The Northern Talks (Multichannel, Wednesday & Thursday)
True Lives (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Real Time (RTE 1, Monday)
The Wedding (BBC 1, Tuesday)
AS the midnight deadline loomed, Liz O'Donnell emerged to give an interview. "Sinn Fein have been very co-operative and open and willing to engage with the two governments," she said. No Shinner, Liz, we could see that at least the Irish government believed the republicans were prepared for compromise. RTE, BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News provided extensive coverage of the Northern Talks as Wednesday ground towards Thursday. Clearly this was a big gig: the Taoiseach, the British prime minister, all the North's party leaders were present and Bill Clinton was on the blower . . . sorry, phone.
TV crews from about 80 nations were there too. Satellite and cable links would inform a further 100 or so countries. Even Jeremy Paxman was in Belfast. Now, there's big-time. Confirmation of the gravity of the occasion was demonstrated by Jeremy's finding it necessary to dig deep into his store of wide-eyed, eyebrow-raising, I-can't-believe I'm-hearing-this faces. His designer gormlessness rivalled Mr Bean's. "Decommissioning" remained the sticky word, its roots and its ramifications pregnant with irony. "Commission" derives from the Latin word "to entrust". It seemed that the Ulster Unionist Party was insisting on achieving trust by thrusting furiously for the un-entrusting of republican weapons. The North is knotty, all right.
No surprise, then, that the midnight deadline came and went. Unfortunately, at 11.57pm, the MMDS system failed too - refusing to unscramble any of the British channels as the early hours of Thursday began. In the event, we MMDS culchies didn't miss much. Most channels had been using Mitchell McLaughlin and Dermot Nesbitt as the most frequent Sinn Fein and UUP spokesmen. The pair were reasonable and respectful towards each other: a deal remained elusive, but they provided glimpses of the possibility of a brighter future. Still, the North had to free itself of the notion that compromise equals capitulation.
Among the usual suspects, a new(ish) TV pundit being consulted by the BBC was Eamon Phoenix of Stranmillis College. He was impressive, stressing the all-Ireland context of Sinn Fein's deliberations and aspirations. They would, he said, love to hold the balance of power in the Dail, possibly replacing the PDs and coalescing with Fianna Fail. No doubt many people find such a prospect abhorrent, but Phoenix's ability to concentrate on the wider picture as the talks funnelled towards ultra-specifics was impressive. He fidgets rather like the young Patrick Moore, but at least it's only his body that does the twitching. His mind stayed focused.
The night's most riveting moments were supplied this time by Gerry Adams. Love him or loathe him, his quite emotional press conference as time began to run out left nobody in any doubt that he was serious in using the cliche "D-Day" to describe the significance of the occasion. Whether or not you believed that he had gone sufficiently far, too far, or not quite far enough, it was clear, for reasons which can remain interminably debatable, that he was drawing a line in the sand. Ten minutes later, David Trimble was no less emphatic in drawing the UUP's line. There was still a gap.
And so it wore on. The history of television coverage of the North, being primary among media in forging the populist view of the conflict, is almost as crucial as the real history of the Troubles. From the black and white days of Gay O'Brien's footage of the RUC beating up civil rights marchers in Derry in 1968, through pogroms, internment, IRA and loyalist atrocities, dirty protests and hunger strikes, Orange marches, peace movements, Paisleyism, Section 31, the propaganda war and all the rest, we have watched its ebb and flow . . . mediated by governments and broadcasters.
Over the period, television journalism (like newspaper journalism) on the conflict has ranged from brilliant to abysmal. Commentators, of course, will differ on what they believe was brilliant and what was abysmal. Fair enough. Still, the North remains a place apart. Instead of the seasonal TV ritual of Wimbledon tennis, Northerners face the seasonal ritual of Drumcree tension this weekend. Instead of barley water, they face Orange wrath. Instead of new balls they face old battles. The puzzle of it all is that most of its people want peace but with Thursday passing, the politicians kept us hanging on.
THE most puzzling aspect of True Lives: Rivers of Words - Thomas MacGreevy was the spelling of its subject's name. Some time around the period that the second World War began transforming rivers of words into rivers of blood, Thomas McGreevy became Thomas MacGreevy. It's not as if the addition of the lower case "a" carries monumental significance but, in a documentary as ostensibly concerned with words as the text of any Northern peace deal, we might have been given an explanation. The family headstone in Mount Jerome cemetery, like the bylines on the author's early books, uses "McGreevy".
