One forensic documentary beats two cliche-ridden cop dramas

TV REVIEW:ONE THING is for certain: you're not going to come away from a Mary Raftery documentary feeling happy and uplifted, marvelling at what a great little race we are. Amid all the media noise, Ireland's most influential documentarymaker has shown time and again, particularly in her films on child abuse, States of Fearand Cardinal Secrets, that a well-researched documentary that's brave enough to challenge consensus and expose previously untouchable figures in our society can effect change. It's rare, but TV can still do that.

Raftery's latest work, Behind the Walls(RTÉ1, Monday), a two-part series charting the history of Ireland's psychiatric hospitals, revealed damning evidence of appalling conditions and cruelty, as the historian Diarmuid Ferriter explained that, for generations, asylums "were dumping grounds for Irish social problems".

By the mid-20th century Ireland had the largest number of people per capita in psychiatric care. The conditions in our 25 mental hospitals – those massive grey stone Victorian buildings on the outskirts of towns – would these days contravene a long list of basic human rights.

The system grew out of the penal system in the 19th century, during which lunatic wards in prisons were extended to become standalone hospitals; right up to recent decades, the system was still built on that containment-and-control ethos. And you didn’t have to do much to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. As Dr Ivor Browne said, they were peopled by “anyone who wasn’t wanted in society”. You could be the unmarried sister on the farm, getting in the way of your brother marrying, you could have offended the local landowner in some way or you could be perceived by your family as being “difficult” or “morally loose”. And there was no meaningful treatment available when you were committed.

In the first episode Raftery told the story of Hannah Greally (the documentary features many beautifully shot re-enactments), who became something of a celebrity in the 1970s when she wrote a book, Birds' Nest Soup, about her experience in St Loman's mental hospital, where she was locked up for 18 years. Her mother had committed her for "a rest". Greally has passed away, but the second part of the documentary, shown this week, featured psychiatric- hospital residents from the 1970s and 1980s telling their stories: a man who was put into a psychiatric hospital "for a rest" after his marriage broke down and found himself effectively imprisoned, and a group of articulate women in Waterford who individually had sought help from the local psychiatric hospital for a variety of conditions, but who ended up being sexually assaulted by Dr Lane O'Kelly, a psychiatrist there. He died before they could get justice.

There is an undertow of anger in Behind the Walls. Raftery does not make cool, dispassionate, academic films. In this thoroughly researched and thought-through programme, she takes a 360-degree approach, covering the story from every viewpoint, with contributions from historians, administrators, psychiatrists, sociologists and service users. It made for a powerful examination of a cruel, inhumane system that was allowed go on for too long.

It ended with a glimmer of hope and signs of change, with stories of supported accommodation in the community for people with mental illness, new models of treatment, increased rights for patients and an ever-reducing number of people in psychiatric hospitals.

THE GALWAY-BASED crime novelist Ken Bruen continues to be ill-served by the TV treatment of his reliably good books. Last year his central character, Jack Taylor, the hard-bitten Galway garda-turned-PI, made it to screen played by the Scottish actor Iain Glenn. It wasn't good. The Guardshad a poor script, woeful acting and an ending you could see coming pretty much as soon as the opening credits had finished. TV3 is showing two more Jack Taylor investigations – this week it was Magdalen Martyrs(TV3, Thursday), and they are even worse than The Guards, for the same reasons.

The dramas are a mostly German production – filmed partially in Bremen, which may or may not look like Galway – and there's a touch of the Oirish about the whole thing, and not just because Taylor's weapon of choice is a hurley. Glenn, who in The Guardscouldn't quite settle on an accent, has now decided to channel Clint Eastwood: his voice is a husky American-tinged drawl that wouldn't have gone down too well in Templemore.

TV3 IS NOT the only one showing duff crime drama this week. The BBC's shiny and very expensive-looking new offering The Body Farm(BBC1, Tuesday) is spectacularly rubbish. Waking the Dead, which ran for about 500 years, ended last season; this spin-off gives its dullest character, the forensic scientist Dr Eve Lockhart (an icy Tara Fitzgerald), her own series.

She runs a body farm, a state-of-the-art forensic research facility that sometimes helps the police out and that for some reason is in a farmhouse deep in the country – as if CSI's Grissom moved to Glenroe. Her team are a trio from central casting: a hunky sidekick, a young male scientist with a full suite of oddball ticks, quirks and fears, and an idealistic female forensic expert just starting out. They are called in to help when two dead bodies are found in a derelict tower block. There's been an explosion and the remains are pebbledashed all over the walls – there's any amount of gratuitous gruesomeness.

“We’re going to get into major maggot mass,” says one of the team in the po-faced and unintentionally hilarious way the actors deliver all their lines. Lockhart is given to staring into the middle distance and to thinking gnomic thoughts out loud: “This is my promise to the victim: I will do everything it takes to unlock the mechanism of your murder, because that is where your killer is hiding from justice,” which would make anyone’s fingers itch for the remote control.

The convoluted plot was as full of holes as a net curtain, though they tried to compensate by loading the whole thing down with gizmos, gadgets and pretendy science. When Lockhart finally confronts the killer (on her own, in the derelict tower block: I mean, really), the killer doesn’t seem to notice a giant webcam is perched on her right shoulder like an electronic epaulette, sending footage back to the body farm for more techie malarkey. Avoid at all costs.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Get stuck into...

Downton Abbey(UTV, tomorrow). Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Jessica Brown Findlay and Brendan Coyle are back for a second series of the period drama. Gorgeous.