TVReview: "God didn't just touch him on the shoulder, he kicked him in the ass," said record producer Bob Johnston. "He's got the Holy Spirit about him, you can look at him and tell that."
Johnston was talking about Bob Dylan, poet, musician, reluctant emblem of the protest movement and icon of the 1960s, who was the subject of Martin Scorsese's compelling film, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, an Arena special shown over two nights this week. If, like me, you persisted in watching (despite the prospect of a 3½-hour examination of Dylan's early career making you vaguely panicky), you will have been rewarded with a brilliantly edited documentary about a disinclined prophet caught up in a tumultuous phase of American history.
Scorsese's film began with Americans beating time to How Much is that Doggy in the Window, and the first steps of Robert Zimmerman's "musical expedition". It ended a few years later, in 1966, with an exhausted Dylan retiring from live performance, seen either as a messiah or a Judas and admirably refusing to take up the mantle of either.
Inspired initially by Woody Guthrie and other luminaries of the folk scene (including Tommy Makem and the Clancy brothers in báinín sweaters, singing of being led astray by a butcher boy), Dylan's ability to connect with the spirit of the times saw him evolve rapidly into a figure of much wider significance. At 21, at a time when prophets were being sought and destroyed, he shared a stage with Martin Luther King, and following King's "I have a dream" speech performed to a vast sea of expectant faces armed only with his acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Along with the expertly arranged historical footage, there were interviews with his contemporaries. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg recalled an uncomfortable meeting between Dylan and the Beatles in 1965 in a London hotel room: "They were at the summit of their spiritual power, yet so unsure of their speech." Singer Joan Baez, who had aged a hell of a lot better than the rest of the contributors, spoke with warmth and humour of her relationship with Dylan.
There was footage of her as a young woman, like a beautiful and wholesome squaw, curled tightly into the corner of a hotel sofa in London as Dylan and his entourage walked over the furniture in their Chelsea boots. Dylan, in his obligatory shades and drainpipes, ignored her.
"I shouldn't have been there," Baez said. "He'd moved on." Commenting on his refusal to allow Baez to share the stage with him during his British tour of 1965, a measured, leather-clad Dylan, speaking 40 years later, his face now lined like a series of fjords, said: "You can't be wise and in love at the same time."
Indicative of the times (and how they have a-changed) was the endless round of press conferences Dylan endured, where earnest, suited, middle-aged men with fat microphones asked him dumb and hostile questions about beatniks, and seemed to hold him personally responsible for the rising tide of nonconformity. There was also the extraordinary vitriol and chagrin of fans who wanted their acoustic folk-hero to stay off the electricity, and who booed him and his band around the world.
"I had a perspective on booing," Dylan recalled. "You've got to realise you can kill someone with kindness too."
ANOTHER ICONIC FACE of the 1960s, Marsha Hunt, described as "actress, model, writer, and lover of famous men" (Mick Jagger, with whom she has a daughter, wrote Brown Sugar about her), was the subject of Real Life: Beating Breast Cancer.
Hunt, in the secondary stages of breast cancer, chose to lift the lid on a disease that she calls "my adventure", by allowing her hospitalisation and treatment to be filmed.
At 59, Hunt is still a beautiful woman. In her 20s, though, when she first arrived in England, she was heralded, extraordinarily, as "the prettiest golliwog in London". While appearing in the musical Hair, she was photographed naked by Lord Lichfield in a pose that would come to symbolise the increased sexual liberation and racial equality of the time.
Now resident in Ireland, Hunt was writing a book on Jimi Hendrix at her holiday home in France when she noticed that "my breast was different".
Determined to finish her book before seeking a diagnosis, it was to be four months before she returned for treatment at Dublin's Mater Hospital. In an act that showed her refusal to be daunted by cancer, Hunt, in preparation for her mastectomy, drew a flower and wrote her surgical team an encouraging note (upside down) on the breast to be removed. Indicative of her positive attitude, she wore fabulous high heels around the hospital and, despite agonising setbacks (including an MRSA infection) and having to endure months of chemotherapy and radium, remained steadfast in her refusal to be defeated by her illness.
"The cancer has been fabulous," she said. Hunt eschewed an offer of reconstructive surgery and instead travelled to London to the queen's brassiere-makers, Rigby and Peller, to have them design a bra for a single-breasted woman.
"I feel like a 12-year-old boy on this side," she grinned, holding the place where her breast used to be. "This is my badge of honour." In response to people who advise her to have breast reconstruction to "balance her body", she asks: "Would you say that to a guy with one arm?" We can't all be like Hunt, and many who have faced breast cancer or who have watched someone they are close to negotiating the disease may have felt either that her relentless positiveness was rooted in fear, or simply that her courage was beyond them. Still, it was great to see her returning to Lichfield's studio to recreate her original 1960s pose, minus a breast and with many more years of experience behind her. And she left us with some sound advice.
"Enjoy how ill you are not," she said. When considering the possibility that the cancer may return, she remained unapologetically sanguine. "Living with a sense of immortality," she mused, "makes us behave badly."
THERE WAS SOME pretty lousy behaviour going on in Bodies, the bloody obstetrics-and-gynaecology medical drama, which returned this week for a second series. The usual "you may find this disturbing" spiel was rehashed by the continuity guy prior to the first episode and before you could say "pass the pethidine" we were zooming into a close-up of shattering membranes and blood-soaked sheets as another tiny actor arrived in studio complete with umbilical cord but minus an Equity card. When it was safe to look up, we were assaulted by Keith Allen doing scary-doctor acting and maliciously shooting golfballs at the principal consultant's four-wheel drive. It's really a very exciting show.
It's also funny. "She'll relieve you at 6am," Rob (the nice doctor that everyone secretly wants to sleep with, played by Max Beesley) is told by a concerned midwife when he volunteers for some last-minute overtime.
"Great," says Rob. "Usually the best I get is breakfast." The surgical procedures, however, are pretty gruesome and almost Tarantino-esque, as the masked white male docs waltz around wielding scalpels over some flaccid unconscious woman with her eyelids taped closed, while Chrissie Hynde croons "sleep sleep" on the radio, and bowels get perforated and placentas parted.
For those of you with the stomach for it, the series is set to continue until the staff starts decorating the Christmas tree with electronic polyps.
LESS VISCERAL AND more emotional matters were on the agenda in The Clinic, which is back on RTÉ for a new series. Dr Cathy Costello (Aisling O'Sullivan) is barely holding on to the reins of the busy practice now that husband Ed has apparently decamped to Brazil and a glamorous career with Médicins Sans Frontières. Fiona, the clinic's long-time secretary, fantastically played by Norma Sheahan, is skirting another nervous breakdown, patients are leaving in droves, and the insidious march of cosmetic surgery is drawing closer.
The Clinic is a steady ship, well-acted, nicely paced (for Zimmer frames), and as clean as a GP's fingernails - but it is badly in need of a tonic. At the close of episode one, Dr Costello has pulled herself together and, thankfully stopped enjoying surreptitious ciggies in the park while uninterestedly watching a child collapse into a diabetic coma in front of her, too depressed to do anything about it. She has also advertised for a new doctor to join the busy practice. If she gets really lucky, Keith Allen might apply.
