Keeping the past alive

TVReview: In a television week that vociferously heralded the reconstruction of Robert Scott's epic and fatal attempt on the South Pole, a very different examination of endurance took place in Townlands: The Brothers, a short, arresting and memorable film shot by photographer Richard Fitzgerald.

Over a period of years in the 1990s, Fitzgerald amassed 20 hours of footage while visiting Paddy and Nicholas Butler, elderly bachelor brothers who lived and farmed under the Comeragh mountains in Co Waterford. Seemingly untouched by the outside world, the brothers endured a harsh, relentless life, living for each other, the cattle and the dog. Their lives, while playing out against the backdrop of the recently deceased century, evoked an era long gone.

Their mysterious and absurdly poignant story unfurled like some hybrid creation by Kavanagh, Beckett and Flann O'Brien. These granite-faced men, with the slow, stoic gait of tired horses, spent their lives, from birth until Paddy's death (when he "quenched out"), sharing the one small, iron-framed bed in their childhood room, lying together for decades under the unflinching gaze of the Sacred Heart.

Ruefully recalling, almost with one voice, their mother - who could "bejaysus see a hundred years ahead of her" and who had little respect for Greenwich Mean Time, setting the clocks to her own liking - the rheumy-eyed brothers seemed to see the distant past with clarity while meeting the present world with shy indifference.

"Women," they said, when asked about their apparently celibate life. "They says you can do without them now with the electric cookers."

"Women," they continued, "since they got the motor cars you couldn't stop them." But unknown to Fitzgerald when he was making the film, and utterly unknown to Nicholas, Paddy had a daughter. Shortly after Paddy's death in 1997, a woman in her 50s came to a shocked and disbelieving Nicholas, demanding her inheritance. A DNA test and legal proceedings followed, and the unnamed woman won her case.

Editor Mikey Ó Flathartha constructed a delicate, moving film that neither sentimentalised nor romanticised the brothers' lives, and which acknowledged the essential mystery of their singular attachment.

With the farm sold to accommodate Paddy's daughter, Nicholas - framed against an inky-blue gable - described a life freed at last from the hardship of daily toil. The old dog still by his side, he spoke with equanimity about the loss of his brother.

"You'd miss him out of the bed; the chat," he said, his pale blue eyes momentarily alighting on the lens with stony lucidity.

"THE GODS CRUMBLE; the humble rise and supplant them," wrote Sir Robert Scott, which may have been either a statement indicative of dangerous over-confidence or a blatantly honest self-assessment.

Eighty years after Scott's death, the TV explorer and deity of the great outdoors, Bruce Parry (do you think he made that name up?), on a mock-up trail in Greenland, was boiling up snow and ice to make hot, beefy telly. Blizzard: Race to the Pole sees Parry and seven other pleasant chaps, representing Scott's British Antarctic expedition, embark on a gruelling three-month race to a "nominal pole", using 1911-style clothing, rations and equipment.

Their rivals, led by Norwegian Rune Gjeldnes, follow a parallel trail, similarly freighted with replica equipment of Roald Amundsen's victorious assault on the frosty stick. Unfortunately for Parry's shivering crew, Scott's layers of lightweight clothing were tailored on Regent Street, whereas Amundsen's reindeer and seal-skin suits were traditionally Inuit.

The British team's first day on the ice was about as miserably unsuccessful as it was possible to be. Parry and gang slept out the start of the race because their 1911 alarm clock froze in the ice, while their pack of psychopathic, buoyantly excreting and feverishly ardent sled dogs chewed through their harnesses like they were candyfloss to get to the husky bitch on heat. Faced with daily rations of pemmican (dried meat, fruit and sugar in lumps of solidified lard), the prospect of Parry's cold, wet and hungry crew seeing out the series, let alone winning the race, seem crushingly low.

Gjeldnes, on the other hand, having previously walked unsupported from Siberia to Canada with little more than some high-calorie biscuits and his trusty beard, is a far safer bet.

Scott's reputation has taken a post-colonial beating. His death, in a howling blizzard a mere 11 miles from a supply depot, was, according to the programme, partly the result of an imperial mindset which saw nature as an enemy to be conquered and which maintained that there could be no accomplishment without suffering.

While death may have been a more palatable notion than defeat for Scott, Parry's team face an enviably simpler 21st-century choice: call the camera crew and get back on the plane, or not. But even if the British team (which includes a record-label boss) resort to tearing up their contracts in an unseasonally watery icefield, this "testing of history" makes riveting television.

Parry and various members of both teams are ex-army. "I'm a commando, get me out of here!" does have a certain ring to it . . .

FROM THE FREEZING ice-fields of Antarctica to the lofty plains of "Children of the Soul". New Age movements don't get much more chilling than the one explored in Cutting Edge: My Child's Psychic, a documentary which was more disturbing than finding one of Parry's huskies eating the cat.

Actually, it was more disturbing than finding Parry eating one of the huskies (which he just may have to resort to). Hewn from Channel 4's suburban-weirdoes mine and ostensibly about children with extra-sensory perception, the programme was actually about deeply misguided adults testing out their novel world view on their unfortunate progeny.

Nicola - spiritual healer, Reiki master and regular contributor to "the Destiny TV Channel" - is also mother of Heather and proponent of the Children of the Soul malarkey. (Please don't think by my tone that I'm slightly sceptical. I'm not. I'm an unassailable, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant sceptic of epic proportions.)

Anyway, Nicola apparently believes that a substantial number of children are "special" beings sent by angels to heal the world. These children she calls "indigos" and "crystals". Parents of the aforementioned breeds are invited to seminars, where, after parting with some dosh, a clairvoyant with glittering eyeliner tunes into a "fairy frequency" to find out which side of the spiritual divide their cherubs fall into.

Secure in the knowledge that your child is "an evolutionary step forward", you can then stick little Johnny or Jenny behind a pack of tarot cards in the town hall fete and start recouping the cost of your diagnostic expenses.

Heather, Nicola's pretty and very ordinary teenage daughter, who was spoon fed this baloney along with her Liga, was apparently "at a critical point in her spiritual journey" at the start of the programme. However, spurred on by her mother and with the help of a couple of head massages and a soul reading, she was soon visualising pyramids and charging the public for psychic readings.

Nicola's teenage son, however, blithely refused to join the family business.

"Why do you think I'm doing this?" asked Nicola, her startlingly pink hair spiking indignantly.

"Midlife crisis?" he offered pragmatically.

Ouch.

DARA O BRIAIN, vaguely acerbic, balding Celtic bear that he is, has a new chat show on BBC, which, let it be said, is no mean feat. Turn Back Time, however, is a disappointingly flat, overly busy affair, in which O Briain and guest skip down memory lane and, with the help of archive footage, revisit career moments that could, with hindsight, have been better.

Former Python Terry Jones, O Briain's first guest, seemed tersely apprehensive and unsure as to the nature of his studio encounter. When he offered some enjoyable stories about his childhood in Colwyn Bay, he was interrupted by O Briain's insistence on getting a couple of pre-scripted gags about magic mushrooms into the conversation.

After silly wigs and aprons, a bloody bunny rabbit and one genuinely interesting question from O Briain about the Python team having to grow up and present birdwatching, building-renovation and potted-history shows on TV, the nervy debut was, thankfully, over.

Then, with all the daring of a couple of 11-year-olds sniggering under the kitchen table, the pair read from a list of rude words to each other: "Fart! Shite! Bollocks!" Until they got really naughty and Auntie switched out the lights. Yawn.