TV Review: When the highly respected writer, Jimmy McGovern, recently bemoaned the scarcity of quality TV drama, asserting that just about anything starting at 9pm on UTV was bound to be "shite", one assumes that he wasn't planning on seeing Cracker, his own iconic TV contribution, in such dodgy territory.
The revival of his inspired creation, Fitz (the boozy, bulky police psychologist so fantastically realised by Robbie Coltrane) for a one-off special was sure to arouse considerable excitement from that captive nine o'clock Sunday night audience, an audience more often than not up to their molars in a slew of autopsy tables heavy with battered blondes and Robson Green. But maybe that is the problem: we have come to expect magic from McGovern, and this time the spell didn't quite work.
Cracker opened with Fitz visiting his family in Manchester after a 10-year absence. Argumentative, bullying, bored, and having to surf the net for Viagra supplies, his bellicose mood was soon pacified by an invitation to climb back into the saddle with the local constabulary when a well-heeled young American stand-up comedian ended up dead next to a comedy club urinal. This murder was followed, with indecent haste, by the violent death of a self-indulgent, adulterous American attaché in his bathrobe - and before long we were up to our expectant oxters in TV news footage of a beleaguered and bloodied Iraq, witnessing McGovern's complicated and somewhat melodramatic take on the tragedy of our times.
It didn't quite work - somewhere along the way Fitz (despite his massive presence) got lost in the tendentious plot. And it was difficult to swallow the premise that a former British squaddie turned cop had murdered the Americans because 30 years of bloody war in Northern Ireland had been reduced to the status of an insignificant "bun fight" and the deaths of his comrades trivialised by the US invasion of Iraq.
Cracker may have been a disappointment but it certainly wasn't "shite", and Coltrane as Fitz, with his growing despair of didgeridoo and kangaroo culture, his relentlessly realistic appraisal of his senescent marriage, his fading prowess and his love affair with his bottle of malt, was wholly welcome back.
"Dinner in fridge, wife in Australia". Will Fitz return to his Antipodean hideaway? I think not.
"MISLEADING, TOTALLY FALSE and wrong" and "a thinly veiled effort" to malign Pope Benedict" was how Irish canon lawyer Dr Michael Mullaney reacted to the assertion on Panorama: Sex Crimes and the Vatican that the 1962 directive, Crimen Sollicitationis, enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Ratzinger, was a worldwide policy of secrecy and control used to silence victims of clerical sexual abuse. Colm O'Gorman - founder of One in Four, which supports adults who suffered sexual abuse, and who was abused by Fr Sean Fortune - travelled to North and South America to present this Panorama investigation, which attempted not only to unravel the possible consequences of this directive but also to ask the big and as yet insufficiently answered question: why were priests who were known to be abusers moved from parish to parish and given the opportunity to re-offend rather than handed over to civil authorities? This was a pattern endemic in the US, from Atlantic to Pacific, we were told, and one that O'Gorman convincingly showed to have had disastrous consequences across the globe.
Behind the stories of clerical abusers under house arrest in the Vatican, footage of a recidivist clerical abuser demonstrating his grooming technique on what he admitted were more than 30 victims over two decades, and lawyers working on abuse cases describing the sheer will required to take on the labyrinthine structures of canonical law, was the simple, awful and moving truth of the shattering effects of child sexual abuse.
O'Gorman, who had previously described Fr Fortune's pattern of abusing him between first and second Mass on a Sunday morning, was at one point in the programme overcome by the bleak and desperate poignancy of his journey.
In a tiny, impoverished town outside Sao Paulo in Brazil, O'Gorman spoke to the grandmother of a five-year-old boy who had been systematically raped and abused by a priest who had offered to teach him guitar, a priest who had been moved to the South American parish although criminal charges were pending against him for his activities elsewhere.
"The priest's little wife" is what they call him at school, the child's grandmother told O'Gorman. "He tells me so often he just wants to die." Horrifyingly frank extracts from the priest's diary were read out, outlining his plans to find a loving and vulnerable child, a needy child, whom he would ask to "give himself" in return for protection and attention. The priest is now serving a 15-year sentence, but for his young victim and his family in their remote community, there is, as O'Gorman said, "no therapy, no support"."We had so little; now they have even taken our faith," the old woman said.
O'Gorman's is a powerful and convincing voice, and his story and those he sought out deserve to be told and retold.
OH DEAR, OH dear, oh dear, oh dear. Trinny and Susannah are reduced to slumming it on ITV. And their new masters, not content with the loathsome and lissom lovelies shredding people's wardrobes for a living, have imbued the show with a bit of marriage guidance "zing". Trauma and Suspender, the voguishly vapid duo, are now raiding sex supermarkets for leopardskin handcuffs and edible thongs to clothe their victims. The girlies' sartorial spider web has been extended to ensnare couples with marital problems, men and women who choose to exchange dignity and privacy for a shopping spree in Littlewoods with TV's most treacherous fashionistas. Presumably, however, the couples' anxiety about their sagging waistlines and flaccid marriages pales into insignificance compared with how they feel after taking off all their dowdy clothes and examining each other's naked bodies behind a cruelly lit cyclorama in the full glare of the dewy-eyed girls and a merciless camera.
The girls' first "fashion virgins" were Little Lester and Lanky Ellie. Lester stays home all day and minds the couple's two autistic sons, while Ellie goes out to make a buck (and occasionally feels tempted, when out of Lester's not altogether considerable reach, to "explore her femininity" with another man).
The couple ended up (in their unwieldy new clothes) traipsing dutifully into the honeymoon suite of a local hotel, where Trauma and Suspender (having apparently transformed Lester into "a god of masculinity") had thoughtfully scattered rose petals, a paperback edition of the Kama Sutra and a tube of edible chocolate sauce all over the sheets. As the door closed on the transmogrified couple, the prospect of Robbie Coltrane in a pair of tights and light-up tiara would have been more appealing.
"HOW COME WHEN the doorbell on the caravan rings the dogs always think it's for them?" Pat Shortt opened the third series of the lunatic Killinaskully with a psychotic tale about the rural town's deranged inhabitants attempting to open a local radio station.
"Putting the unity back in the community", the "ray-deo" station offered delights such as Mrs Gilhooley's "Night and Deity" and Goretti's darkly mischievous "Night Nurse" and could (if the sound desk hadn't blown up when Fr Philip sprinkled it with holy water) have singlehandedly revived Roger Whittaker's rather lacklustre career.
"For Nonie Goggins, seriously one hundred and eleven!" roared the town's assembled DJs, crowding around the desk for yet another Whittaker request, and it was only when the poor woman had passed away that they realised the request read "for Nonie Goggins, seriously ill".
Shortt's Killinaskully may delight in gombeenism and paddywackery, but the sharpness of the malevolently insane humour offers our rednecks-in-Gucci-shirts society a great big banana skin to slip on. Given the massive popularity of the series, it looks like our cute-hoor backsides can take the fall.
