Nature Boy (BBC 2, Monday)
Eirinn Is Alba (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Gimme Some Truth (BBC 2, Sunday)
Mad Dog Coll (TG4, Monday)
As soon as you see the parrot, you know it's out of place. The dazzling tropical colours - red, blue, yellow - clash violently with the routine greys of the pigeons. The pigeon coop is in the yard of a back-to-back house in a dour north of England town. The house is foster home to 16-year-old David. It is a grim, poverty-stricken place, home to a vicious and cruel foster father and a broken, albeit kind, foster mother. The dazzling parrot hasn't a chance.
Nature Boy, a new, four-part drama written by Bryan Elsley, is a quest. Centrally it focuses on David's search for the father who abandoned him when he was four. But it is also a journey through racism and Britain's abandonment of its grimmer towns and nohope people. For David, it is even a journey even through his own dreams. To cope with the awfulness which surrounds him, David has turned to nature where, he believes, "there's a reason for everything, no matter how cruel it seems".
It is all very like Kes, Ken Loach's 1970 film in which Billy, a poor, north of England, teenaged boy in a loveless house befriends life and nature in the form of a kestrel hawk. The awful moment when Billy finds his kestrel's discarded (i.e. "murdered") corpse was mirrored with David's discovery of the parrot's body in a dustbin. The parrot would eat from "nature boy" David's hand but bit that of the obnoxious foster father, who, enraged, promptly battered it to death.
But Nature Boy is not just a simple parroting or otherwise cheap parody of Kes. The Loach film, for all its bleakness, strongly suggested that when culture fails, nature can compensate. Elsley's drama seems to regard nature as a more aloof force, indifferent to the needs of mere humans. Neither good nor bad, it just is. Anyway, along with its rippling theme of abandonments, this new drama displays a rippling theme of relationships, not just to Kes, but to film and TV drama in general and even to television itself.
The dead parrot, whether intended or not, evokes (alright, perhaps parodies!) the overrated Monty Python sketch about, well . . . a dead parrot. The seagulls attacking some of David's illiterate and delinquent school classmates suggests Hitchcock's The Birds. The scene in which David feels the kindest thing is to cut the throat of an injured fawn savages the sentimentality of Bambi. But it is in its melodramatics that we can see just how Nature Boy relates to the history of television itself.
Given the, albeit absurd, turbo-charged drama of so much television nowadays, it's difficult for TV drama to win audiences. Gameshows and sport and the contrived wild hybrids such as the American wrestling nonsense are so melodramatic that ordinary drama can barely compete. Indeed such melodramatics threaten the long-term future of soap operas, as incorporating them risks destroying the genre's crucial balance between naturalism and drama. Then there are docusoaps and smut in all its televisual varieties.
Anyway, Nature Boy, in which the intensity of the racism, violence and delinquency is alarmingly Hollywood, given that the action is set in Barrow-in-Furness, clearly feels that it needs hyperbolic punch to make its case. It probably does but there's a cost in adding Hollywood to naturalism. There is a risk of smothering meaning beneath spectacle. As broadsheet newspapers feel the need to allow in some tabloid values, so is it with broadsheet television.
Still, whether in spite of or because of, the cautionary note which, correctly if poignantly includes itself, Nature Boy is a rich drama. It opens with David leaving a freshly caught fish on the doorstep of his natural mother, who is a junkie. It closes with him discovering the corpse of Ann-Marie, his 16 year-old foster sister on the nature reserve beach where he swims. His only friend, Fred, the warden in the reserve, is, by the way, a repentant paedophile. The joyriding, drug-taking thugs have burned Fred out and killed Ann-Marie. This one pulses with symbolism as well as melodrama.
It was strange, therefore, to see it followed by an "action line" phone number "for anybody concerned about any of the issues raised". Television drama isn't usually the genre used to launch such action lines. Still, that's OK. "Any of the issues raised?" Abandonment, cruelty, illiteracy, drugs, sexual exploitation, lumpen savagery, dumbing-down, screaming media, the consecrated ignorance of bureaucrats trumping the best motives of real teachers . . . those phone lines should have been busy.
IS there a collective noun for professors? Perhaps it's a "pack" or a "brood" or, surely not, a "pride" of professors? Whatever the term, there were enough professors on Eirinn Is Alba to warrant a group name. The opening episode of this new series about the relationships between Ireland and Scotland worried away at the question of whether or not there is such a thing as Celticness. If it exists, how real and tangible is it? Or is it merely conceptual, an abstraction as ethereal as Celtic mists?
Given the philosophical implications of all that, you could understand why the pack/brood/pride of professors was consulted. As ever with such matters, we were back in the country of myths and symbols: children of Lir, Cuchulainn (who features in Scottish as well as Irish myth), Celtic crosses and all the rest. Appropriately, the Celtic mists were dense and numerous and evocatively filmed. A plaintive but romantic tone predominated.
