Seven Ages (RTE 1, Monday), (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Heart of the Matter (BBC 1, Sunday)
The Real Lena Zavaroni (C4, Wednesday)
The most conspicuous signature on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 is the single word "Birkenhead". Big, bold and emphatically underlined, it looks so domineering it seems to be squashing every name beneath it, including that of Winston Churchill. On the opposite side of the page, the members of the Irish delegation signed as gaeilge, their names flecked with a fada here and a buailte there. Arthur Griffith, mind, signed bilingually (adding in brackets the English version of his name).
Appropriately, we saw the Treaty signatures on this week's opening episode of Seven Ages, Sean O Mordha's new seven-part series on the history of Ireland's 26county state. It was telling that even the very forms of signatories' names radiated symbolism. Those symbols and their meanings haven't gone away, you know. In fact, for obvious reasons, they're particularly acute at present. This acuteness makes this new series all the more relevant and charged.
Alternating between black and white film of civil war Dublin and colour film of the city today, Seven Ages produces a swirl of the then and now. It's a technique which gives life to an age which has all but slipped out of living memory into cold history. Contributors from politics (violent and otherwise), history, the arts and the media supply perspectives on the temporal swirl. The results are vibrant and engaging. Whether or not young tigers and tigerettes will watch is another matter.
Former presidents Paddy Hillery and Mary Robinson and former taoisigh Liam Cosgrave, Charlie Haughey and Garret FitzGerald contribute. Cosgrave and Haughey featured in the opening episode but did not say anything unexpected. Still, having them on the record for future generations is worthwhile in itself. Including voices from the fine arts (most notably so far, that of Lailli Lamb, daughter of artist Charles Lamb) broadens the base for understanding the spirits of the times under discussion.
Anyway, back to those symbols - motifs of deepest meaning and most frivolous inanity. We saw an overprinted stamp (Saorstat na hEireann stamped over the head of Britain's King George V); pillar-boxes painted green, though still bearing British insignia; crowns, harps, shamrocks in wrought-iron railings. We heard that in 1926, the crowd at the Royal Dublin Society's horse show, sang God Save the King when the British team appeared but were silent when the Irish one emerged. Horses for courses!
Little wonder then that the new State was desperately searching for reasons to justify its claim to statehood. W.B. Yeats, as Seamus Heaney said, was for this emerging Ireland "a great world artist", whose "unapologetically nationalist" stance "helped Irish Protestants". (Mind you, the new State owed a debt to Irish Protestants for kickstarting 1798.) An ancient language and devotion to a great world religion, though allegiances to these are now in decline, framed even more profound cultural oppositions to the departed coloniser.
But in economic terms, it was all pretty grim: you can't survive just on poetry, language or prayers and in any case, the last thing the fledgling state wanted to eat was its words. Having been, in effect, a farm for England, the 26-county State naturally remained primarily agricultural. Life for the majority was spartan. Still, they stuck it out and there is something redemptive about the old footage and old yarns too. The Free State and Dev's State were poor and culturally fascist (inevitably the most vulnerable suffered unduly) but the generations that formed and informed them were resilient and patriotic - a cultural army really.
Their ways are not fashionable now and are frequently patronised when not ridiculed. But the people who recall the place between the ending of colonisation by Britain and the start of colonisation by Western capital know that they were early minders of a frail but precious child. Battling against hardship and their own inculcated complexes they loved it just enough. It's unlikely that they endured the long haul of poverty and piety to turn Dublin into the nightclub capital of Europe or whatever it is this week. But that's kids for you. It's history too.
Acknowledging that it deals with human issues which don't have simple, reasonable answers, Seven Ages is more reportorial than judgmental. In choosing to tell the story of this State in that way, it has (at least so far) the required decency which allows people to tell their own stories in their own ways. The political fault line caused by the forced oath cuts down to profound issues such as the rights of a state (or states) versus the rights of individuals. In republican terms, "Birkenhead" was actually a man named Fred Smith. What's in a name, eh? Mere identity? Looks like yet another winner for Sean O Mordha.
FROM the origins of this state to the origins of man: ape-man does not look like a winner for the BBC. Clearly, the lower case title is meant to symbolise, or at least signify, something - contemporary internet and e-mail style perhaps - but it's hard to know. Indeed it's impossible to understand not just the stylistic devices but the reasoning which poses as logic in this one.
