TV Review:'Genocide by apathy, death by diplomacy?" World Aids Day 2005: 6,000 Africans died on a single day, a striking death spectacle played to an empty auditorium. There was, according to the remarkable and tenacious former Irish nurse, Mary Donohue, barely a ripple of press coverage to mark this tragedy, such is our collective exhaustion or, worse, indifference to a 21st-century pandemic which has killed an estimated 28 million Africans.
Three years ago Donohue visited an Aids programme in Kenya's Rift Valley, where she witnessed the death of Rose Atieno, a young woman dubbed the 16 millionth person to die of Aids in Africa. Atieno died without medication or hospitalisation in a rat-infested hut, nursed by her eight-year-old son, Curtis, who continued, after his mother's death, to nurse his Aids- infected father and sister.
To mark World Aids Day 2006, RTÉ screened A Missing Generation, a powerful documentary about Donohue's Rose Project, which, by supporting small community-based care initiatives and the building of educational and acute care centres, aims to bring quality medical and psycho- social care to sub-Saharan Africa.
The ferocity and magnitude of Aids, which has crashed upon the continent, decimating an entire generation and leaving in its cadaverous wake more than 13 million orphans, has, according to Donohue, forced an "over- challenged" population of grandparents and children to dig deep to find the inner resources needed to survive; inner resources, Donohue feels, that we in the West would probably be unable to summon. For example: an emaciated but stoical grandmother, solely responsible for the care of six grandchildren, collects stones in a tin bath, walks to her home with the basin of debris balanced on her head and breaks the rocks by hand to sell to a builder to feed her family. What strikes one is not just the appalling travesty of the necessity for her actions, but also the dignity, selflessness and humanity of an elderly woman for whom the future holds no promise.
For example: Richard, an African health education worker sits among a group of villagers in rural Malawi and, gently but effectively, dispels the myth that a strong and virile man infected with the virus can "cure" himself by having sex with an infant or a very young girl.
For example: Elizabeth, a pioneering doctor, traverses the brothels and slums of Nairobi with her "one-legged sock", persuading impoverished sex workers to insist that their clients use condoms.
This is not the first potent and convincing documentary to illuminate the work of an innovative Irish volunteer in Africa. Reminiscent of the award-winning When You Say 4,000 Goodbyes, on the work of Dubliner Dr Mike Meegan, A Missing Generation howled for our attention. For Donohue, Meegan and their like - individuals who refuse to be overwhelmed, who are respectful of the culture that they seek to help and who are prepared to take that first step - television can be a powerful ally. With documentaries like these telling us how it is, none of us can claim we weren't told what was happening. History, Donohue said, will judge us very harshly.
Meanwhile, every day in Africa, 5,000 people die and 9,000 more become infected by a disease which is no longer seen as inevitably fatal in the West. The website address of the Rose Project is www.roseproject.com.
'NATURAL DISASTER? I don't know what's natural about something that flips the world on its head." Tsunami: The Aftermath, from the prodigious and electrifying pen of Abi Morgan, began, like all riveting disaster dramas, with a calm prequel: a balmy night at the Khao Lak Oasis Hotel, a handsome couple and their beautiful child sharing dessert under a tropical canopy. At the next table a terse family are trying to enjoy their expensive vacation, while a sympathetic young Thai waiter finishes his shift and brings foil-wrapped leftovers home to his beloved grandmother. Then, as the hours slip by, a fissure opens on the sea-bed and the ocean prepares to pounce.
Less than two years after the tsunami that engulfed south-east Asia the BBC has - hastily, some believe - recreated the disaster for a television audience. Focusing on the plight of a handful of fictitious characters caught up in the catastrophe - hotel residents, a world-weary English journalist, a Thai photographer working for an Asian news agency, an Australian aid worker, and a British diplomat overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis - Tsunami: the Aftermath was a compelling and, in my opinion, well- intentioned drama. The scale of the disaster, so difficult to comprehend at the time, was brilliantly recreated: beaches littered with corpses and debris, a ship marooned on a rooftop, electricity poles snapped in two like matchsticks, and lives distorted and utterly shattered.
There were also stories that were less evident at the time: bodies (in keeping with Buddhist cultural practices and to prevent the spread of disease) incinerated before they could be identified; big business interests, hawk-like, snatching beachfront lands from dilapidated communities; and the dispirited, often inadequate, response from officialdom. Fascinating as the drama was, though, the question of what, beyond entertainment, can ultimately be achieved by recreating these events still needs to be answered. Undoubtedly, there was a strange unease between fiction and fact that remained unresolved in the first of this two-part series. This disaster did not happen to these weeping actors and busy art directors, and the extras playing those beached Thai corpses are actually survivors (who, some press reports claim, were paid less than the occidental extras with whom they lay side by side). Shocking, brutal and spectacular, perhaps the garish and unpalatable truth is that disaster simply makes good television.
THAT UNCOMFORTABLE DICHOTOMY between fact and fiction was strongly in evidence in Scars, an extraordinary but uneasy drama from Irish film- maker Leo Regan. Regan's previous credits include the Bafta-winning 100% White, a film about three former neo-Nazis who Regan met while photographing far-right skinhead gangs for his book Public Enemy. Scars, an exploration of the effects of extreme violence on its perpetrator - in this case, Chris (not his real name) - was rooted in what appears to be Regan's favoured dark terrain. Having encountered "Chris" on a previous project, Regan conducted a series of conversations with him about his former life, which was dominated by vicious, unpremeditated physical attacks on those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who "Chris" perceived to be his enemies. Those recorded conversations were then given to actor Jason Isaacs, who "played Chris" for Regan, who "played" himself, thus somewhat undermining the crucial authenticity upon which the whole project depended.
The confessional conversations, in which "Chris" described slashing people open with Stanley knives, pogo-ing on a man's skull, crippling a "grass" with a Transit van and gouging out a fellow prisoner's eyeball, were a meditation on the psychological havoc wreaked by living with such memories, and had an almost redemptive feel. An uncomfortable hybrid, Scars was nevertheless a powerful, emotional and intellectual assault.
'AHEM . . . EH . . . I'M singing a song called Insecure. I wrote it myself." Yowza. With the metronomic inevitability of hot shopping malls, bad- tempered elves and flaccid fairy lights, You're a Star is back to torment us, with sinewy Linda, sombre Thomas and belligerent Brendan sieving through a slew of Galwegian musical talent at the start of another interminable euphonious odyssey. Brendan O'Connor, displaying his scintillating verbal wit and dizzying eloquence, told one contestant that "if we wanted a black singer we'd get one who's black" and berated another's effort for sounding like "a Van Morrison cover version by a middle-aged lesbian".
Whittled down to six, the beleaguered hopefuls sang their party pieces on a set that inexplicably resembled a Disneyland library before four of them got shunted back to oblivion by a voting public whose volume of calls "exceeded all expectations" (that would be two, then).
The caravan of love moves around the country over the next few weeks in search of the next . . . em . . . Chris Doran? Lock up your tonsils.
