It's radio on the telly as Duffy casts a cool eye over public art

TV REVIEW:JOE DUFFY'S documentary Whose Art Is It Anyway?(RTÉ1, Tuesday) gave an insight into what Livelinemight look like if it was on the telly. Duffy set out to examine a truly interesting subject that, despite its ubiquity, gets hardly any coverage: public art.

A scheme launched in 1988 whereby 1 per cent of the cost of any publicly funded development can be spent on commissioning a work of art has meant that there’s hardly a new stretch of motorway or public building that doesn’t have a shiny, sometimes madly obscure, often fantastic, giant piece of art on it.

One of the most controversial public art pieces was Anna Livia, or the Floozie in the Jacuzzi – a brilliant nickname, but not quite as accurate as the Biggest Rubbish Bin O’Connell Street Ever Had, which is what it quickly became. Duffy, who gave a great deal of time to this piece, said he was angry that it was taken away.

“Are you not as angry as I am?” he asked its maker, Eamonn O’Doherty. The artist, a calm, unruffled sort, wasn’t a bit angry. “Are you emotional?” asked Duffy later, as the piece was being installed in its new home. “I wish I was,” said O’Doherty. “I’m just glad to see the end of it.”

On O'Connell Street, Duffy talked to the man who cleans the Spire ("Fairy Liquid? Go'way!") and a flower seller, and got a passer-by's opinion on Jim Larkin. If that wasn't Livelineenough the programme even included clips from the show – radio on the telly – leaving you in no doubt this was Duffy's documentary.

The more informative sections were those in which he met the artists responsible for some of the works dotted around the country, and experts such as Declan McGonagle, Aisling Prior and Ruairí Ó Cuív, who talked about the commissioning processes, and some of the challenges and problems that arise. Apparently, a key part of the brief for motorway art is that the piece can’t be too visually arresting – you don’t want somebody slamming on the brakes at 120km/h to have a look.

Interesting too were Duffy’s visits to some of the pieces, particularly to Dundalk to see what is arguably the daftest piece of public art in the country. “Is that couch a couch or a piece of art?” he quite reasonably asked when he spotted the sofa in the middle of a bleak-looking green patch in a housing estate. Dundalk’s arts officer gamely tried to explain that “in time to come, this will be a symbol for this estate”. Though quite what estate would want a symbol that screams fly-tipping is another matter.

“I think this is taking the public debate to its ultimate: is this a joke or is this insult; should art be uplifting or challenging?” said Duffy, getting to the crux of the issue. The weather wasn’t kind to the programme maker: skies were grey and it rained a lot, giving the whole thing a grim and dispiriting air.

IT'S LUCKY FOR Scott & Bailey(UTV, Sunday), a new female-led crime drama (yes, another one), that plot isn't the be-all and end-all in TV crime dramas because, although the two lead characters were strong and believable and worth setting the timer for, the plot, or at least the crime part of it, was creaky.

As a crime-fighting duo, Scott and Bailey (Lesley Sharp and Suranne Jones) are more Cagney and Lacey than Rosemary and Thyme. Sharp’s Scott is the married mother of two who thinks before she speaks and is methodical and professional in her dealings. As Bailey, Jones is as stroppy and mouthy as she was in Corrie, a brilliant copper but likely to break the rules. They’re good, credible foils for each other.

The first scene signalled that this six-parter is as much about their personal lives as their professional ones. Bailey is in a fancy restaurant expecting a marriage proposal, but instead her smarmy boyfriend of two years dumps her. A bit of light stalking later and she discovers that he has a wife and kids tucked away in mock-Tudor splendour in suburbia. And before you speculate how rubbish she must be as a detective not to have copped that during their two-year relationship, she comes over all Fatal Attraction, which is diverting and character-revealing but makes the crime that has to be solved nearly a by-the-way.

It’s well made, though: the dialogue is sharp, and the relationships between the women (the duo have a straight-talking female boss) entirely believable. If only they’d get the crime part sorted.

ALISON MILLAR'S technique (starting with her award-winning film At Home with the Clearys) is to get close to her subjects and to observe. She's never on screen, she asks questions off camera and makes comments in a voice-over, and the sense of despair in her voice throughout the superb The Men Who Won't Stop Marching(BBC2, Wednesday) was clear.

During her four-month stay in Belfast to document loyalist marching bands, her guide to the Shankill was freckly-faced 11-year-old Jordan, whose dad, Jackie, set up his own band (there are 13 in the three-kilometre stretch of Shankill Road) when he was released from the Maze.

First stop was an end-gable mural to his Uncle Stevie, “a military commander”. Then on to the next mural: “This is the prison where Daddy was; it’s called the H-block”; then, “There’s where the boy hung himself.” And the KAT graffiti that’s everywhere? That’s Kill All the Taigs. “Well, they have KAH – kill all the Huns, that’s us Protestants,” explained Jordan with simple, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes sectarian logic.

Millar showed the importance of the bands in this deprived community, where being part of a band is being part of a tribe. In a world of hard men dressed in gold epaulettes, banging drums and marching up streets, with aggression fizzing in the air around them, Millar came to understand the emotional outlet that being in a band offers, but “it entrenches them and keeps old prejudices alive”. The bands were practising for the area’s annual parade to honour “a defender of Protestantism”, a paramilitary shot by the police on his way home from killing a Catholic.

Millar asked how the people on the other side of the towering “peace wall” that divides the area might view this celebratory march. A look of incomprehension flitted across his face. “It can only be a good thing,” he said.

A reality check, quietly countering the images last month from Dublin of sunny days and the Queen and the President standing side by side, and all the talk about reconciliation and the past being behind us.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

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