Reputations (BBC 2, Monday)
Hendrix Night (BBC 2, Saturday)
The Boys Of St Vincent (RTE 1, Friday & Saturday)
Two Americans who made it big on this side of the Atlantic were reappraised this week. Eamon de Valera and Jimi Hendrix, a green dreamer and a blues guitarist, respectively synonymous with a crippling conservatism and a combative counterculture, make an unlikely combo. Dev 'n' Jimi - Celtic mists and purple haze; 40 shades of grey and 40 hues of psychedelia; ceilis and Woodstock; austerity and excess; longevity and early death; white and black; repression and release . . .
Reputations: Eamon de Valera Ireland's Hated Hero was suspiciously strong in the editorialising of its title. Still, "hated" packs a punch not present in the larger, more mundane truth: Eamon de Valera - An Irish Politician To Whom A Generation Has Grown Indifferent. Of course, Dev is hated by a minority but he remains loved by some too, in spite of the revisionism (much of it fair, much of it not) generated by market forces pedalling a disingenuous, consumerist "liberalism" and by Neil Jordan's romanticised but nonetheless balancing Hollywood biopic of Michael Collins.
A central thrust of Reputations was the notion of Dev as 20th-century Ireland's dominant social engineer. We heard, yet again, extracts from the "Dream" speech, delivered on St Patrick's Day 1943, in which he outlined his vision of a frugal, self-possessed, largely isolationist Ireland. Emphasis was placed upon Dev's passion for maths and geometrical shapes, his "Jesuitical" mind and his psyche which, ironically, was cast as demonstrating a fondness for exactness. Cold, precise calculus, not warm, instinctive passion, it appears, underpinned his plan for an atypically "Celtic" idyll.
For Irish viewers, there was little new in this profile. After an early and, as ever, inconclusive examination of the tiresome subject of Dev's parentage, his Blackrock College and Gaelic League years, 1916 and all that and his duplicity over the Treaty negotiations, the question of his thinking in relation to the North was foregrounded. Dev, the programme insisted, could have had 32-county unity if he had done a deal to assist Churchill's beleagured Britain during the early years of the second World War.
This may well be true and, in fairness, the reasons suggested for Dev's refusal to back Churchill were compelling. However, they were also incomplete. It was because he feared the inclusion of 800,000 Protestant unionists would threaten his power. Fair enough. It was because the Nazis looked like winning and Dev didn't fancy backing a beaten docket. Again, fair enough. Pointedly though, nobody suggested that maybe Eamon de Valera didn't trust the British. He would, after all, have remembered how they had reneged on promises of Home Rule.
But perhaps, most likely, he was able, in his Jesuitical mind, to use any reason not to trust the British to justify not doing the deal. After all, the other reasons cited, while eminently practical, were less than noble. But propped up by justifiable suspicion, they could be recast as subsidiary. Who knows? Just being able to construct the possibility that he was making the right call may have been sufficient. Dev would hardl y be unique-among politicians - indeed, among humans -if he thought along such lines.
Beyond this aspect, Hamish Mykura's documentary was admirable. It married evocative old footage and stills with reasoned interviews and it used a part-plaintive, partominous soundtrack. The usual suspects, Tom Garvan, Paul Bew, Fintan O'Toole, John Bowman, Ryle Dwyer and Robert Fisk among them, contributed. So, too, did Martin McGuinness and an old Old IRA man, Martin Calligan. "Dev was the greatest twister and traitor in Irish history," said Calligan, citing the Long Fella's hanging of republicans. Ironic, too, that the nearest statement to justifying the "hated" of the title should come from an Irish republican.
It is true and there was agreement on the fact that Dev stayed too long. Presiding over the exodus of the 1950s - largely because the victors in the second World War decided to punish De Valeran "neutrality" - Dev's reputation has inevitably suffered. The generation and class, who remember the respect he gave them in the 1930s, is all but dead now. The memories of those of the 1950s, though dwindling in number too, carry an understandable bitterness. Still, it's not as if, during Dev's overlong tenure, the realistic alternative government would have delivered a progressive Shangri-La.
Sure, Dev probably did, as was argued, "cement partition". But John Bowman's rather understated, deadpan observation that "Churchill had a very Anglo-centric view of things" might have been further explored. If it was hard to trust Dev, it was certainly no easier to trust a bully with a right-to-rule attitude. Really, you wouldn't need a mind capable of understanding the complexities of differential calculus and matrices to work that one out. Dev, "the cardinal of Irish politics" versus Churchill, the high priest of the British empire. Aren't "statesmen" great?
Anyway, there was more fun to be had on Hendrix Night, yet another Saturday evening of themed programmes. The opening profile was another Reputations piece. Titled Jimi Hendrix The Man They Made God (which could equally have been applied to Eamon de Valera) it had little in the way of revelation. The bones of the story are well known anyway: Seattle-born Hendrix moved to London; was a prime - indeed, primal - force in making the city swing; played wonderful, explosive, electric guitar music; took too much acid; got ripped off by music industry sharpies and choked, aged 28, after OD'ing on drugs.
