A Woman Against The Mafia (Channel 4, Monday)
Panorama (BBC 1, Monday)
The Nevin Trial (TV3, Tuesday)
Undercover Portrait (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Later With O'Leary (Network 2, Wednesday)
Flies buzzed about the blooddrenched sheet partly covering a human body. Lifeless limbs protruded as onlookers, held back by police, gazed from a distance of about 20 yards. A zoom lens obliterated this distance and focused on a part of the victim's head covered more in blood than by the sheet.
We were seeing news footage of a late 1980s mafia murder in the Sicilian town of Partanna. The staple mix of sentimentality and machismo, which characterises Hollywood's formula mafia movies, seemed more obscene than ever.
A Woman Against The Mafia is a subtitled, Italian documentary. Made by Marco Amentas, it blends archive film (TV news and home movies), reconstructions and interviews. But it's arty too - nothing as loud as Hollywood mafia "style", mind - just rich in appropriate imagery. The woman in question (called a "girl" in the translated on-screen title but a "woman" in the gender and status-sensitive TV listings pages) was 17-year-old Rita Atria. Even before she was born, Rita was a part of the mafia. Her mother had wanted an abortion but her don dad had instructed the local doctor to say that this was medically much too risky.
When Rita was 11, her father was murdered by a rival mob. Six years later, her brother was shot to pieces by two boyhood friends. At 17, this girl-woman had had enough. She decided to break the code of silence and grass to the law. Doing so is a graver move than making an anonymous call to Crimeline. There are usually consequences for those who breach omerta. So it proved for Rita Atria. Anyway, instead of going to school on November 5th, 1991, she took the bus to Sciacca where she met Sicily's leading anti-mafia judges, Falcone and Borsellino.
Collaborating with the judges, Rita provided crucially incriminating information. Within months the judges were assassinated by the mafia - first Falcone, then Borsellino. One week after Borsellino's death, Rita apparently committed suicide by throwing herself from her apartment balcony in Rome. A few months later, her mother, who had disowned her, smashed Rita's headstone with a lump hammer. A graveyard overseer saw her do it. It was clear that Mama had been as neck deep in blood as Papa.
In itself and in its specifics, it was a fascinating story. But it also embodied the universal significance of children trying to break free from family values and mores. Waking to the adult world and finding themselves trapped, most teenagers, in fairness, do not have to come to terms with mafia parents and relations. But the common struggle to assert individuality against the powerful forces of blood (even unspilt), tradition and expectation was echoed in Rita's adolescent diaries. Her dilemma was not simply to act against the murderous mafia but to justify her own self-liberation at the expense of shaming her family.
To the outraged outsider, doing a job on the mafia must seem incontrovertibly moral. But to Rita Atria the solution to her dilemma cannot have been so clear-cut. "These people have no heart and less soul because they have been shaped by this culture since they were children. Their real mother is the mafia," she confided to her diary. Yet she was of "these people" and had been shaped by "this culture" since shortly after conception. Had her father and brother not been murdered, it's unlikely that Rita would have breached the code of omerta.
In a sense then, this was a tale of revenge. Somewhere in its distant origins, the mafia can make claim to a chivalrous ethic. It did, after all, fight feudal abuses and the misrule of Sicily's invaders. But the elaborate code of codology - the convenient and disingenuous appeals to family, honour and vengeance - and the romanticised morality of sentimental schmuck and ruthless reprisals can have no claims to legitimate resistance or revolution now. It's purely criminal with Hollywood glamorising the hokum as a bogus morality tale to get bums on seats.
Anyway, this was a fine piece of European documentary-making, more arty - tilted angles, lingering images, moody silences - than the standard Irish, British or US variety. It was sad too, of course, but not without hope. General modernity and, in particular, feminism, are threatening the old patriarchal fundamentalism of the mafia. At Rita's funeral, women with defiant faces said that they had had enough of the nonsense. They meant the hypocrisy as much as the viciousness. In a disgraceful week for Irish politics, we could see that politically, as well as psychologically, there was a universal significance in this story.
In sharp contrast, one of the most earnest white hats of our times, Fergal Keane, travelled to South Africa for Panorama: The Dying Game. The dying is from the world's fastest growing epidemic of AIDS: already SA has an estimated four million HIV positive people; 1,700 more become infected every day; by 2006, there is likely to be one million AIDS orphans. The statistics are staggering but, as with the mafia, the cultural context explains quite a lot.
"Most of the men, married and not married, think sex is just a game," said Lucy Ndlovu, a 17-year-old schoolgirl mother who is HIV positive and lives in a Salvation Army hostel. No doubt, Lucy is right but the gamey men still need gamey women to indulge them. Among black South Africans, there is also a tradition of fighting against the things they're told to do. Considering how often they've been told to behave in ways not to their benefit, their mistrust is understandable. Now, however, it is killing them.
