The colour of vivid lives

TV Review: Benedict Kiely never learned to use a typewriter

TV Review: Benedict Kiely never learned to use a typewriter. During his days as literary editor at the Irish Press he would spend the mornings at home writing, then take the bus into town from Clontarf, carrying two piles of paper, the smaller sheaf covered in his meticulous longhand, the larger pile blank, until eventually the smaller pile would supersede the greater and another novel was complete.

Kiely still spends his mornings writing, before heading into Dublin, maybe (before it closed for refurbishment) slipping into the Shelbourne bar to meet old friends, friends whose numbers are diminishing. "Sometimes," says Kiely, who is now 85, "I see nothing but ghosts." Wordweaver: The Legend of Benedict Kiely, Roger Hudson's absorbing portrait of an often underrated writer and teacher, was almost elegiac. The programme, which included contributions from friends and fellow writers Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Colum McCann, illuminated Kiely's working life, over the course of which he has written novels, short stories and numerous essays on Irish culture and literature.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the "green curtain" imposed by the Catholic Church and the pervasive effects of censorship helped create a society with an "introverted quality" to it, we were told. When Kiely was employed as a leader writer for the Irish Independent the advice given by his boss was: "You've only two things you need to write about, 'godless Russia' and 'the rate-payer's burden' - 500 words and don't come to a conclusion about anything."

At the heart of this society, Kiely, along with the likes of Brendan Behan and Myles na Gopaleen, created an "Ireland inside Ireland", dispatching their copy from The Palace Bar, balancing the wit to win a place at the table with the wit not to get overwhelmed by the consumption of whiskey. The list of hostelries where this alternative society met reads like a souvenir tea-cloth: McDaid's, The Palace, The White Horse (where Behan apparently wore his shoes backwards in a unique impersonation of Toulouse-Lautrec).

READ MORE

Kiely, whose stories form a social history of Northern Ireland, was born in Omagh, the son of a British army foot-soldier. The quiet transgression of this one-time noviciate Jesuit within a maverick group of writers and journalists at a monochrome time in our history was in vivid contrast to the life of another Irish artist of the same period, Francis Bacon.

While Kiely stayed in Ireland, helping to create a climate of tolerance for younger writers, the teenage Bacon, armed with a determined atheism, set out on the sexually transgressive and explosively colourful life which was the subject of Arena: Francis Bacon's Arena. And where Wordweaver relied on our polite attention, as Kiely and his fellow scribes chatted in book-lined rooms or from the depths of their rocking chairs, Arena grabbed us by the bristles and threw us against the canvas of Bacon's extraordinary work.

Bacon, who described his paintings as "one continuous accident mounting on top of the other", recalled how his father threw him out of the family home in Kildare "because I was a pederast" and put him in the care of a trusted friend. The friend, according to Bacon, fell in love with him and took him to 1920s Berlin, which "corrupted me completely". Much of his young life is shrouded in myth and mystery, but in 1946 the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York bought one of his works for £240 and the career of this self-taught painter took off.

Although Bacon said his paintings were not narratives, the temptation to find stories in them is irresistible. His influences ranged from the work of Velázquez and Eisenstein (combined in his notorious images of screaming popes) to trips to South Africa (where he watched baboons being hunted and then eviscerated on a table behind his mother's house) to his obsessive sado-masochistic sexual relationship with his volatile lover, RAF pilot Peter Lacy. Bacon had a love affair for each decade of his adult life, and much of his work reads like a beautifully butchered love story. He was attracted to conventional-looking men with shady pasts or criminal backgrounds, and claimed to have met his 1960s lover, George Dyer, when Dyer was attempting to break into his studio.

Some 10 years later Dyer died from an overdose on the morning of the opening of Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, an accolade the gallery had only previously afforded to Picasso. In a twist typical of the strange narrative of Bacon's life, his former lover, Peter Lacy, had also died on the opening day of Bacon's Tate Gallery retrospective in 1962. From the seedy bohemian playpen of Soho's Colony Room club, a tartly voracious Bacon said: "Everything escapes you. Even in love, everything escapes you. How can you cut flesh open and join it with another person?" Bacon was uncomfortable about painting in front of his subjects, especially those he was fond of, because, as he explained, he needed privacy to "practise the injury" of his artistic method on them. He stuck doggedly to his stark atheistic vision and said, in defence of the violence of some of his images, that no work of art could be remotely as horrific or savage as real life. An astute prophecy given the rest of the week's viewing.

A different kind of excess was tackled in the second of the Supersize Kids series. These real-life tales from planet fat are getting less like vicarious jaw-droppers and more like public health warnings as the tally of morbidly obese children gets higher. Bethany is six years old and weighs six stone; she cannot fit into children's clothes, she watches three hours of television a day and writes her mum's shopping lists as prescribed by ad-break advisers, usually animated monkeys in baseball caps licking their snouts over some new snack food.

Helen is 16 years old and weighs more than 23 stone. When she was six, she too weighed six stone, then 12 stone when she was 12, and so on - until at 14, her weight rocketed. She has been told she will be dead by the age of 20 if she doesn't lose weight. Her mother, Julia, is also obese. Julia is decisive: against conventional medical advice she brought herself and Helen to Belgium to have gastric bypass surgery, a procedure that reduces the stomach's capacity to hold and digest food. Helen's father (Julia's ex-husband) tried to get Julia and Helen to tackle their atrocious eating habits and sedentary lifestyle (Helen consumed tubes of crisps, giant chocolate bars and milkshakes while surfing the net, her only social interaction) before resorting to such violent surgery, but Julia, with melodramatic fervour, was having none of it.

"This will be her rebirth," she said. "She will be born into the new Helen." And yes, over four months, Helen lost five stone and Julia a similar amount.

Helen was confident, the pall of despair had lifted and she was looking at the possibility of going to university. But will life continue to brighten when the only thing between Helen and obesity is a wall of staples in her gut? Her father, quietly weeping in his car, possibly guessed the answer.

Naomi, meanwhile, who had suffered from childhood obesity but who had eventually lost all her excess weight, was having a £10,000 surgical body lift to remove the flaccid empty skin that had once contained her former self.

"What have I done to my body by eating so much food?" she asked, as her loose skin swam around her like a tiresome puppy.

The programme ended on an optimistic note as six-year-old Bethany, having taken on board the advice of a dietician, perused a children's menu with her mum. "Chicken nuggets?" her mother inquired. "Don't be daft," said Bethany. "They're deep-fried." With luck, that's one little strawberry-blonde who will never have to endure the scalpel.

Don't watch Families at War, the new bad idea from Channel 4's reality slush-bucket. In the first of the series, a nervous, rather shaky-looking "mediator" called Martin took his life in his hands by bringing two meaty brothers and their snarling wives to a country farm to iron out their differences (don't ask - they included a missing drill and unpaid wages). To be fair to Martin - though I'd rather not - after a week of chicken-coop building, stream-clearing and whitewashing pillars, the brothers survived a night camping out together on their own (with a TV crew) in the field beside the farmhouse where the disgruntled wives kept their arms crossed and their mouths firmly shut.

"I think I'll emigrate," said Michele, the more cowed of the two wives, as her sister-in-law spurted big tears of rage about the injustice of it all.

Good idea, Michele, just don't take a TV crew with you.