Of all the things on television this week, none can have been as remarkable as the sight of Tom Waits delivering a performance during which it was advisable to turn down the volume for fear of shattering the foundations in the house. Philip King's Freedom Highway did what it said in the subtitle, "Songs of Resistance and Liberation", and Waits delivered a slave song in the dusty surroundings of his garage.
He has a surprisingly serene speaking voice, and he gave a timid introduction that gave no indication of the utter chaos he would soon wreak upon the ether. If you have not heard Tom Waits sing, the best description I can give is that of cement mixers crashing in his throat. It ambushes you with its beauty, but can leave those who have never heard it before feeling a little shaken.
When he sang in Freedom Highway his entire body seemed to convulse as if to wrench this sound out of him. He devoured the silence, taking the molecules in the air, crushing them and then producing a sound that can only have come from a part of his stomach so dark and deep we should be grateful that only he has to go there. When he finished he threw his head back, wiped his brow and chuckled as the air settled back in around him. It is a good thing he lives somewhere fairly remote, or the sound of screaming car alarms could have been deafening.
It was the performances that made Freedom Highway a real gem. As a road trip it was more of a meander than a cruise. It was about music as oral history, as revolution, as identity, travelling the globe and pointing the microphone at Chile, Northern Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, the working classes, slavery, 1960s and modern America.
There were some unexpected stories. As a boy in South Africa, Michael Masote was informed that blacks couldn't possibly play an instrument of such refinement as the violin, and he was regularly stopped by police suspicious about what was in the case and then demanded a song to prove it was his instrument. There was also the all-too-brief inclusion of hip-hop, a movement through which music finally rebelled against itself. But it's a long, long story, and this was a whole series crammed into a short 60 minutes with all the comfort of a full orchestra in a tour minibus.
When it came to the music, though, it knew to stop and dwell. Through an effortless rendition by the Soweto Community Choir, the South African national anthem became a hymn. June Tabor gave a quite striking delivery of that most melancholic of songs, Lily Marlene. Yungchen Lhamo, an exiled Tibetan, only sings a cappella. "The reason is because when I left Tibet I lost everything and I want to show people that you can lose everything but you can't lose what you have inside." It was an assertion of such simplicity compounded by a haunting, soaring singing voice that it almost rendered all the other contributions redundant.
Tell Me Captain Strange was a hybrid of the cheeky and sympathetic, a film that was filled with UFO-spotters and those who claim to have been abducted by their pilots, but that gave the impression if you were to look behind it you'd see its fingers were crossed. Boyle, in Co Roscommon, it turns out, is a bit of an alien holiday camp, and we followed local astronomer Eamon Ansboro to San Jose, California, in an attempt to persuade the world's leading astrophysicists that he had found the orbital paths of alien probes.
He was greeted with a look of polite incredulity that Eamon must already recognise from down the local of a Saturday night. It was the same look on the garda's face as he listened to Jim Flora describe the strange goings-on in Monaghan. Jim and the family regularly head out at night to wave torches at the starry sky, like intergalactic lock-hards trying to persuade spaceships to park.
At the risk of having somebody from Caherciveen beam into my living room and zap me with a ray gun, the case of the UFO sighting in that Co Kerry town seems to have some credence. How else could it explain the fact that none of the four people interviewed spoke in any recognisable tongue, as if somebody had put their words through a mincer. I should play the tape backwards. And there was the case of Lawrence Downey, who was one night walking his dog Lobo when they were both enveloped in white light and taken to a spaceship. The aliens, said Lawrence, appeared to communicate with Lobo. For years we've been wondering if our television signals have ever been picked up by a distant intelligence. Now we know not only that they have, but that they paid special attention to Barbara Woodhouse.
The film reaffirmed the proof that spaceships are blurry circular, rectangular, cigar-shaped objects piloted by tall blonde-haired aliens or stumpy grey bald ones that live in deep space or near space or in the hollow Earth. After centuries of sightings, the evidence would hardly make you spontaneously combust with excitement. Strange lights, though, have been seen for years. "The older generation put them down to fairies, simply because they couldn't explain them," said one woman whose irony had obviously been abducted by the aliens.
There have been enough unidentified objects causing terror across the country over the past fortnight, now that we've decided that we must obviously be top of every terrorist's list of target countries. Late last Saturday night, TV3's Threetext news page led with the story of an anthrax alert near the why-hadn't-we-thought-of-it-before target of Co Tipperary. The report read: "A house in Monadreen has been sealed off after a suspicious package was pushed through the letterbox. Garda∅ and the fire service are currently at the scene and an army ordinance team has been sent from Clonmel."
If they want to find Osama bin Laden, the Allies should focus on Monadreen, where they'll find him terrorising the town most Saturday nights, drunk on power and two flagons of cider.
Some odd things came through the post in Colditz too, according to Escape From Colditz. The Nazis, employing a confused sense of logic, sent all the most cunning escapees to the same prison, where they began to concoct plans of such ingenuity your brain threatened to shut down just thinking about them.
They were helped by British intelligence services, who sent maps concealed in wax records and on the backs of playing cards, German money in board games and compasses disguised as fountain pens or pencil clips. The POWs concealed their maps in cigar tubes inserted where cigars oughtn't to be smoked. They got the idea from the name printed on the tube. Upmann Cigars, they were called. "It was painful at first, but we got used to it," said one ex-POW. "I would walk around like a cowboy," said another.
They were so adept at concealing the means of their escape that there is an archaeologist working in the castle who is still uncovering maps and fake uniforms 54 years after the last prisoners left. They emerge from the floorboards, wrapped in canvas, as crisp and fresh as the day they were placed there.
There were soldiers in Colditz who faked their escapes and then hid under the floors to later emerge to cover for those officers who had actually escaped. They were called ghosts. "Remarkable men. They made incredible sacrifices," said Gris Schofield, an officer whose escape went undetected thanks to the distraction of a "ghost", but who had a moustache so thick that he could surely have smuggled out a couple of men with him.
Somebody actually thought of that one. One German sergeant, nicknamed Franz Josef, had a white moustache with such a wing-span that it looked as if a passing cloud had snagged on his upper-lip. A POW disguised himself underneath a copy-cat moustache and uniform and would have walked right out the front gate if the colour of the prison passes hadn't just been changed. Even after they shot him, the guards were convinced they had put a bullet in their own man.
It's doubtful that there will be flying saucers involved, but we are promised that next Monday's Escape From Colditz will reveal how the British prisoners looked to the skies for an escape route from the castle. They were an ingenious lot, so don't be surprised if it turns out that they tunnelled their way out through the clouds.
tvreview@irish-times.ie