TV Review Hilary FanninEaster 1916. "He had little or no sleep for the entire week. He was out walking all night when he came across a train carriage and he decided to break in and catch a few hours' sleep.
When he awoke, he looked up at the ceiling and, as he always said to us, 'I thought I was in heaven, I saw all these seraphims over my head.' He wiped the sleep from his eyes, looked again and realised that he had broken into the king's state carriage."
Growing up on a bleached suburban estate in Dublin in the 1960s among a population of resilient but restless adults who had one sensible shoe in the decorous past and the other tapping its toe to a more permissive and dangerous beat, there was one political figure whose name invaded our skipping games and whose features were as familiar as the suffering face of Jesus permanently illuminated in many of the kitchens up and down our road.
TG4's solid history series, Uachtaráin, continued with an examination of the career of Eamon de Valera, the third president of Ireland as well as the longest-serving taoiseach in the history of the State, a man who cast his long shadow over us for generations.
Born in a foundling home in New York City in 1882 to an unmarried Irish immigrant mother and a man who Dev apparently claimed was a Cuban sculptor, his rocky and inauspicious start, the programme suggested, subconsciously motivated Dev to find an unshakable identity and sense of place. Employing familiar archive footage of a smoky and ravaged Dublin in 1916 and contributions from, among others, Dev's grandson, Eamon Ó Cuív, the hour-long documentary had to chase its tail merely to illuminate the basic early facts of Dev's elongated career: his remarkable escape from execution after the Rising due to the British government's apprehension over his American citizenship, on to the Treaty and its bloody legacy, the Civil War and the death of his former colleague, Michael Collins.
What was fascinating, however, in a documentary that narrowly avoided becoming a solemn history lesson, was the sheer tenacity of a man whose identity and that of the State were so inextricably bound up together. In the years of his journey from gun-runner in Howth to avuncular host on the steps of Áras an Uachtaráin (with a delicately beautiful Grace Kelly and, later, a smiling John F Kennedy and windswept Jackie), his presence permeated our consciousness like no other Irish political figure.
Our neighbour on that suburban road, which stretched its finger towards more as-yet-unborn suburbs, was a friendly and burly policeman, who we believed, rightly or wrongly, to be Dev's bodyguard - I used to imagine that he kept the fragile, blind old man in a matchbox in his pocket. Observing the current generation of politicos adorning our lamp-posts, it seems unlikely (fortunately, perhaps) that we will produce such a mythological creature again.
IF I HAD been a scientist (a possibility about as remote as the distant suns of Jupiter), my preoccupation would have been with weather - you know, why does the sun shine all week and go Awol on the bank holiday weekend? Had I done so, I would by now, unintentionally, be at the cutting edge of scientific research, grappling with such issues as the future survival of our planet and how Australia can be prevented from turning into a dustbowl (well, hopefully for all of us, I would have been have fired by this point).
Sixteen years ago, maybe such trifles as hot, hot Aprils appeared as speculative trinkets on the tarnished ankle-chain of scientific knowledge to the big boys, the serious, lab-coated, bag-the-Nobel boyos who began then and are still now scuttling around in a 27km tunnel underneath Geneva, investigating the theory of everything.
Horizon did a damn fine job in communicating the immense complexity involved in the understanding of everything. Apparently (and you'd be well advised not to quote me on this) it all boils down to sub-atomic particles being given an almighty boot in their sub-atomic backsides and set on a helter-skelter collision course inside the Large Hadron Collider, a big blue Heath Robinson-esque metal cylinder crouching under Switzerland. Okay? Got that? The scientists involved in this $6 billion (€4.4 billion) experiment, which will come to fruition next November and be ready to recreate the Big Bang, were scarily intellectually generous in their explanations of their work (and well they might be, given that the black hole they hope to replicate can drag gravity and everything in it - ie, us - into an "unknown dimension").
