TV Review: This week's dramatisation of Omagh fixed its eyes on those it believed responsible and held their gaze. Just as Paul Greengrass's film Bloody Sunday hadn't the patience to wait for the Saville Inquiry, his and Guy Hibbert's dramatisation of the Omagh bombing was outspoken. It named those it believed to be responsible; wrote their names on a list, which it referred to throughout.
It is a part of the world in which the dominant sound on the airwaves is the babble of double-speak, mollification and abdication of responsibility. Where families are too often told that the past is past and hush now, you'll disturb the peace process. Television drama is giving voice to the victims and their families.
In Michael Gallagher of the Omagh Victims Support Group, which is suing the Real IRA, it found the perfect vessel. Omagh native Gerard McSorley played him as a man with his head barely held above the grief, not quite able to re-engage with the world, as if he had been wrenched away from it on that day his son Aidan was murdered by the bomb. His was a fine performance, no doubt informed by McSorley's personal experience of losing a son.
Greengrass has made his name through reconstruction, with Bloody Sunday and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. He has become adept at making the lens an observer without it allowing the viewers to be comfortable in their voyeurism. We watched scenes from behind a door or from another room. As Gallagher searched the town for his son, it hung back, unwilling to intrude on grief; the camera staying in the car when its driver got out.
Before the explosion there was a dreadful sense of anticipation, quietly rendered. People going about their business, setting up for the day, opening their shop fronts, saying hello to each other. This was intercut with others going about their business; checking wires, affixing circuit boards, driving the car bomb into the town and gingerly closing the doors before walking away. It was a sensitive and simple: the lingering banality of last words; a deceptive bomb warning followed by the ennui of inconvenienced shoppers being herded towards a bomb they don't realise is there. But we do. Before the carnage, the colours were muted. After it, they struggled to rouse themselves, as if the very atmosphere had been scarred.
It seems somewhat unfair to criticise the drama of the piece, as if that is to dilute the actual experience of the real-life protagonists. But the script faltered in its rhythm as it moved on from the terrible intensity of the bomb to becoming a conspiracy piece and a struggle for answers, raw against the shattered lives of the Gallagher family (played solidly by Michele Forbes, Pauline Hutton and Fiona Glascott). In telling this story almost entirely from a single point of view, it left gaps in information that it was sometimes a little clumsy in filling.
However, it was bold in its inclusion of well-known figures, who we usually see only via news footage. Michael Gallagher walked into a room to find Gerry Adams (Jonathan Ryan) there, although shadows afforded a little camouflage. Lorcan Cranitch played former Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan with exacting mimicry, while Brenda Fricker had a cameo as Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan.
Increasingly, this is how the North vocalises its unresolved trauma. The IRA thrillers of old have been replaced by the victims' stories as docu-drama. Following Bloody Sunday and Jimmy McGovern's Sunday, and the more recent if unsuccessful Holy Cross, it has taken to replaying pivotal moments. And as it does so, it is getting bolder, louder. Like Gallagher, it is the strengthening voice at the back of the room, cutting through the din, gradually commanding the floor.
Friends finished this week. How will it end, asked Network 2 in the moments before the final episode. Belatedly? Predictably? Shoddily? Mercifully? Friends spluttered to a stop some time ago. Even if there was a brief spell a couple of series back when the writers managed to rattle the fuel tank enough to get a bit more gas from it, it's been running on empty for several years. Its recurring gags had collapsed with exhaustion. The final episode name-checked plenty of its more famous gags: the chick and the duck; Gunter's crush on Rachel; the foosball table. Ross got to use the "we were on a break" line one more time. All of this might have left you warm inside if they hadn't already referred to these jokes in pretty much every episode since the turn of the millennium. When even the comfort blanket of nostalgia leaves you cold, you know it's time to move on.
Besides, it had become pyjama party comedy. It was so wowed by the success of the Rachel and Ross storyline that it yearned for the whoops and woo-hoos of an audience smitten by the chick-lit twists, and the laughs that should have gone with them were an afterthought. It had shoved pairings together with abandon. Even if their mutual self-obsession always meant they would eventually sleep with each other, there was an obvious desperation each time it happened. These were characters defined by their ages, but for whom ageing seemed to have been more intimidating to the writers than to them.
Its outcome will have been familiar to viewers of Sex and The City. Childless couple is handed baby(s); heroine goes to Paris but is rescued by long-time love interest. If this year's glut of finales is teaching us anything it's that a) babies are easily come by; and b) in the mind of the New York gal, Paris is the capital of chic, a Shangri Ooh-La-La, where every hotel room has a view of the Eiffel Tower. But in the mind of their men, France is a place from which they should be rescued. What does this say about modern American thinking? Don't knock my feeble attempt at finding subtext. Most weeks, this is about as political as American comedy gets.
Chandler and Monica were handed twins. As a couple who have been dealing with infertility, their desperation to have children might have been more convincing if Courtney Cox wasn't so outrageously pregnant. She seemed to get bigger as the episode went on, her bump eventually appearing in shot well before she did and her loose clothes flapping about in a vain attempt to cover her up.
Nothing much happened to Phoebe, although it would have been quite perfect if the rest of them had each turned around and finally told her what a hateful, annoying, testing person she is. Oh, how the audience's whoops would have been cut short if they had done it.
It was sharpest, as it has always been, when it turned its attention to the comforting trivialities of the character's lives. Network 2 followed the final episode with the very first and it was a reminder of when it was at its leanest: before the characters were weighed down with back-story and history and fame. When the Ross/Rachel nonsense was fresh and most of their time was spent having adventures in everyday trivia. This is why Joey has always been the funniest; because he was a man-child and was not expected to mature. He remained an engaging dullard, even when they tried to spoil him by giving him a heart-aching affair with Rachel. He is off to Los Angeles now to try his luck in a spin-off show. May the spirit of Frasier guide him on his way.
In Buried Alive guests are presented with a premature obituary. "I think I speak for everyone here when I say the whole nation was shocked and saddened by the unexpected demise of Barry McGuigan," intoned host Dara O'Briain. "Barry, were you surprised yourself?" McGuigan, to be honest, seemed quite delighted by it all. Except at the end when the screen flashed up BARRY McGUIGAN 1961-2004 and briefly re-enacted that famous dead-eyed photograph from the disastrous Las Vegas fight. In a strange irony, the caption for that picture read "Dead man walking". Buried Alive, I suppose, could be subtitled Dead Man Talking.
It's entertaining, if a little unsteady in its tone. It has less of the outright comedy that you might have expected, although O'Briain doesn't wilt at the more serious moments. It could work a treat on British television where the celebrity well runs deeper. Nevertheless, McGuigan made it a bright start. At the end, he was asked what epitaph he'd like on his headstone. "You can stop counting, because I'm not getting up." Give that man a sitcom.
tvreview@irish-times.ie