The Cable That Changed the World (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) is a dreary documentary about an interesting subject. It tells the story of the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable that connected Ireland to North America, via Valentia Island on this side of the ocean and the Canadian island of Newfoundland on the other, in the mid-19th century. Unfortunately, it does so in a thumpingly generic fashion while overwhelming the viewer with details best left to an academic textbook. By the end even its narrator, Jessie Buckley, sounds as if she’s ready to check out.
One issue is that the film, a co-production between RTÉ and University College Cork, seems to be aimed at an international audience rather than at licence-fee payers. This is presumably why many of the Irish academics speak with American accents and why Buckley’s narration is loaded with “tell us something we didn’t know” boiler plate. We learn, for instance, that mid-19th-century Ireland was wracked by a “devastating famine triggered by the failure of the potato crop” and that, in 1922, Irish nationalists rose “to end centuries of British rule” here “and achieve independence for most of the island”. Whoa, easy on the bombshells, RTÉ.
The biggest problem, however, is that The Cable That Changed the World wants to tell a global story rather than an Irish one and doesn’t give us enough of Valentia, in Co Kerry, or illuminate the way the arrival of the cable changed the people who lived there.
The telegraph crews set up their own community on Valentia, but we don’t hear an awful lot about how they mingled with locals or what has become of their houses, which were so strikingly “modern” when set against the ancient wildness of the Atlantic coast. Someone from that part of the world once told me that “Telegrapher” was a word locals used for someone who was getting too big for their boots – but such insights are absent from The Cable That Changed the World.
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The flaw is surely an over-reliance on academic voices to the detriment of other perspectives. We hear from Mícheál Lyne of Valentia Transatlantic Cable Foundation, but unless I’m mistaken – and I admit to struggling to stay awake through my two viewings of the film – everyone else interviewed is from academia. Has an interesting documentary ever been made in which the only voices you hear are those from within jogging distance of a university quadrangle?
That’s a shame, as there is a lot to tell. There is a reference to Peter FitzGerald, a local landlord apparently known as the knight of Kerry. He was largely responsible for the decision to have the cable make landfall at Valentia. Yet aside from hearing that he acquitted himself well in the Famine, there is little sense of him as a historical figure.
The documentary also tries too hard to make the story relevant to present-day events. Cyrus Field, the driving force behind the cable, is described as the Elon Musk of his day – an odd comparison, perhaps, unless Field was also an edge-lord man-child who delighted in picking fights with world leaders.
Watching The Cable That Changed the World, I had an involuntary flashback to my college years – and not in a positive way. It has the quality of a double lecture on a hot day. The story of how Field raised the capital and assembled the experts to lay the cable is told with impressive thoroughness, and as a study aid the film will no doubt prove invaluable. It plunges into the weeds, doesn’t get bogged down in local specifics and gives a big-picture view. By those standards, it is competently made. But, on a Monday night on RTÉ, it’s a bit of a snooze.