Keane sought out gold miners, 40 per cent of whom are HIV positive. We saw them being instructed in the use of condoms but then heard some of them say that they are prepared to pay more for unprotected sex. One man who has the virus described his attitude as: "I'm already dead, man, so I must spread it all over." More than 50,000 men work in the mines visited by Keane. It is expected that at least 20,000 of them will be dead in 10 years' time. In the meantime, many will have brought home the disease during their leave periods.
An AIDS widow, already HIV positive and the mother of eight children, breastfed her newest baby. Extremely poor, she had never been told that this was likely to infect the infant. In the cities, a cynical attitude towards AIDS claims that the acronym stands for "American Ideas Discouraging Sex". Given the obscene ideology of apartheid which has poisoned the psyches of so many South Africans, we ought not be greatly surprised. Told so many lies, it's no wonder that resistance to Western advice is trenchant.
In a Salvation Army orphanage 60 per cent of the children are HIV positive. We saw a skeletal baby, her wide eyes locked onto some otherworldly void, foam at the mouth. The staff had named her Wendy after she had been found abandoned on a doorstep. Within nine months, Wendy was dead. Her little white coffin was buried in a grave with a number but no name. Wendy's is a recurring story. In a country with such endemic poverty, a mobile labour force and a permissive sexual culture, Wendy's death was unremarkable. Such is the horror.
For his part, Fergal Keane was characteristically earnest. There is often an irritating sanctimoniousness in his manner but, for this tragic epic, even he could hardly overstate the awfulness unfolding. Still, swinging between sympathy and condescension, his voice was often that of the disbelieving missionary. Perhaps that's only human for a white Westerner confronted with a plague which could be greatly reduced. On the other hand, it also shows the width of the chasm between historically antagonistic cultures.
Back home, a "TV3 news special", screened The Nevin Trial. Given the wall-to-wall coverage which this trial and its tabloid possibilities had already received, it was always going to be difficult to supply anything new and worthwhile. And so it proved. Fair enough, faces were put to names which hitherto had just been recorded in press reports. But beyond that, this seemed principally like an exercise in prurience, its ominous music merely adding to the suspicion that, at best, this was infotainment.
Including a "reconstruction" of the murder was especially dodgy. We saw an actor play out Tom Nevin's final moments - the kitchen, the glass of stout, the takings being counted - and we also looked down the barrels of a shotgun. Perhaps this was legitimate but it smacked of media cannibalism. The simple, straight-to-camera interviews with relations and former employees of Tom Nevin were more easily justified. They, at least, put human faces and not just viewer-grabbing hype to the sorry story.
Patricia Flood, Catherine Nevin's step-aunt, recalled Tom Nevin breaking down and asking her: "How would you like to see Tom Kennedy and Catherine coming out of the bedroom every morning?" Later, Flood said "I'll never forgive her. She'll never know the hate that I have . . . the lying bitch that she was." In a dubious programme, this was a rare moment of searing honesty. The Nevin trial hasn't always brought out the best in the media.
Poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist, journalist, barrister and one time cultural commissar, Anthony Cronin was the subject of this week's Undercover Portrait. As a public intellectual for decades now, Cronin's involvement in Irish literary life spans all of the second half of the 20th century. Along the way, of course, he has been close, too, to the politics of Irish literary and artistic life. In this regard, his Viewpoint column in this newspaper during the 1970s was discussed but his relationship with Charlie Haughey was scarcely mentioned.
As a result, the impression generated was that some aspects of this portrait were more undercover than others. Still, as a prose writer of style, Anthony Cronin was rightly praised. His Dead As Doornails memoir about 1950s Irish literary figures - Kavanagh, Behan and O'Nolan - remains a fine evocation of the period. All too frequently those times have been popularly, almost jauntily, portrayed as a mythologised union of drink and writing. Like most extended prose pieces, this portrait was variable. Some of it was engaging but it had more gaps than Manchester United's defence on Wednesday night.
Finally, Later With O'Leary. In an earlier manifestation, this political group therapy gig used to be Later With Dunlop and Finlay. Not surprisingly this week, Frank Dunlop was the subject of the show he once co-presented. Though it can hardly have been riveting viewing for the young people Network 2 is casting for, when it wasn't verbally unruly, it was a low-key cautionary tale. Its moral centred around the commodification of power - the selling of public trust by glic boys in suits to other glic boys in suits. The scams haven't had the operatic violence of the mafia but the universal lobbying/bribing chicanery was easily recognised.