TV REVIEW: This week Shane Hegarty reviews SAS: Are You Tough Enough? - BBC2, Sunday; The Trench - BBC1, Friday; Prime Time: Balance of Fear - RTÉ1, Thursday; The Ghost of Roger Casement - RTÉ1, Thursday; and An Miotas Ceilteach - TG4, Monday.
If the SAS needs to make any cash, it could do worse than set itself up as a holiday camp. As one of those weekend places to which middle-management arrive to learn about team-work and focusing on goals and that sort of thing. Where they can learn how the basics of interrogation can be applied to the cut-throat world of the boardroom. Where they pretend to escape over freezing moors, before being tracked down by sniffer dogs, assaulted by very tough men, blindfolded for hours and made to stand in a room filled with incessant, brain-burbling white noise and then interrogated until they break, simpering like an abused dog. Then they can go back to the office, apply all they've learnt and beat that quarterly target by selling 3 per cent more pencils than ever before.
These are good days. War (I mean real war. War that arrives on your step, wipes put your family, drags you off to some foreign killing field) is a distant place now in Britain. Despite the odd foreign adventure, it is a land last sighted a generation ago. They fought and killed and died so that subsequent generations could get bored of the quiet life and wish to recreate the conditions for their own entertainment. Kitchener used to point out from those recruitment posters; in the 21st century, it's your television that needs you.
It is such a luxury of the modern age that the public's view, experience and fear of war-time can be so soft, that it can treat it like a theme park. Last night, the BBC began The Trench, a new series from the genre arrogantly labelled "reality" television. It claims to recreate the conditions of the Great War trenches, using as a blueprint the diaries of those who were actually there.
I will return to this programme in a couple of weeks, as at the time of writing, I haven't seen it because the BBC couldn't recreate a pigeon and get a preview tape to me on time. I'm sure the first episode had provisos attached, qualifications about its accuracy. Although there were none in the incessant trailers preceding it, only promises of IT managers from Sussex living another generation's nightmare.
It is, obviously, an utterly corrupt idea that you can recreate even the very notion of the trenches, as if they were some sort of jigsaw to be pieced together. Will they wake up with rats crawling all over their faces? Will they be executed for nodding off at their posts? Will they leap into a crater containing a soup of decomposing bodies? When they beg to the clipboard-wielding producer to be allowed go home for a decent meal and a night in with the wife, will they be court-martialled and shot? The volunteers will leave the trench, and I guarantee they will talk of their sense of accomplishment, the sense of having learned something. And when they do, The Trench will have confirmed itself as exactly the opposite of what it claims to be. What genuine veterans learnt, they couldn't bring themselves to speak about.
There are no such pretensions to education in SAS: Are You Tough Enough? The selection process for the SAS becomes the Krypton Factor with added torture. There is still a lot of walking while labouring under heavy packs. There are plenty of people running until they puke. There is swimming across freezing rivers, unnecessary push-ups and bossy staff sergeants shouting really nasty things. This week, the surviving volunteers were let loose and had to evade capture, at which they proved singularly unsuccessful. Once found, they underwent the blindfold/white noise treatment followed by some pretty intense interrogation. An Irish doctor by the name of Morgan O'Connell acted as psychologist to observe and protect them. "I would imagine," he said in his best medical speak, "they will be absolutely shitting themselves right now."
It was highly watchable television. To watch the mechanics of interrogation, the calculated art of it. It was tame stuff, maybe. No fingers broken. No teeth pulled out. No cigarette burns. No standing the prisoner naked in a room and taunting his privates. No wet sponges and humming electrodes. But most broke all the same, although the two women left held firm. Young men all over the land will have watched it and come to the quick conclusion that they could do it no problem, all the while struggling to find the energy to even look for the remote control. Just, you would imagine, what the army recruitment officers would want.
In real-life torture situations, the victim always breaks eventually. Even the army knows this. To break, to reveal information that may endanger colleagues, can induce a guilt that will sometimes haunt a soldier for the rest of their life. Host Dermot O'Leary interviewed the volunteers the morning following their own interrogation. How did they feel? "Everyone's buzzin'! We feel like we've really achieved something." Next week, they learn how to de-humanise the enemy, as well as 47 different ways to break with your bare hands. I jest, of course.
One of the few things which differentiated the recent footage of US soldiers engaged in battle in Afghanistan from SAS: Are You Tough Enough? was the sound of the gunfire in the background as those US soldiers hunkered down. Low, distant gunfire.
Tat-tat-tat. The kind that acts as a soundtrack to television news. A hint of actual war, a tingle of battle. We hear the sound, but nobody gets hit. Nobody explodes. War as we want it to believe it is. On they go, eating desiccated chicken soup for the soul, climbing a personal mountain even higher than the actual one. They get to kill a few people too, but not on camera.
If A television executive is looking for reality, there are enough places in the world where war is not yet an extended weekend break. Why not the Gaza Strip, where they can enroll with Hamas and train to be suicide bombers. Brendan O'Brien's report from that God-awful place was the latest film in what is becoming a vintage period for Prime Time. He didn't enter the classroom of the bombers, but he spoke with one of them, met their leader, visited their widows. This is an entire population with bombs strapped to their bodies, either actually or metaphorically. O'Brien's report put some humanity into the situation for those of us who have seen only the blur of news coverage. Those who will become the shattered fragments of skin and bone, the stains on the concrete. Those who will be their victims. Yet it re-emphasised the inhumanity. The obnoxious bloody-mindedness of the Israeli government. The cold rationale of those who train young men how to become human bombs. The only conclusion? That there won't be one.
How excellent it would have been if The Ghost of Roger Casement had concluded that the Black Diaries were indeed forgeries, concocted by the British government as a way of discrediting him before his execution. Alan Gilsenan, Jim Murray and Kim Bartley's fine two-part film culminated in the sort of historical detective work that is rarely found on Irish television, and I bet the makers secretly yearned for the results to ignite the conspiracy.
Ultimately, the results were prosaic and predictable; the only hand to have created Casement's diaries was his own. However, as is always the way with conspiracy theories, the results were immediately absorbed into the wider theory. The forensic scientist was not only English, but had been previously employed by the Metropolitan Police. And, anyway, hand-writing analysis is a flawed science. Angus Mitchell, an academic convinced they are faked, was given the forensic results, rustled about in his logic for a way of structuring the thesis, and found a phrase that could become a motto for conspiracists everywhere. He quoted W.B. Yeats: "There is no truth save that in thine own heart."
An Miotas Ceilteach was a documentary which acted like an interrupting cough from the back during the bit of a wedding when the congregation is asked does anyone object to this union. It reminded us that we, the Irish, aren't Celtic at all. We speak a Celtic language, but there was never any Celtic race as such. The things we ascribe to Celticism - all those spirally designs, all that jewellery we flog to the Yanks - aren't Celtic at all. The notion of the Irish as a Celtic race was first foisted on us by the English as a way of portioning up the races of the world into easily identifiable anthropological groupings at a time when they approached the planet in a phrenological frenzy.
Not surprisingly, what they found to be weakness, we saw as strength and adopted it as our own. We could have done worse than adopt a character in which we become romantic, loquacious, "taller than Roman spears". The programme suggested we should re-evaluate our national identity. Junk the Celtic "kitsch", accept ourselves for the porridge of identities that we are. Which is all well and good, but maybe we should wait until the tourists have left the theme park.