TV Review: In the first instalment of Hanging With Hector, presenter Hector Ó hEochagáin, this week buzzed about the Taoiseach.
The two of them took the Government jet to Paris, where Jacques Chirac posed for pictures only after he had shoved aside the Irish ambassador with an ego-shattering sweep of an arm. Hector went to Farmleigh for a cabinet meeting. He stood outside the door and greeted the ministers as they arrived. It was instructive to see which of them either did not recognise Hector or just didn't want to say hello.
Michael McDowell glanced at him, before putting his head down and rushing onward as if dodging a beggar.
Through most of the programme, Bertie looked quite like a man trapped in the corner of a party he didn't really want to be at. Hector talks to you as if you have a serious hearing impediment, and as the Taoiseach once again felt the hot breath of Hector's enthusiasm close and warm on his ears, he seemed to be dipping deep into a well of patience built up over many years of cumann meetings.
Generally, though, he managed to shake Hector off . He gave him a few minutes on the plane, the odd moment in between one thing or another. They went to Croke Park for the Westmeath-Dublin match, but Hector was relegated to the row behind him. Bertie sat with the GAA's Sean Kelly; grabbed a few words with Gerry Adams. Meanwhile, Hector sat behind them, grumbling to nobody in particular, half-heartedly heckling like a schoolboy sent to the corner.
And this was the problem with Hanging With Hector, because while he had access to Bertie Ahern, it was rationed. There was a conceit of there being just Hector, Bertie and a camera, but you had to presume there was a media handler out of sight but very much in their eye-line. Anyway, Bertie kept his guard up and had no interest in giving too much away.
Hector, though, was disinclined to ask why.
Louis Theroux has a similar series on the BBC, attaching himself like a limpet mine to his subjects; demanding full access and throwing restrained, calculated tantrums when he doesn't. He has an ability to inveigle his way into people's lives, and prise out their personalities through a chumminess that disguises his mean intent. But also because he asks questions most people wouldn't have the guts to, because he understands that a lot can be learned even in how someone doesn't answer a question.
In Hanging with Hector, though, it was often about the presenter's excitement, his giddiness. I can't believe it, he'll say. I'm with the Taoiseach. Hector! With the Taoiseach! Me! Bertie! It filled the gaps where Bertie's personality was supposed to be. The programme began to get somewhere only when they went for a pint towards the end, but by then, with the minutes draining away in a short programme, it was already too late. Next week, Hector hangs with Keith Duffy. The Coronation Street actor has always been a likeable chap, but he's the sort of celebrity you can catch simply by casting your hook in his general direction. In the small, over-fished pool of Irish celebrity, you can't let the big fish get away.
THE BBC NORTHERN Ireland continuity announcer introduced the final episode of Silent Witness with breathless parochialism. "Amanda Burton, Coleraine and the Causeway Coast star in a brand new Silent Witness." The giddiness was more than a little undignified, not just because of its obvious neediness, but because the subject matter of the programme involved the North's disappeared, corruption among former RUC officers and terrorists-turned-politicians. They're subjects BBC NI seldom makes dramas about. But never mind that. Coleraine's on the telly! The script itself appropriated the ghosts of the North's past only for use in a throw-away murder thriller, with dumb twists and red herrings and entire plot lines that disappeared in the gap between the two episodes. A landslide revealed a couple of bodies and Prof Sam Ryan (Amanda Burton) flew to her home town to investigate; where she met her long-lost son and solved the mystery of her father's death. The script, all the while, stepped gently through the political sensitivities. Bryan Murray's politician went by the rather neutral name of David Kelman, and his party was never mentioned. The script was vague on what side the terrorists might have been on, working on hints and suggestion rather than coming out and saying it.
Ultimately, it pinned the murders on two former RUC officers, who had executed the victims 30 years previously. Silent Witness, then, had learnt a valuable lesson of Northern politics. It's always worth blaming the police.
And in the middle of it all, Ryan was hit by a car. Not clipped by a car, or nudged by a car. But clobbered. She bent down to pick up her bag off the road and, bam!, she was run over in what was as surprising and faithful a hit-and-run as you're likely to see this year. Having been so thoroughly creamed by the vehicle, she woke up in hospital with a slight headache and a picturesque bruise. Then she checked herself out and brought the plot to a messy conclusion.
Misery has always found her magnetic. Good things do not happen to those who meet her. In this episode, there was an attempted suicide, a murder made to look like suicide and an actual suicide. Flowers probably wilt in her wake.
At the end, Ryan resigned from her job and moved back to Northern Ireland. Hasn't that place suffered enough?
WHILE SILENT WITNESS had borrowed one terrorist conflict for its thrills, the BBC was also busy marking the anniversary of 9/11 by stoking the fears of future terrorism for the purposes of entertainment. There was a three-part conspiracy drama, The Grid, which owed much to the white-knuckle nonsense of 24. And on Sunday night, there was Crisis Command: Could You Run The Country? Here, three business-types are seated around a table, in front of big screens. They are given a major national emergency, three advisers and a few hours to sort it out. There are fake news reports and emergency radio transmissions. Everyone takes it very seriously indeed.
This week's contestants were asked to guide Britain through an outbreak of pneumonic plague. They dithered and argued but did pretty well, at one point saving Ireland from infection and later being commended for ordering the shooting of unarmed civilians. Behind them, teams of people manned telephones, shuffled notes, watched computer screens. And in the brief moments when the pace flagged, you found yourself wondering: what it is that all these people actually do? And then, after the credits the BBC offered a helpline number for anyone "affected by the issues" in the programme. Victims of pneumonic plague probably clogged the switchboard.
While the BBC was anticipating future gloom, RTÉ was rummaging through the past. The Morrison Tapes: Ten Years Later began revisiting those who, in 1994, left Ireland for a land where the grass is red, white and bluer.
Kildare men Charlie Bagnall and Donal White had gone to New York. White was a carpenter, and returned to Ireland after three months, so avoiding the embarrassment of having left the country five seconds before the construction industry took off.
Bagnall stayed. He didn't become either the multi-millionaire or global rock star that had been planned, but after struggling for a while now lives a good life with his wife and daughter in Pennsylvania. It was a personal story, most especially in the very touching story of how they eventually adopted their daughter.
Meanwhile, their house has "Níl aon tinteán . . ." written large in the kitchen and the Stars and Stripes planted in the garden. His Kildare accent has American edges. Yet, the programme didn't give us a fuller sense of an emigrant's split vision; of how they look back as much as they look forward.
The Morrison visas marked the last time a generation left Ireland because they saw no other option. The programme might have asked the obvious question of whether he regretted leaving just moments before the boom.
It was a week for raiding the RTÉ archives. Afterthe football on Wednesday, Network 2 repeated the entertaining Gerry Ryan's Chat Show Hitlist. And last night, RTÉ1 began a new series of Reeling in the Years, this time featuring the 1960s. It only began with 1962, because that was the year in which RTÉ television began. Nostalgia did not exist before it. Or if it did, it drifted away in the smoke of barrooms or by the fireside; was lost without a rock and roll soundtrack to latch on to it. Of course, I shouldn't be too sniffy about these programmes when they are always so watchable. I yearn for a lost time when nostalgia wasn't so addictive.
tvreview@irish-times.ie