They were a pretty cool bunch, these uber-scientists (please note here the use of the word "uber", employed earlier on Tuesday evening by stylist Gok Wan to describe a pair of big knickers - "uber-knickers", he said, and it stuck; the word, not the knickers). Anyway, interviewed against an inky-black backdrop, these uber-scientists (many wearing polo-necks, although they didn't reveal their underwear) offered such literary gems as "we are almost at the visual edge of the observable universe" and "the farther we look, the deeper we can see into the past". Riveting stuff.
Gradually, Horizon started to resemble a really good episode of Sapphire and Steel, dead exciting, and when they began to theorise about the possibility of the blue tube revealing "an unseen world" that may co-exist alongside us, I was ready to jump into the supernova in my Spandex body-suit (much to Gok Wan's approval, I'm sure).
Sam West's cognisant, perfectly pitched narration for Horizon (you'd swear he was an astro-physicist, not an actor) included an explanation of the Higgs Field which I will not even attempt to disseminate, but one atom of information did adhere to my particle, so to speak, which is that we are all "moving around in treacle". That's what the man said (kind of): we human beings are stuck to earth, bound to travel through a kind of orbital molasses - all of us, that is, except Hector Ó hEochagáin, a man who moves through time and space with the velocity of an aerated frog recently released from a schoolboy's straw.
I KNOW A lot of people are entertained by Ó hEochagáin's "bejaysus-we're-all-a-mad-bunch-of-bastards" charms, but I have to admit to tiring of the stringy redhead's celeb-side manner. The first programme in the third series of Hanging with Hector featured Ó hEochagáin in manic pursuit of Connemara-born chef Richard Corrigan, starting in a castle in the Scottish Highlands (where Corrigan and his team were preparing to feed 70 Scots in a blizzard of wild seas and wild salmon) and concluding with the host working for an hour in the kitchen of Bentley's, Corrigan's uber-classy London seafood restaurant (it's hot, chef! I burnt me fingers, chef! I'll see you in the bar, chef!). Corrigan is an interesting subject: with the singular intensity of genius, he talked of "pure food" and "wild food" with passion and muscular fervency, and then, ignited by an Ó hEochagáin riff, reminisced about eating freshly slain pig filleted and still warm to the touch.
"He's a rebel, he's a hippy, he's an anarchist, he's the Brendan Behan of the culinary world," concluded Ó hEochagáin, about an inch away from Corrigan's ear, glass of bubbly in one hand, the other gripping the big chef's neck to steady himself.
"Oh you're a class act, Hector, you're a class act," said Corrigan and, boys oh boys, it was mission accomplished again for he of the golden helmet, as another celebrity scalp adorned his pelt, Irish dancers high-kicked in the swish London bar, and wild-eyed Corrigan and the Navan man revelled in their antecedents and their roguery and their great big Irish balls. Great, and one hates to dampen their fire, but it's just that Hanging with Hector can be a little like walking into a party where everyone is happily half-shot and lugubrious and you realise that your liver is just not up to it.
BUT BACK TO the knickers. Stylist Gok Wan, that thin sliver of oriental androgyny and rectangular spectacle-dom, is also back for another series of his arrestingly titled makeover show, How to Look Good Naked. So much television these days is about stripping ordinary women down to their ugly underwear, retouching their roots and sending them back to their burdensome lives with a couple of pairs of slingbacks and industrial-strength lingerie that it has now become entirely unremarkable to watch buxom ladies weep over their cellulite while their dwarfed husbands salivate at the prospect of a TV company recycling their dowdy spouses as panting nymphomaniacs in Marks and Sparks hold-ups. (Over here, Mr Producer, my missus is drowning in a fleece and getting undressed with the lights out too.)
Gok Wan, throwing his subjects' unfashionable panties out the window of his chic Clerkenwell loft, is exactly the same as Trinny and Susannah and every other style guru that may have darkened your screens, and despite his promise to make his subjects "size heroes" rather than "size zeros", the statistics remain the same. Eight out of 10 women, the programme claimed, hate their bodies, most want to be an airbrushed confection, and flocks of us still converge on hot supermarkets in baggy jumpers to purchase glossy magazines full of unattainable body images. How to Look Good Naked is a ripple of lipoids on the thigh of the beauty industry, and just another chance to measure ourselves against the competition.
tvreview@irish-times.ie