The core subject of ape-man is prehistoric anthropology, a pretty specialised gig at the best of times. Perhaps France's 25,000-year-old cave-paintings are, at least at first glance, less dramatic than, say, Sky Sports. But the overlay of television gimmickry used in this new series' opening episode was at least as bizarre as RTE's transmission from Newgrange. What is it about TV and prehistoric man? People who are normally quite sane seem to feel an uncontrollable urge to get out their box of electronic crayons and scribble wildly whenever a camera lights on human prehistory.
Where Newgrange got elevator music, unnecessary interviews and inappropriate camera jumps, ape-man got a horror movie score, daft LSD-like simulations and the sort of jump cuts that could bring on mass epilepsy. Clearly, the makers believed that the story, in itself - the state of the cave painters' psyche 25,000 years ago - was too boring. Fair enough, an Open University lecture on the subject could well be for anthropology anoraks. But this production smothered its subject with bells and whistles.
As far as I could make out, the argument went as follows: the creatures who made the cave-paintings were fully human; they were adjudged to be so on the basis of similar, modern paintings in the Kalahari desert; Kalahari shamens go into trances during which they see patterns similar to those on the walls of the French caves and the Kalahari paintings; a psychiatrist in the US put patients into deep hypnosis in which they too saw the crucial patterns. QED?
Perhaps nobody else feels that there are links missing in the programme's argument or maybe I just misunderstood it. It was suspicious though, that whenever a cold, common-sense link was required, we were treated to mad images of faces and hooves and the horror-movie music. Then again, maybe it was the sort of stuff that makes perfect sense if you're as stoned as a shamen. After all, artists and graffiti-sprayers have been known to mess about with mood-altering materials.
The wild overkill was a pity. Of course, attempts to represent altered states of consciousness on screen are notoriously iffy. The tone of the perception is in the mind of the beholder, after all. Like being stone cold sober with a group of drunks, ape-man wasn't much fun. And anyway, 25,000 years seems like a short period in evolution. Why wouldn't the cave-painters be fully human? Contemporary humans engage in behaviour which is much more primitive than getting mellow and drawing pictures. A good subject, a ludicrous treatment.
Funnily enough, Heart of the Matter tried to look at television itself as though it is our contemporary cave-painting. In ways, of course, it is, even if the pictures move without your having to act the suburban shamen. David Burke of the anti-television outfit, White Dot, argued that watching TV is terrible for individuals and society. So, why should we watch him tell us this? Well, even accepting the unavoidable irony, Burke's arguments were as off the wall as ape-man's techniques.
Of course, many people watch too much TV and it can make viewers passive and mentally dull. But if David Burke is the result of not watching TV, then it is obvious that mental dullness can be acquired through TV abstinence too. "TV is teaching you, you're boring," he said. In fact, at the moment he said it, TV was teaching me that David Burke is boring. He was right to argue that a "stream of bullying and persuasion" comes out of the box. But knowing that, you can learn to cope with it.
That's why so much TV advertising is deeply offensive. It can only pretend to treat you as an equal. Paying the piper, it calls the tune. Anyway, Burke has written an anti-television book titled Get A Life. There are important anti-television books to be written but on the evidence of the author's precis of this one, he ought to take his own advice and quit writing books. Still, Heart of the Matter, in allowing David Burke to demolish his own arguments, will have stimulated people to think about what the box is telling them. Clever TV and properly inconclusive.
Finally, The Real Lena Zavaroni. Back in 1974, aged 10, she achieved fame as "the little girl with the big voice" when her song Ma! He's Making Eyes at Me became a popular hit. For the following few years she was a regular on British television and toured Japan and the US, where she met such as Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Jerry Lewis. She also sang at the White House for President Gerald Ford.
But this documentary in Channel 4's Trouble With Food season was a a full-blown horror story. Lena Zavaroni developed anorexia nervosa and over the years literally faded away, dying recently at the age of 35. Old TV performances, photographs and home movies detailed her physical deterioration. It was as though she wished to de-exist, to get her skeleton on the outside of her body. For those of us who had heard about, but never seen the full awfulness of this disease, this was salutary television. Watching this, TV wasn't teaching me that I'm boring (which may or may not be) but that I'm ignorant of a great many subjects.
Zavaroni had been plucked from a little Scottish village when she was 10. It's a ludicrously early age to be exposed to the bright lights and dark jealousies of showbiz. But who knows what caused her illness? Research into the disease suggests there's a genetic component but the complexities of nurture's effects on nature cannot be dismissed. Either way, this was a deeply disturbing story: if is was inevitable, that's horrific and if it wasn't, that's horrific too.