THEY'VE treated us like scum. There's scores of people dead thanks to them. They don't think of them as people. They think of them as scum, said Trevor Hicks (Christopher Eccleston). Mr Hicks's two teenage daughters, Sarah and Vicki, were among the 96 fans crushed to death on April 15th, 1989, at Hillsborough soccer ground Sheffield, when Liverpool met Nottingham Forest in an English FA Cup semi-final.
Seven years on, Liverpudlian and former Brookside and Cracker writer, Jimmy McGovern, has spoken up for the dead and their families. Television drama, criticised here last week for its obsession with cops, docs and frocks, spoke up for itself with McGovern's Hillsborough. It was docu-drama really, but it was also the most important creative television programme of 1996.
It's just "trial by television"
claimed a Tory MP during the News at Ten, which split Hillsborough like an extended half-time break. "The awful thing about it, is that it's all true," said McGovern. He's on record in the British press, saying that "they" can sue if they want. "They" include the South Yorkshire police, who were led on the day by Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield; the Sun newspaper and medical and legal experts.
Seldom are television programmes beyond criticism. But given the gravity of the charges, the credibility of McGovern's script, the realism and poignancy of the drama, quibbles about Hillsborough's technique, stress and balance seem, at least for now, superfluous. If the programme has been unfair, its enemies will rightly attack it. But watch for the usual establishment method - pick a tiny inaccuracy or implication and inflate it to try to smear the spirit of the piece.
Consider the phrase "trial by television" as a condemnation. Unable to attack the content of the drama, an attack is made on the very idea - the effrontery - of making such TV. Of course, trial by television can be abused. But, given the clear injustices of many trials by "due process of law" - including the cases of the 96 crushed to death - trial by television should not automatically be considered a term of abuse.
There were moments during this extraordinary programme - the father standing in line with his dead son's team mates to collect a football medal for his boy; bodies laid out in Sheffield Wednesday's gymnasium; Sun rats reporting lies fed to them by the police - when, even knowing, for years, about all of these things, you now knew them at a deeper level for seeing and hearing them re the scarves and flowers and teddy-bears that filled half the Anfield pitch, it was easy to think that grief had been compassionately shared. In a way it was, but Hillsborough made clear that in the matter of loss, the directly bereaved will always walk alone. Sure, all of Liverpool and beyond that, all of football and even all of Britain, shared in the grief. But the stark stuff, the real horror, was borne by a few hundred people.
And yes, they were treated like scum. Post Heysel and widely hated in Thatcher's Britain, Liverpool people and soccer fans generally didn't count. Many, of course, were no angels. But they were people and their treatment by the powerful was despicable. In short, this was brilliant TV, recalling times when the medium was not ashamed to have a social conscience. Not that we in Ireland should feel smug about any of this. Try pitching a docu-drama on the Stardust (if the bereaved backed it) to the suits in RTE and see how far you get.
`THE man in the moon is wearing a golden jockstrap stuffed with ...money," said the fortune-teller. She could see it in her crystal ball. So could we. And there, fair enough, was Julian Clary, perilously astride the sharp point of a crescent moon. Crisp, new banknotes winked out from the rim of Julian's glittering briefs. "Then he removes the jockstrap," whispered the fortune-teller, her eyes bulging like the wallet of an Irish government minister.
But we did not see the eye-popping removal. The crystal ball clouded over just in time. Any how, Julian seemed a strange choice to represent the embodiment of middle aged women's sex fantasies. He's hardly, after all, even with money added, any woman's Mr Darcy. Perhaps this was the sharp point of Brazen Hussies, money, not sex, is what mature women fantasise about. But, like the crystal ball it wasn't very clear once we got to the nitty-gritty.
It's not very clear either, why television should bother to make this sort of drama. The subject matter was worthwhile, but the laboured, arty treatment was as fluffy as a chocolate-box kitten. Part of Wicked Women, which the BBC has termed "a mini-season of dramas about women in power in the 1990s." Hussies was a morality-fantasy, a kind of Coronation Street in pink, given an overblown Ken Russellish treatment.
A few scenes were hilarious and Julie Walters and Robert Lindsay produced memorable Elsie Tanner and John Travolta routines. Lindsay's Travolta, in particular dancing to Night Fever, with toilet flushes added to the backbeat was a sublime mix of male preening and human corporeality: libidinous and lavatorial at the same time. It was, quite literally, a pee-take, magnificent in its parody and puncturing of pretension.
But, more often than not the excessively stylised treatment was gratuitously flabby. The plot, in which Walters, as a miserably married pub landlady, hits back against her sexist, sexless working-class life, by opening, with a reunited female friend, a women-only male strip club, was demeaned by the fluffiness. Perhaps the drama's fable-quality was meant to be enhanced by super-soft focus camera work on sordid realities. It wasn't.
When a group of quite hardy and hefty women start guffawing lines like "I'd `ave given `im one", it doesn't help that most of them are dressed up to look like Barbara Cartland on acid. It's not the vulgarity that's a problem. It's the distortion, which makes the women seem utterly one-dimensional. Sex-fantasies, by either gender, at any age, don't need this degree of pantomime make up. Panto-porn has its place in a Julian Clary game show. But it's too indulgent, too wasteful, to be allowed spread to TV drama.
