TV REVIEW: The Forgotten IrishTV3, Thursday Addicted to MoneyRTÉ1, Tuesday Rásaí na GaillimheTG4, Wednesday Ryan ConfidentialRTÉ1, Thursday
‘TO EAT, to live, to die in this place – I might as well finish myself off.” Such were the sentiments of an elderly Irish emigrant, one of the many thousands who left these shores in the 1940s and 1950s and took the mailboat to England, a woman now beached in a limbo of loss: lost youth, lost community, lost country.
This week's second programme in TV3's superb two-part documentary, The Forgotten Irish, focused largely on the experience of Irish women who migrated to Britain. For every 1,000 men who left an impoverished Ireland in search of work, it is estimated that 1,400 women also upped sticks for England, a country blackened and gutted by war but in the process of building a national health service that would employ many of these tender young girls. As the programme pointed out, if you were a well-educated convent girl, with a sense of duty and deportment ironed into your soul, as many of these young women were, there were career opportunities open to you.
Not for all, though. Having absorbed hours of moving archive of our recent history in one documentary or another over the past few years, one becomes blasé about crackling footage of beehived young girls set-dancing in Irish clubs in Camden Town or of burly boys with flimsy suits and calloused hands lifting their cautious eyes to some distant whirring camera. But the clips contained in The Forgotten Irishtook on an added poignancy when those faces, now weathered by age, spoke about the collective sense of isolation behind the images, of a "famine of the spirit", of belonging neither to Leeds nor to London (places their children call home), nor to Ireland, the glossy, comparatively affluent sod which is no longer recognisable as the country they left behind a lifetime ago. "Who are we?" these withered faces asked the camera. "We don't belong here, we are in limbo."
Bedded into this deeply arresting film were stories from the survivors of institutional abuse, 40 per cent of whom, it is believed, left Ireland for England after their incarceration. Since the publication of the Ryan Report, the programme showed, stories and testimonies have been erupting like molten lava from beneath the rocky exteriors of men and women who had previously tried to bury their pasts in domestic work, on building sites and in bars.
One woman told of hearing the convent door shut behind her after a childhood spent in a religious institution. Confused and alone, she turned and knocked tentatively on the door.
“Are you going to be a nun?” inquired the sardonic porter.
“No, Sister, I want to know where England is,” said the beleaguered child.
The bleak, bleak stories, the faces aching with loss, the plight of organisations trying to cope with an avalanche of need on limited budgets, the statistics relating to suicide, alcoholism and depression, the testimonies of searing loneliness, were somehow encapsulated in the blunt recital of a poem found in the pocket of the corpse of a homeless Irishman in Camden Town. I can’t do his verses justice here, but the dead man (whom I, like so many of my confident generation, may have glibly passed by as I swanned around Camden Market looking for a tie-dyed T-shirt) wrote of wandering the streets between Mornington Crescent and Camden, and of watching “a woman with autumn hair and winter teeth” whom he would have liked to kiss, but of knowing that his plight was to scavenge those streets alone.
Intimate, effectively simple and overwhelmingly sad, this was a memorable series.
MY GOD, what a leap we all took in this fickle country, from snivelling toddlers in scabby sandals, to loudly neighing lords of the dance, with our fake-bake tans and our armoured jeeps. In his new three-part series, Addicted to Money, David McWilliams, everyone's favourite economist (now that George Lee has embedded himself with the shampooed Enda), flung himself wholeheartedly into the task of finding out who killed our economy, and just who turned out the lights on our noisy party.
Beginning his investigation (for reasons that I didn’t quite grasp) trudging through the snow in some frozen Icelandic tundra, he wanted to know whodunnit, why they dunnit and where it would all end.
The frenetically busy opening programme, with the assistance of a dizzying inundation of split screens, used the drugs trade as a metaphor for a banking system that pushed credit like cocaine, and built its plate-glass empires on the backs of dodgy derivatives and by encouraging our own insatiable desire to spend. The strawberry-blond economist went out of his way (Australia actually) to illustrate his point about our eyes becoming bigger than our wallets, and our sudden inability to function without a couple of boudoir bathrooms and a home theatre. Draped over the set of the Oz soap opera, Neighbours, McWilliams postulated that the drama series had become "the prototype for global suburban culture", growing, as the set designers confirmed, more and more luxurious over the years, more crammed with consumer must-haves, reflecting the worldwide taste for "lifestyle porn". McWilliams need not have worked so hard to convince us, considering how the evidence of over-spending in this country accosts us at every turn and hacienda-like extension.
As the excitement built, with whirling graphics showing how boom-time property prices in Ireland exceeded those in Paris and Rome, and with hard facts in capital letters stomping across the screen to tell us, for example, that in 2008 our private debt was eight times larger than our national economy, the grim statistics and dire pronouncements began to project a kind of gallows humour and the entire outing started to feel, well, kinda jolly. The lunacy of the fact that pre-crash American households had, on average, 13 credit cards and were being offered a quarter of a million dollars credit a year, is so boilingly insane for the whole damn globe that laughter seemed a more appropriate response than tears of rage.
I think McWilliams’s series is pretty fantastic, actually. It’s dizzyingly busy, yes, and overloaded with screaming metaphors, but it is an honest attempt to explain a critically ill system, one which our enthusiastic host likened to a religion whose followers have lost their faith. Next week’s programme should provide greater justification for McWilliams’s hefty travel budget, as he dissects the global consequences of the financial crisis. All in all, the series is a pretty enlightening cup of poison.
THE IMAGE OFIreland flooded with excess and flashing the plastic was rather entertainingly articulated elsewhere by a new seven-part series currently running on the ever-inventive TG4. The comedy drama, Rásaí na Gaillimhe, follows the fortunes of a disparate but intricately linked bunch of characters who converge upon the Galway races for a week of murder, sex, mayhem and money-money-money. Each episode is based on one of the deadly sins and its relevance to modern Irish life (though I just can't imagine how greed, gluttony and pride could possibly fit in to any vision of our gentle nation).
With a terrific cast including Don Wycherley, Owen Roe and the wide-eyed Ruth Bradley, this is a smart, crisply shot lampoon, well worth our bilingual attention.
House of silicon Hanging with the Hef (and Sandy, Mandy and Brandy)
Gerry Ryan, looking like an affluent, pin-striped badger, kicked off his new series of Ryan Confidentialwith a trip to the octogenarian Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Hef's crib, in the little we saw of it during Ryan's convivial conversation with the waxen entrepreneur, may have looked like the lacquered interior of a Chinese restaurant, but Ryan's host was far from stodgily predictable. Whether one views Hefner's dubious empire as a frothy paradise of dizzyingly numerous silicone-breasted blondes (and undoubtedly the world's richest trove of nipple tassels) or as a house of carnality and exploitation presided over by an ageing Lothario firmly stuck in a Martini-and-olive time warp, there is no doubt but that Mr Playboy is an astute and articulate man. Despite his penchant for wrapping teenage identical twins around his bird-like chest and having three platinum girlfriends at a time (one particular batch were alluringly monickered Sandy, Mandy and Brandy), he has, he claims, been championing a liberal social agenda, in terms of race and bigotry, over the last number of decades and "promoting a positive attitude towards sexuality".
Ryan’s confident geniality makes for relaxed viewing (although it is a little hard to buy into his theory that Sandy, Mandy and Brandy were a reaction to the “personal hurt and tragedy of a broken relationship”). Speaking of Hefner’s life in the fast lane in his 80s, a balmily relaxed Ryan posited that, should he himself make it to his 80s, he’d be surprised if he could put his own underwear on (possibly not an image one would want to carry into the weekend).
