The Real John Lennon (Channel 4, Saturday)
The Dream Academy (BBC 1, Wednesday)
RTE New Comedy Awards (Network 2, Monday)
Lines Of Fire (BBC 1, Wednesday)
`John Lennon had no social skills. He was an angry man whose history bespeaks a desperate quest for a certain kind of nurturing," said Pauline Sutcliffe, sister of Stuart, the first Beatle to die. It's 38 years since a brain haemorrhage killed Stuart Sutcliffe and almost 20 years since a rush of blood to Mark Chapman's brain killed John Lennon. Beatle lives cut short, like so many lives cut short in popular music, bespeak a quest for a certain kind of remembering.
Channel 4 chose to remember John Lennon with a dedicated night marking the 60th anniversary of his birth. The centrepiece of "Lennon Night" was a portrait titled The Real John Lennon. Given that from the time of Brian Epstein's makeover of The Beatles to the time of Albert Goldman's savaging of the Lennon legend, there have been more than enough unreal John Lennons, The Real John Lennon seemed real enough. Affectionate without being cloying, it managed to retransform a legend into a person.
Opening with footage from the immediate aftermath of Lennon's death - accompanied by his hauntingly poignant In My Life - the portrait quickly cut from finish to start. Thereafter it was a straightforward chronological documentary: birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, astonishing success, Yoko Ono, decline, brief revival and death. In time and in trajectory, Yoko Ono was pivotally placed. This portrait treated her as the black widow of the piece.
"In Yoko, John saw a mother figure," said Lennon's half-sister Julia Baird.
"Yoko Ono did a number. She was determined to get John," said Cynthia Powell, his first wife.
"Yoko was very manipulative. She suggested that I should sleep with John, who, incidentally, always called her `Mother'," said May Pang, Lennon's former personal secretary turned lover.
"In front of Yoko, John always brought down the shutters," said Lennon's cousin Stanley Parkes (a splendid Alf Roberts lookalike). "He got caught between sushi and sausage, bacon and chips."
"Yoko did not want any of the family at the funeral," added Julia Baird.
Oh Yo...oo...ko! In the middle of "Lennon Night", they called your name and, even allowing that no defence was included, it was difficult to dismiss the charges. Popularly blamed for breaking up The Beatles, this time Yoko Ono was blamed for breaking up Lennon's connections with his personal and not just his professional past. That past, or at any rate, that past as it has passed into legend, was retold without dramatic alterations to the familiar plot.
No surprise in that. After all, John Lennon was once so famous - even if The Beatles never were, despite his claim, really more popular than Jesus - that dramatic alterations to the plot have become extremely improbable. Perspective however, remembering that he's now dead half as long as he lived, means that his character can at last be more meaningfully extricated from the plot. The strength of The Real John Lennon was not in its newness of plot details but in its elaboration of his character.
Clearly he was disturbed by repeated abandonments and tragic losses. His father left when John was just five. His mother was killed by a car when he was 17. Stuart Sutcliffe died when Lennon was 21 and Brian Epstein committed suicide five years later. With the perverse predictability of such a history, Lennon himself would abandon his first wife Cynthia and first son Julian (when the child was five) and abandon too the band that made him globally famous. Indeed, for lengthy periods, John Lennon pretty well abandoned his life for drink and drugs.
Given his access to excess and the times that were in it, it might arguably have been more perverse had he not indulged in sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll. But the anger remarked upon by Pauline Sutcliffe could never quite be quenched by such satiating of basic instincts as compensation for the void in his nurturing. Whatever kind of nurturing he sought, Yoko Ono, it appeared, was capable of convincing him she could supply it. Mother Yoko? Now there's some trip.
The idea of a 60-year-old John Lennon was always incongruous anyway. "He defined the dreams and aspirations of a whole generation more than any other 20th century artist," claimed this portrait. He probably did, yet his meaning to this dotcom age of insipid boy bands, in which even ideology can be presented as a consumer choice (any colour you like, so long as it's blackest "free" market) is as problematic as was his own life. His music aside, Lennon is sinking into history almost as fast as Lenin. Still, with a nod towards Robin Williams's dictum, Channel 4 remembered that you really had to have been there to remember not being able to remember the 1960s. In the process it found the Scouse bloke behind the codology. Fine stuff.
DESPITE all the evidence that showbiz fame seldom comes without problems, its lure has, if anything, increased since the era of The Beatles. The Dream Academy followed four young hopefuls - Georgia Roots, Kelli Young, Tim Brown and Ben Forster - at London's Italia Conti Academy. It was "Fame, the Documentary" (mercifully minus the leg warmers). It was also, despite contrivances, a kind of flexing of television's muscles, affording an audience of millions to hitherto unknown people.
