Manchán Magan has been making television much like Listen To The Land Speak (RTÉ One, 10.10pm) throughout his career. As a writer and documentarian, his speciality is the rambling, shaggily moreish travelogue that doubles as a meditation on the Irish landscape and its untapped reservoirs of history. He’s playing all the hits here as he reels through a long-form love letter to an often disregarded and half-forgotten Ireland – to its untamed corners, its distant gleaming mountaintops, its misty sites of ancient worship.
The difference is that this latest feature took shape in the weeks and months after the presenter received a stage four prostate cancer diagnosis. “The prognosis is not great. I thought I was invincible,” he says of the cancer. “It makes you think about your role and your future in the world.”
Curiously, his health and his coming to terms with his mortality are bought up only halfway through the film. It is one of several odd choices in a beautifully made but sometimes muddled documentary.
Magan, to be clear, is a presenter of considerable charm and eloquence, and it is obviously distressing to hear of his ill health. Yet it would be doing him a disservice to claim that Listen To The Land Speak is a flawless work, when it has the woolly quality of an open-ended conversation or an evening pottering across the fields, revelling in the sheer joy of muddy boots and aching limbs.
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This is a film with a lot to get off its chest. It begins with Magan talking about the wondrousness of Irish language placenames – and how they can unlock the keys to our past and (presumably) help us better understand our present.
The story then turns to the personal. He recalls leaving Ireland at the age of 19, confused about his place in the world. He explains that he only finally found direction when he acquired farmland in Westmeath.
However, there is another shift in tone as he interviews writer Ellen Ryan about the patriarchal aspects of Irish mythology and how the significant women from Irish folklore have been historically downplayed and deserve to be rediscovered and cherished anew.
The conversation from there comes around to his health. There is a heartbreaking and gorgeously shot scene of Magan reflecting on life and death as he swims in clear lake waters. “When you’re told you have an incurable illness, it puts everything up in the air. You do not want to google ‘stage four prostate cancer’.” He says this ruefully yet defiantly. Cancer is part of who he is now but he will not allow it to define him.
Magan is an intriguing figure and Irish broadcasting would be poorer for his absence; his vision of Ireland as a place where the mysterious coexists with the everyday has an almost Tolkien-esque aura of the fantastical. Why read about Middle-earth when, in a way, it lives and breathes all around us?
Alas, Listen To The Land Speak is occasionally too meandering for its own good. It’s great fun accompanying Magan as he sets out into the great blue yonder, but there are times his latest documentary is reduced to going in circles with no destination in mind.
Listen To The Land Speak is available to stream on RTÉ Player
