TV Review: "Does anyone actually know who David Kelly is? No, I didn't think so."
This simple question, posed by a senior civil servant to Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair, was at the heart of an accomplished and moving dramatisation of the events surrounding the suicide of Dr David Kelly, the British government's chief weapons inspector. To a bullish Campbell and a somewhat fey Blair, the civil servant explained that in the 1990s Kelly had gone to Russia and, through patient negotiation, uncovered a stockpile of undeclared biological weapons that were "arguably the greatest threat to life on earth ever manufactured, and Kelly found it, and then set about dismantling it".
There were no hands left without dirt on them in Peter Kosminsky's painstaking unravelling of the complex story of journalist Andrew Gilligan and the now infamous "sexed-up" government dossier claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be activated within 45 minutes - which became the British government's pretext for going to war.
Everybody involved seemed to lie or evade the truth at some point or other: Kelly, when faced with an MI5 investigation into press leaks, offered an obtuse explanation in his defence, that his conversion to the Baha'i faith required "the dissemination of truth rather than a lie".
What Kosminsky's film clearly aimed to do - and succeeded brilliantly in doing - was to create a believable and sympathetic character out of the enigmatic figure at the centre of the Hutton inquiry, to reclaim the human element of Kelly. Mark Rylance, as Kelly, played him with extraordinary empathy and a scientific precision worthy of his subject. His was one of a number of portrayals (especially Jonathan Cake's Machiavellian Campbell) that were so persuasive it was difficult to remember this was in fact fiction, or at least only a version of the truth. Contentious issues abound, such as the fictional Gilligan's altering of his notes on his conversation with Kelly (which the real Gilligan denies), but what was powerfully conveyed was the terror of a man who finds himself running headlong into the might of the government machine at its most warlike.
However, with the British general election looming, the WMD undiscovered, Campbell gone and Blair looking a decade older, it seems David Kelly is still biting back.
THE TWO-PART "DOCU-DRAMA" The Year London Blew Up was made by the appropriately named Blast Films. It charted the 1974 IRA terror campaign in Britain (one bomb there, reasoned the IRA, was worth 100 in Belfast), starting with the bombing of two Guildford pubs. The material, drawn from sworn affidavits of the IRA cell and interviews with police, was fascinating, giving the programme an almost visceral immediacy. By 1975 IRA activist Martin Joseph O'Connell and his team of three volunteers had, from their base in central London, instigated more than 40 terrorist attacks and were still at large.
When a £50,000 bounty was placed on their heads by Guinness Book of Records co-editor Ross McWhirter the IRA team upped the ante, shooting McWhirter dead on his own doorstep and driving around London's West End in stolen Cortinas like a posse in a lawless frontier town, firing machine-guns into restaurants and clubs.
When the cell was eventually tracked down, its members forced their way into a council flat on Balcombe Street and took a middle-aged couple hostage. The five-day siege that followed was recreated in dramatised reconstructions of the gang holed up in the couple's living room, negotiating for water and food while Engelbert Humperdinck sang Please Release Me in the background.
The siege, handled by future Metropolitan Police commissioner Peter Imbert, ended with the hostages released and the four terrorists giving themselves up. "It was," recalled broadcaster Jon Snow, "breathtaking, emotional and elating." Imbert and his officers were also responsible for charging four innocent people of the Guildford bombings, people who spent a further 15 years in prison after the arrest of the Balcombe Street gang and their admission of responsibility.
At times the "dramatisation" of these events was clunky and expositional but archive footage of former British home secretary Mervyn Rees speaking about the importance of IRA ceasefires being "real", and footage of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness greeting the Balcombe Street gang on their release in 1999 under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, made this compelling living history.
"THE DEVIL IS as capable as anyone else of pulling a fast one," said retired Garda sergeant John Murray. "But if it was the devil, he shot himself in the foot." Murray was describing an evening in July 1985 when he saw a substantial concrete Virgin "floating in mid-air". "It was," he said, with the assured gravity of a man used to being listened to, "spectacular". It is 20 years since that rainy and heady west Cork summer when a statue of the Virgin Mary was first seen to "move" in Ballinspittle. Would You Believe presenter Geri Maye, best known from children's TV omnibus The Den, asked Murray if he suspected the devil may have been behind the action. Somehow the question would have been more plausible put to a sock monster.
In this soft-focus, non-investigative, bewilderingly sentimental backward glance at a truly strange time in our history when, on one evening alone, 8,000 believers pulled up their hoods and gathered to pray at a roadside grotto, there were far more interesting questions that were neither asked nor answered.
Twenty years on, the crowds and the chip vans have long departed, the cautious bishops have closed their doors, and Ireland has emerged from the chrysalis of its doctrinal past. The sincerity and faith of the few who continue to experience sensation at the grotto is beyond doubt. Seeing is believing, they say. But as the camera panned over the larger-than-life Virgin, looking, from her kohl-ringed eyes to her delicately painted toenails, like a well-loved doll, the question of what was really happening in Ballinspittle in 1985 remained a mystery.
A DOMESTIC FANTASY for wrinklettes, First Love, Second Chance is yet another completely mad reality dating series. This week it featured Jill, a 36-year-old single mother and professional Victoria Beckham lookalike. She sat on the sides of baths at trade shows like a good little doppelganger and bared her teeth, Posh-style, at the camera. Meanwhile, Mark, having tried and failed at marriage and an unspecified career and having spent a month "inside" for marijuana possession, was back living with his mum and studying the "sociology of crime". Jill and Mark had first met 18 years ago in Torremolinos when both were curly blondes who looked uncannily like George Michael. Mark still did, albeit with the help of the peroxide bottle.
The pair were reunited and both spent a week living in each other's houses to see what life would have been like if they had stayed together in the first place. There was a lot of whispering to hand-held cameras in toilets as the pair, seemingly tongue-tied when it came to expressing their growing fondness for one another (Mark now having remembered who Jill was), had no qualms about sharing their feelings with the rest of us. It was vaguely touching. Vaguely.
Mark said "wow" a lot or, when he was really impressed, "wow-wow wee". In fact, he looked and sounded like a pleasant cocker spaniel and would have gone well with Jill's ornamental bunny, which hopped around her living room like a happy little . . . bunny.
Jill's son liked Mark too. Jill even liked Mark. But Mark wasn't confident of Jill's affection. Mark seemed to spend his life in a pleasant haze of confusion, occasionally selecting phrases from the romper room to lead us through the mist. "Last night we twinkled," he said. "But my twinkle seemed a little bit bigger than her twinkle." Well, hell, Mark, who says size matters?
In a coup for reality TV, Mark and Jill are now planning to marry this summer. We know they are happy because the director chose to put the closing credits over footage of Mark, Jill and her son on a roundabout - in a playground, that is. Which is just as well, as I wouldn't fancy Mark's chances in traffic.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