Footage of Hendrix's volcanic performance at Monterey (much better than his Woodstock gig) when he burnt guitars on stage, still does not fail to reignite the spirit of an era. Sure, it's been screened as often as Dev's "Dream" speech has been replayed. But the wild abandon of it all, which prompted the LA Times to write a review which stated: "When Hendrix left the stage, he graduated from rumour to legend" is about right. His return to the US, having established himself in London, must rank as one of the greatest homecoming gigs in history.
Much use was made of Irish guitarist Noel Redding's home movie footage. Noel, as ever, though it's hard to blame him, played the same old tune: he, like Hendrix, whom he played with, was totally ripped off. He used to make about £15 a week, he said, and even when the band began to become seriously successful, he was hauling in about £40. Even by 1960s standards, this was meagre. No wonder the lads liked to stay stoned. The major question, of course, was how could they afford even that? Perhaps they couldn't afford not to.
Accounts of the number of hits of acid which Jimi Hendrix was dropping were staggering. He kept his liquid LSD in a bottle with an eye dropper, which, if reports are to be believed, he used almost like a squirting gun. Purple haze? How could he even know what colour it was? Anyway, it was a pity that the cliched pictures of the Vietnam War were accompanied by a Hendrix soundtrack. When it's not Hendrix, it's usually The Doors - conjunctions of sight and sound which cannot but inject an inappropriate response. The napalm explodes; cue the intro to All Along The Watchtower. There's a dead body - here's Hey Joe. It's rock narcissism and cheap thrills where starkness is required. Quite sick, really.
"The business killed him," said Eric Burdon of Hendrix. Well, it certainly didn't help. But there was a little more to it than that. Wild sex, diet pills, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, dope and acid in such prodigious quantities require more than a business push. Clearly, Jimi Hendrix liked to have a good time and determined to live up to the myth he was creating. The prats making money out of him didn't give a toss, of course. But his legacy endures. Some purists railed against his not sticking solely to blues. OK, some of the excesses had a circus-like quality. But the verdict of the blues purists was more miserable than bluesy.
The second offering of Hendrix Night was Picture This, an account of the process of persuading the Commemorative Plaque committee of English National Heritage to erect a plaque to Jimi in London's Brook Street. Next door, there is one to Handel. Hendrix and Handel? Only one of the plaque committee had ever heard Hendrix's music. There's a broad education for you! Look, forget about a rerun of the Keats/Dylan debate. People are entitled to apply whatever aesthetic criteria they wish - but not (on either side) if they remain proud of their ignorance. Open-ness, not a spurious high culture/popular culture dichotomy, is the central issue.
Anyway, Hendrix got his plaque (blue, mind - not purple, as some had hoped for). He is the first rock musician ever to get one of these. Considering that it's necessary to be dead for more than 20 years to qualify and that the plaque committee all but ignores popular culture, it's historic. Perhaps somebody should erect a plaque to the plaque. There was a great moment in the home of plaque maker, Frank Ashworth. While he was making Jimi's one, a camera loitered on another just finished. It was to Enid Blyton. Now that's a trip - from Enid to Jimi - that's just a tad too mind-expanding.
Against a male, choral soundtrack of hymn-singing, The Boys Of St Vincent screened images of paedophiliac buggery, forced fellatio and monstrous molestation. The second and concluding episode of this mini-series goes out tonight, so it's appropriate to deal only with last night's opener. It was, too, an eye-opener - not, in fairness, excessively graphic - which dramatised events based upon scandals in a Catholic Church-run orphanage, in Newfoundland, Canada in the 1970s.
Made in 1992, it has been screened in this part of the world before (Channel 4, I think). Of course, Mary Raftery's recent States Of Fear has given it added piquancy. Certainly, it was powerful and distressing too, even if some of the dramatic constructions had a dubious, soap-opera neatness. Henry Czerny, a Tom Cruise lookalike with an Adolf Hitler personality, played Brother Peter Lavin, superintendent of the orphanage. His "boy", Kevin Reevey (Johnny Morina) a 10-year-old orphan with, conveniently, no known relations, was the central victim in a story of widespread physical and sexual abuse.
There has been a belief for some time that, at an institutional level, the Canadian paedophile scene operated as an organised ring, involving not just high levels within the church, but also within the state. Certainly, attempts to expose the orphanage abuses, thwarted at practically every step, reflected this perception. It was the helplessness of the youngsters - without parents, in the grip (literally) of sickos and abandoned by the institutions of state - which was thoroughly frightening. Attempts by individuals - a janitor, a detective, an all-too-easily dissuaded social worker - to expose the abuse, were consistently defeated by naked power.
All of which begs questions concerning Irish television. Why wasn't this mini-series, now seven years old, shown earlier? Might it have proved too uncomfortable for certain power interests here? The church's role in institutionalised paedophilia here is quite well known now. But the state's cover-up? It didn't all happen just in Dev's time. As another, more recent republican remarked of the IRA a few years back: "They haven't gone away, you know." Neither have well-connected people who get their kicks from sexually abusing children. The Boys Of St Vincent is not entertainment (though its dramatic structure is that of a conventional miniseries). But it should encourage vigilance. That justifies screening it and even the most arcane Jesuitical gymnastics with logic can't alter that.