TV REVIEW:True Lives: The Green Fields of Vietnam RTÉ1, TuesdayTuras i mBaol: An Sahara - An Bealach Siar TG4, ThursdayRay Mears's Extreme Survival BBC2, SundayCannabis Cafés UK BBC2, Wednesday
True Lives: The Green Fields of Vietnam was indebted to the ciné camera footage shot by Michael Coyne. It was that familiar dreamy, grainy look so often used as a visual prop in American television. The texture of nostalgia, the filter through which we see 1960s America. Soaked with the green of the uniforms and the landscape, its lack of sound adding an eerie air to the tanks spraying long ribbons of flame at villages, to the waves and smiles of men later killed. But if there had been sound, what might have jarred most would have been the Irish accent coming from the soldier with the camera.
Coyne's experience was the spine of this excellent documentary, which marked the return of RTÉ's consistently impressive documentary strand. A Galway man, he emigrated to Chicago, only to be drafted and subsequently spend a year of his life as a gunner on a tank during the 1968 Tet Offensive. He was among around 2,000 Irish who fought in Vietnam. Until recently, only one of the 60,000 US and Australian dead was registered as Irish, but there have now been 21 traced. Those who joined up did so under US addresses, dying as Americans.
It's hard to shake off the incongruity of an Irishman in a situation so set in our minds as the Vietnam War. It was an American war. The boys who died were their boys, not ours. The pen pictures of the soldiers were all- American. The solid, steady wholesomeness. The sideways look to the camera. The square jaw and straight lines of the cap and the collar. And then there was the familiar, replayed footage of the war itself. The buzz cuts and 1,000-yard stares. Soldiers wading through marsh, creeping through jungle. It is not the flashback of Irish youth. That is one of dancehalls and working the land. The uniform is the Sunday suit and the carefully greased hair. But of course, it was not anomalous at all that a boy should leave Ireland and find himself, through accident or design, being shipped to the wars of his adopted country. At that time, in fact, it was inevitable. It is just not in our frame of reference to think of it. We have not conditioned ourselves to see a US army uniform but expect an Irish accent.
Yet The Green Fields of Vietnam refused to lean purely on the novelty of Irish Vietnam veterans. Anne Roper's film was beautifully shot, intelligent and thoughtful, and what stayed with the viewer were the words, not just who was saying them. There was Tom Kelly, a Co Roscommon man who served as a paratrooper and was the only man of his unit to walk out of one devastating ambush. His friend, Ed Somers - a Co Wexford man serving in the Australian military - watched the bodies pile up in the field hospital during that battle and presumed Kelly was among them. It took him 30 years to discover Kelly was still alive. In the US, where veterans' organisations are so widespread, he might have traced him sooner.
But in Ireland, these ordinary Irishmen who returned here after the war with experiences so separate from anything expected of them, found that silence was the best strategy.
There was Ger Duignan, who spent four years in Vietnam, much of it helping out at an orphanage, where he began a relationship with a local girl who later died alongside him in battle. And there was the story of Christy Nevin, the first Irishman to die in Vietnam. He was born in Co Mayo, emigrated as a teenager, sent money home from his army pay, and died in battle in 1966. His mother, May, and her family collected his posthumous Purple Heart from the US embassy in Dublin, where they were greeted by anti-war protesters who screamed and jeered at a mother who had lost her son in another country's war. Whatever about the political arguments, at least the basic humanity of what happened was recognised before it was too late. May died a few weeks after the making of the documentary.
At Christmas, Dermot Somers turned up trekking across Siberia. On Thursday night, in Turas i mBaol, he quickly thawed himself out by beginning his two-part walk across the Sahara with the caravans of Niger salt traders.
Niger is in "the dead centre of Africa and of the Sahara". The word to take note of there is dead. The caravan's journey comprises a month's walk to Bilma, to collect the salt, and three months' walk to Nigeria to sell it. A three-month walk. The leader of the caravan and Somers's guide is Alhassan, a 72-year-old who has been plying the route for 40 years. "The lazy," he said casually, "hate the journey."
There isn't much in the way of guidebooks for this part of the world, so Alhassan navigates by the stars and instinct. He eyed a place to rest for the night. "This place is better. There are fewer fleas." In that sentence, the word to pay attention to is fewer.
On this journey, Alhassan led his band of 20 camels, two men, one boy, Dermot Somers and a cameraman across the vast sand-dunes. You can blame David Lean for it, but there has not been a television programme shot in the desert that hasn't featured enormous expanses of sand with a camel rider silhouetted against the setting sun. It is a requirement of the visa. Turas i mBaol opened with one of these, and dipped into the well of obvious camera shots regularly. It didn't matter, as it was a programme that rose above cliché through sheer verve and the fact that if you ever get bored of the sight of a desert caravan of several thousand camels crossing such profound emptiness, then you have lived a life far more exciting than the rest of us.
Dermot Somers looks like a man who has spent his life facing directly into the elements and walking straight ahead. Ray Mears, on the other hand, looks like he's spent his life in an oxygen tent. Ray Mears's Extreme Survival is a series of practical tips aimed at people who may find themselves lost in the wilderness, but watched by those whose most extreme survival moment will come when the digestive biscuit drops into the tea. Mears is fresh and has a certain smugness, as he lights fires with twigs and boils up stews with ferns. He has the air of a man who would greet a nuclear holocaust not so much as a disaster but as a robust challenge to his manhood.
But he has made a wonderful series, filled with some fascinating information and hair-raising anecdotes. This week he showed us how to survive if lost in the forest. "When I look around I see an abundance of natural resources," he said, looking around at an abundance of things that would kill you. He then made a squirrel trap out of some twigs lying nearby and fashioned a bird trap out of a piece of string. Bears are a little tougher to deal with. If you are ever out in the wild and a bear takes a shine to either you or your pic-a-nic basket, here are some handy tips. Never run; they can out-sprint you. Never climb up a tree; they can climb quicker than you can. Make yourself as large as possible. And - very important this - keep your distance. Sitting on a sofa several thousand miles from the nearest wild bear, and about 20 miles from Dublin Zoo, I think I have that one well covered.
Cannabis Cafés UK was a Money Programme special pre-empting the change in British drug laws and the inevitable prospect of the drug being sold over the counter. It followed Jimmy Ward, a borderline rascal with the dream of opening the first Dutch-style coffee shop in Bournemouth. He's done his homework, literally, after doing a training course in Holland. He remained still a little naïve, though. Paranoid about the police turning up on his opening day, his method of weeding out the undercover squad was simple. "Are you a policeman?" he asked a man on a bike. "No," the man replied. "OK then," said Jimmy.
In the UK, coffee shops could create 45,000 jobs. The cannabis industry is estimated to be worth £4 billion, and legalisation could bring £1.6 billion into the public purse. What the potential revenue would be in theRepublic, we might not really know until the UK alters its laws and we eventually follow suit. I'm sure the politicians who call to the door over the next couple of weeks will have all the figures to hand.
Anyway, Jimmy succeeded in getting through his first day without getting arrested, even if the coffee shop had more journalists in it than customers. How much money had he made? He reached into his back-pocket and pulled out a very fat wad of cash indeed. "Not bad for teas and coffees," he chuckled. How much of it he'll declare for tax, he didn't say.