Anyway, the simple counter-pointing of women's sex-fantasies with male ones is seldom convincing. No doubt, females ogle hunks like males ogle bimbos and there is much hypocrisy about women's alleged disinterest in gawking. Brazen Hussies, to be fair, belatedly acknowledged the differences. By the time it did though, the brazenness at the hussies had been so diluted by fluffiness, that it was all as anti-climactic as a eunuch's visit to a brothel.
IN parts, an unnecessarily arty treatment almost unbalanced Where Do I Begin?, a thoughtful documentary in which Just in Keating spoke about his late father, the celebrated painter, Sean Keating. Directed by Justin's son, David, who has co-produced the recently released feature film, The Last of the High Kings, staccato and time-lapse shots, even when accompanied by a moody trumpet, were overused, giving a meddlesome MTV look to a programme centrally concerned with introspection.
Still, that's really a quibble. Questions about art, politics, family relationships, religion and the Ireland of de Valera, were posed and answers were proffered. Pre-TV archive footage, home movie clips and RTE inter views with Sean Keating were combined with scenes of Justin and his brother, Michael, reminiscing about the past and, in particular, about their father. It wasn't quite seamless, but it was Sean Keating described the Limerick of his boyhood as "a medieval dungheap" in which lower-middle class Catholics had neither "respect nor power". Visiting the house in which his father spent the first 22 years of his life, Justin found that it is now in bedsits. It was tempting to think that bedsit-dwellers are hardly groaning under the weight of respect and power accorded to them roughly a century on from Sean Keating's Limerick.
It Was in setting a mood of poignancy, largely because of Justin's personal memories, that Where Do I Begin? begun to get places. Considerations of traditional versus modern art and of the development of this State after 1921, held interest, but the most compelling talk was when Justin pondered on his relationship with his father. This was the private being made public and it was achieved without mawkishness.
Yes, of course, some of it was sentimental - a term of total condemnation among the more constipated middle class - but not excessively so. Having confronted Sean about what he (Justin) perceived to be his father's greater affection for the elder Michael, the old man had said: "We love different people in different ways." Just in Keating's eyes filled up as he recounted this, reminding us that rationality, erudition and even wisdom are leaky containers for deep human emotion.
SEAN Keating's painting of Ardnacrusha power station was interpreted by Just in as a declaration that human skill could deliver a brighter future. Ardnacrusha as art seems quintessentially hopeful in the spirit of the times in which it was built. Ardnacrusha as PR, as was the case in Death of the Banshee, seems more representative of our own age.
Micheal O Muircheartaigh (wasn't his brother head honcho in the ESB?) narrated a well-produced, if typically syrupy, commemorative documentary - marking the 50th anniversary of the rural electrification scheme. Thousands of men digging holes for poles in a bucolic Ireland reminded you that the changes in this country in the last half-century have been monumental. Ironically, as the ESB brought power to the people, the real power within small communities the parish priests - would, in consequence, begin to lose out.
For along with electric light and pumped water, came the wireless. No longer would it be possible for villages to remain so uninfluenced by the wider world. Death of the Bansheee didn't get all sociological about this, of course. Instead, it was gently anecdotal with interviewees who had worked on the scheme, providing a light, oral history of a time of bicycles, pulpits and poles - millions of poles, bought mostly from Finland.
Tales of parish priests reading and threatening to read, from pulpits, the names of welshers - families who had signed-up, but then wished not to pay when the men with the poles arrived - recalled a country of people easily manipulated. In a week in which politicians appeared to be digging holes for themselves as big as any the priests dug for the Church in recent years, there was reason to hope that our own times will begin to see through much of the abject PR of the powerful.
THE bucolic Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s was invoked too in Michael O'Hehir: A Tribute. As the predecessor of Micheal O Muircheartaigh, O'Hehir was, as the cliche goes, "the voice of Ireland". GAA and horse racing notables were lined up to pay tribute to a man whose broadcasting career spanned the years from 1938 to 1985.
As obituary programmes go, this one had more appeal than most. It was partly because O'Hehir was, and always will be, identified with memorable sport(ing moments, which have their own resonances across the years. All-Ireland finals, Aintree Grand Nationals and Arkle anywhere, anytime, carry significances and sentiments for all who remember them.
There was, at times, a nasal quality to O Hehir's voice and he used turns of phrase, by turn, correctly gentle and questionably obsequious. But these are considerations at the margins and it is not a sidesweep at RTE's current crop of commentators to say that Michael O'Hehir has never been adequately replaced. O Muircheartaigh is probably even more knowledgeable on Gaelic games and has won a kind of cult following, even in pockets (or pocai) of Dublin 4.
But it unlikely that the broad, national cross class appeal of O Hehir can ever be replicated in this country. His voice though it was the voice of a time when Ireland was, we know now, cruel reminds most of us of happy times. It's impossible to imagine that voice describe anything like the Hillsborough disaster. Impossible.