Representations of ethereality are, by definition, dodgy, so this opening episode was taking risks. Undue emphases would risk creating the blandness and flaccid sentimentality of the cod Celtic elevator-muzak variety. But that didn't happen, largely because the professors and other contributors appeared to know what they were talking about. One of them made the point that "Celticism" is political in Ireland but safe and nostalgic in Scotland.
Although this was not the most refined point raised, it was perhaps the most interesting. Again, like the current republican/unionist conflict in the North, it is related to notions of self and sovereignty and is always about context. The more rabid elements at a Celtic v Rangers football match would disagree, not only with each other, but with the premise. The irony, though, is that as the spirit called Celticism subsides in the Republic of Ireland, it is growing in Scotland and Northern Ireland: a real, millennial sea-change.
There was discussion too about language and about its role as "the defining characteristic of culture". Professor Seamus Deane spoke about the Irish being "virtuosos in English" but he spoke too about "the silence behind" such virtuosity. This background silence, if I understood him correctly, was the vacuum of the lost Irish language. It was that sort of programme - full of intellectual abstractions which either resonated with viewers or sounded like gobbledegook.
But that, of course, was seminally appropriate. After all, isn't Celticism synonymous with music, poetry, dance, romanticism, spirituality and all things ethereal? That has always been an imaginative and symbolic simplification. But Celticism in this part of the world is defined in opposition to Anglo-Saxonism, which sees itself as rational, scientific and rooted - all that Celticism is not.
As in Nature Boy, nature v culture antagonisms are symbolically at the heart of the Celtic v Saxon duality. No wonder it requires a pride of professors to ravel/unravel it all. A promising series, it will become less abstract (less Celtic?) over the coming weeks when it focuses on such simple matters as religion, music, language and emigration! A co-production between RTE and two regional BBC channels (Northern Ireland and Scotland), its tiny one-upmanships can be fascinating
There was nothing tiny about John Lennon's attempt at one-upmanship on Paul McCartney. The song How Do You Sleep? on his Imagine album was pretty nasty stuff. We saw him sing it to George Harrison on Gimme Some Truth, the title not just of this documentary but also of another song from the same album. Almost 30 years on from the late hippy period of the early 1970s, the home movie footage of the making of Imagine has (like its professional contemporary, Kes) dated alarmingly. It looks as though it's from another century - which, of course, it is. Imagine!
The central irony in all of Lennon's hippiedom is the fact of his wealth. Is it, or more cogently, was it possible to be a hippy and be wealthy (in John Lennon's case, extremely wealthy)? When he sings "Imagine no possessions" from the comfort of a millionaire gaff, is this a case of fraud or artistic licence? The song did become a hippy anthem while Lennon held on to his possessions. In this, perhaps we can see the central flaw in the hippy ideal: the standards required are inhumanly high. Ultimately it cannot but fulfil its own death wish.
Still, in separating life from art, John Lennon is in a long tradition. It was clear from the footage here that he was an angry bloke used to getting his own way. And yet, there was also a kind of feral honesty to him. Though the clash between his lyrics and lifestyle could suggest hypocrisy, they could also suggest a genuine seeking for some kind of truth. If his ego became inflated from the kind of attention he was receiving, didn't that just show his humanity?
Anyway, looking back, this one was a reminder of how much even pop music has changed in three decades. When it was shot in 1971, Lennon had just another nine years to live. We saw Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson, Miles Davis, Tariq Ali, Phil Spector and other notables from the period. Yoko Ono was there too, of course. She wore hot pants and a revolutionary's beret. It was all, as I've said, a long time ago. Then again, only time gives us the truth. Lennon was demanding too much. Hero or nutter - you choose!
Finally, Mad Dog Coll. As documentaries on American gangsters go, this was splendid. It couldn't, of course, have the fictive richness of The God- father or of Once Upon a Time in America. But even more importantly, it undercut the spurious glamour of a sordid world. Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, born into poverty in Gweedore, Co Donegal in 1908, was gunned down, aged 23, in a phone booth on Manhattan's West 23rd Street. He had been involved in an estimated 20 murders, including the disgracefully reckless killing of five children in a single incident.
Prohibition had provided Coll, as it did all sorts of ruthless misfits, with the chance to make, literally and metaphorically, a killing. So too did the teeming New York of the day, where wild affluence and abject poverty lived only blocks apart. But before even all that, the toughness of poverty and institutional "care" had added enough flint to Coll's possibly psychopathic personality to guarantee a major explosion. Old black and white footage was combined engrossingly with a well-paced narrative and intelligent contributions. An excellent antidote to mafia hubris.