Their fortunes varied dramatically. Ben pulled a major gig in the West End musical La Cava while Tim literally ended up as the hind quarters of a panto cow in Wolverhampton. Even the gap between the Premiership and the Beezer Homes League reserves doesn't quite encompass such a span. Kelli has made it into a "yoof" TV drama and Georgia retains realistic hopes of an audition for EastEnders. Their individual stories constituted the docusoap's plot, but the contrivances of the genre raised those awkward old questions about the effects of a TV camera on reality.
In one blatantly contrived scene, we saw Georgia waiting by her phone for a call from an agent. She had been waiting for weeks but, conveniently, a camera was rolling as the phone rang. The agent had good news - she was going to sign-up Georgia. Whether this primarily constituted good PR for the agent or a good break for Georgia is impossible to determine. But it certainly made you wonder if, Big Brother-like, exposure on television counts for more than talent in the fame game. Why bother with talent to build a profile when a camera can do the job so much more efficiently?
Still, even with the instant profiles provided by TV, the wannabes had to endure the vileness of auditions and, in fairness, the vileness of reviews. It did remind you that, while killer criticism of the "Ms Jones played Mozart at the National Concert Hall last night and Mozart lost" variety might amuse readers, it can devastate young hopefuls. We saw Kelli (and yes, that lower case "i" bespeaks an egomaniacal capital "I") depressed by a scathing review. The only consolation, I suppose, is that the thinking public rightly remain as final arbiters, able to review the reviewers.
It's not so, of course, for those who make the decisions at auditions. Although a camera was allowed film Ben trying for a role in Les Miserables, we did not get to hear the deliberations of those assessing him. Then again, even if we did, the presence of a camera would almost certainly have curtailed the remarks of the people with the clout. In that sense then, this docusoap was castrated showbiz. Aside from Tim's gig as a cow's behind, it never quite exposed showbiz for the exploitation extravaganza of ambition it actually is.
YET more showbiz hopefuls pitched up on RTE New Comedy Awards. Sure, it's easy - but pertinent too - to say that, traditionally, RTE comedy is a great joke itself. But at least it's trying now (yes, yes, I know "very trying") to unearth some deliberately funny performers. Hosted by Ed Byrne and his hair (John Lennon's locks wouldn't have been in it beside Ed's), this is essentially an amateur talent competition.
Truth is, it looked and sounded it too. No doubt, it does take either great bottle or great desperation to attempt stand-up. And, like the rest of showbiz, stand-up stands up on the exploitation of ambition. This opening edition was jointly won by James Gouldsbury and Karl Spain. Gouldsbury took the mick out of Leaving Certificate points culture, his monologue about doing his "colouring-in exam" - Higher Paper, of course - being apt and funny, if rather strained. There was flab in his routine but there was some humour too.
The Irish stand-up boom has got to be fading anyway. The problem for new hopefuls is that they've got to be at least as good as the established performers. The bar has been raised, and the genre doesn't have an infinite range of devices. Increasingly, it's variations on themes and styles, many of which have already been comedy-ed to death. For RTE, it's cheap TV, but on the evidence of the opening night, the show lacks the hilarity of the best stuff and it's probably just not quite dismal enough to attract a cult following. Comedy is funny like that.
FINALLY, Lines Of Fire. Based on Frank Ormsby's anthology of the poetry of the North's Troubles, A Rage For Order, this was poetry underpinning multimedia. Produced and directed by Brendan Byrne, its layering and fading of filmed horrors set to poetry had a beguiling quality. At its most potent, its elegiac combination of words, music and images offered a depth of perspective not possible in conventional, logic-tyrannised, prose analysis.
Generally the music and images supercharged the words but, inevitably, they occasionally swamped them. Presented by Paul Muldoon and including interviews with Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Michael Longley, this was the North's poetry establishment firing fusillades of verbal bullets from its heaviest artillery. Overall, it contained enough splendid moments to be hauntingly memorable.
Still, the North being the North, a quibble. At the top, Muldoon wondered if, as Yeats asked, "mad Ireland" had "hurt us into poetry". The "hurt" sounded self-consciously clunky although it clearly packed an arresting punch. But the "mad Ireland"? Depends on how you view it, I suppose, but if poetry wants to mix it with politics, Ireland maddened by mad British policies sounds closer to the truth. Certain kinds of remembering mean not forgetting certain kinds of perspective.