Battles past and present

The Battle of Kinsale - RT╔1

Battlefields - BBC2

Ian Paisley: The Unquiet Man - BBC1

Murphy's Law - BBC1

Marking the 400th anniversary of the event, The Battle of Kinsale this week told the tale of a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Hugh O'Neill, who turned traitor to Queen Elizabeth and fought a battle that proved a fork in the road of Irish history. The bravery of that move was succinctly put in the description of what had befallen the last nobleman to betray her. "His liver and bowels were burned, his heart removed, his head stricken off, his body quartered." The chances of a small fine and three points off his licence would have seemed a bit optimistic.

It all ended in disaster. The Spanish managed to wreck another armada, their second in trying to get to England through Ireland. The battle itself was a military blunder that resulted in 2,000 Irish casualties, but an English death toll estimated at just one or three soldiers. The Irish campaign, which had so nearly bankrupted England, actually proved the catalyst that shifted it from a position as a minor European power to the mightiest empire on the globe.

Luckily, one of those on hand to cut through the scholastic jibber-jabber was the forthright Hiram Morgan of UCC. Describing Elizabeth's mood after O'Neill had routed her soldiers, he did not beat around the bush: "She was," he said, summoning all his powers of academia, "extremely pissed off."

Unfortunately, to get to the good stuff you had to sit through historical reconstructions that fell somewhere between a local historical society picnic and a Duran Duran video. There was an impressively reproduced sea battle, but it must have soaked up the budget for the stuff back on dry land. It was a fierce battle, the documentary would tell us, before somewhat lessening the impact by showing two lone men engaging in a spot of medieval handbags by a castle. Thousands of rebellious soldiers were represented by three men running through a field. No wonder the Irish lost, they can't possibly have been able to see a thing through all that dry ice.

It mightn't have looked so ropy if the BBC's "major new series", Battlefields, hadn't come charging over the hill the following night armed with a much bigger chequebook. Its reconstruction of the Battle of Alamein had tanks, explosions and guns, alongside actual footage from the battle for North Africa. If you have the digital channels, you can spend all day watching programmes like this one, with titles such as Weapons of War and War Machines.

They have annexed whole swathes of the schedules, and are highly addictive. Watch too many and after a while you can't look at a map without seeing giant arrows swinging into strategic bays, can't pass a pothole without wondering what kind of natural fortification it might make. Some day, long after these things have gone out of fashion, someone will come blinking out of their darkened sitting-room convinced The World At War is still running after 3,000 episodes.

At Alamein, two armies met over a massive, flat, featureless desert, a setting described by presenter Prof Richard Holmes as a "tactician's dream". Under Montgomery, the British were transformed from a demoralised, exhausted, disobedient army, into a force that chased the Nazis out of Africa.

The programme's grip lay in the individual stories: of men marching towards the enemy guns at an unflinching pace, guided by the sound of the company pipers; of surviving in the open desert on two pints of water a day and biscuits left over from the first World War; of sappers clearing mines in the dark; of countless acts of unbelievable bravery.

As always, the stories are told in a language of drastic understatement. One commanding officer wrote of being pinned down at the front line, under devastating shelling from his own side. "We got a hell of a time from our own guns. And of all the unpleasant things on an unpleasant day, I think this was the most unpleasant." When the battle began there were no people, no buildings, no landmarks in the golden landscape. Some 60 years on and the sands are still seeded with mines, and the graves far outnumber the vegetation.

When Ian Paisley comes on your TV set, there is the instinctive reaction to turn down the volume before he has even opened his mouth. As a title, Ian Paisley: The Unquiet Man was one waiting impatiently to be used. There was footage from 50 years of speeches and sermons, from a figure who first seems to buffet the words about in his massive jowls before dashing them against the ears of all present. He has a particular ability to give the word "God" nine syllables.

Believe it or not, the young Paisley's first sermon was a disaster, after he took to the pulpit at age 15 with what he thought was half-an-hour's material, but which only stretched to four minutes. He retreated like a heckled comedian, vowing never to preach again. History, obviously in the mood for a practical joke, provided a turning point in the form of a minister present who told him that he was to return, and that next time he would speak for 30 minutes, after which nobody would be able to stop him. Sixty years on, and that particular whoopee cushion is still deflating loudly.

The wrath of Paisley will never diminish, but his smugness has hushed it a little. He is the most visible, most successful result of a culture that has engendered Protestant sects of every shape and size, each claiming that their keys are the only ones that will fit the locks at the gates of heaven. The fundamentalist that he is, he positively bathes in his foes' abuse.

"I am a person, according to my enemies, with very few brains, very few talents, very few abilities," he proclaimed to great delight. The programme lobbed some truths at him instead. It was worthwhile to see the footage of him giving a graveside oration behind a rank of paramilitaries, and to be reminded of his repeated attempts to set up his own "defence" organisations. Paisley, remember, has always had a penchant for throwing matches on dry tinder, before admonishing the tinder for catching fire.

His deputy leader in the DUP, Peter Robinson, became known in east Belfast as "Peter the Punt", after he paid a fine and costs of over £17,500 for his part in a loyalist mob's incursion into Clontibret, Co Monaghan, in 1986. The mob assaulted two gardai, daubed loyalist slogans in the village and caused extensive damage.

Will the DUP ever survive without Paisley? "The foundations are built on his leadership," said Robinson. Pull away foundations of that size, though, and things are likely to come crashing down. It is unnerving, if not unsurprising, that his religious followers see him as a messenger from God. There is the delicious thought that when he returns to his sender, he will arrive at the gates of heaven and find that the right keys actually belonged to some soapbox preacher with a congregation numbering himself and his dog. We will hear the shouting all the way back down on Earth.

Paisley wasn't the only unquiet Ulsterman on the BBC this week. You may know actor Jimmy Nesbitt from such programmes as . . .well, all the programmes on television - and most of the ads in between. Turn off your set and you'll notice that the slowly fading imprint left behind on the black screen is that of Jimmy Nesbitt's face.

Ration your viewing to just 16 hours a day, however, and he remains ever watchable. Murphy's Law was a thoroughly enjoyable waste of a Monday night. The script - from Divorcing Jack author Colin Bateman - so dripped in clichΘ that it must have deliberately revelled in it.

Nesbitt played Thomas Murphy, a wise-cracking, troubled, maverick cop with a past. His mission: to infiltrate a ruthless London gang engaged in some utterly implausible deal involving diamonds and heroin. It was the kind of thing where most of the tension was to be found in how Murphy's cover almost got blown every three minutes.

When he did get unmasked, the bad guys had the customary sense not to kill him, but to bring him along to the drug deal so that he could provide a witty commentary on proceedings before causing some trouble. The more people pointed guns at his head, the louder the wise-cracks cracked. "I hate to say something as clichΘd as you'll never get away with this, but you'll never get away with this." Bateman didn't at all hate giving him clichΘd things to say, and the whole thing wriggled with twists and jumped with one-liners.

"Do you have any last requests?" asked a baddie, his gun held to Murphy's head.

"Miss."

tvreview@irish-times.ie