sort of boggy Disneyland in the midlands, where Jonathan Judge, Lullymore’s development manager, says that the families who cut turf weren’t doing so for the good of their health. “These people were trying to make a living. Heat their home, raise their families. It’s not for the novelty.”
If the film lacks anything it is recognition of the association of bogs with backwardness. “Boggers” is an Irish euphemism for a hick, while in the HP Lovecraft short story The Moon-Bog the landscape is connected to primordial savagery (the essence, the Waspy Lovecraft believed, of Irishness). Not everyone in Ireland, or beyond, celebrates our association with bogs. That thread of ambivalence needed to be unpicked.
But this is otherwise a fascinating documentary that approaches a familiar subject from an intriguing angle. And it captures the essence of the bog lands – their mournful stillness and the sense of powerful forces working just beneath the surface. Above all, it refuses to be predictable or pander to shortened attention spans – and for that, and much else, it is to be praised.