From the early 1940s until Mc(Mac?)Greevy's death in 1967, "Mac" predominates. Was the added "a" a mere affectation? A necessary correction? A more strident assertion of Gaelic roots? Whatever its significance, this profile by Susan Schreibman was unashamedly positive. Of course, given the fact that it was an attempt to promote M(a)cGreevy - friend of Joyce, Beckett and the Yeats brothers - and not only resusicate but recast his reputation, elements of hagiography were inevitable. This was, quite simply, advocacy documentary.
In his time, north Kerry-born M(a)cGreevy was a poet, a literary and art critic (the latter for this newspaper), a lecturer, a broadcaster and director of the National Gallery. His working life reads like the CV of a gentleman aesthete. Hardly surprising, then, that uniquely among north Kerry writers, his outlook was primarily modernist and European. Not for him the atavistic, proprietorial, Drumcree-ish passions of The Field. His own outlook had been heavily formed by his experiences on the killing fields of the first World War and the killing field of Croke Park on Bloody Sunday.
Clearly, M(a)cGreevy was more interested in art than in money. His writing, like most good writing, did not earn him a great deal of lucre. Still, poverty is relative. Even when M(a)cGreevy no longer held a position at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (Beckett replaced him there), he continued to stay in a hotel in the city. Later, in London, he occupied "an intermediate position between lodger and family member" in a home owned by friends. It wasn't, to be fair, a life of splendid luxury but neither was it close to the destitution of many London dwellers of the period.
Perhaps the greatest problem for this documentary was the fact that, ultimately, M(a)cGreevy is a victim of Fifth Beatle syndrome. Hanging out with Joyce, Beckett and the Yeats boys is one thing. Being considered their equal is another. Testimonies to the talents of M(a)cGreevy were many and enthusiastic but balance would have been better served by including even one pundit with a different view. It is likely that M(a)cGreevy has been undervalued. If so, however, the reasons why are a crucial part of the story if an otherwise commendable documentary is to avoid lapsing into mere promotional video.
The first in a series of three dramas on RTE's Real Time slot was Just In Time. A moody, Pinteresque piece, it featured Gerald McSorley as Frank, a middle-aged academic and Frances Barber as his wife Maria, a painter. It is, of course, high time, that RTE screened more drama and this one, made with cash from RTE and the Irish Film Board, provided a promising beginning. Frank and Maria are experiencing difficulties in their smotheringly middle-class relationship; so they take off to their smotheringly middle-class country cottage for a weekend.
Against a set shimmering with shadows, the pair produced very mannered, quite theatrical performances, perhaps somewhat melodramatic for television. Frank, we know, though Maria doesn't, has been acting the maggot with a woman, Sarah, in London, where he has gone to write a book. Then another middle-aged academic, Michael, pitches up unexpectedly at the cottage. Michael, married to Anna, has with him his younger mistress, Kate. Frank, and especially Maria, are not best pleased. The candlelit foursome which ensues is as tense as a Drumcree stand-off.
As an exploration of middle-aged, middle-class longing and regret, Just In Time was generally perceptive. It was difficult, however, to feel great sympathy for any of these characters. It wasn't as if their emotional lives indicated obscenely wanton self-indulgence. But, even in their meditations, there was a cloying kind of social propriety which suggested repression as much as civility. Perhaps that is a true bourgeois curse - a lack of ventilated emotion - but even Frank's collapse in tears at the end was more irritating than purgative.
Still, this one, directed by John Carney and Tom Hall, as a follow-up to last year's debut November Afternoon, managed its contemplative mood well. By times gloomy and spectral, it also included scenes in which Frank played the guitar for Maria before they walked together like young lovers in a David Cassidy video. But these are incidentals in the overall, and Just In Time more than compensated for such jarring moments with its well-written, awkward conversations, its repetitions and its silences. It was the preciousness of the principals which grated.
Finally, The Wedding. To the strains of Dean Martin singing Amore over shots of Tyneside and Newcastle United's St James's Park, this light documentary opened during preparations for the nuptials of a Geordie couple. He's a fanatical Newcastle supporter and has inadvertently arranged his wedding for the same day that the Magpies play Manchester United in the FA Cup final at Wembley. He floats the idea of cancelling the wedding but his bride, though keen on football, won't hear of it. Clearly, the warnings should have been heeded: feminism, though once perfectly justified, is now out of control.
It was all, of course, sub Nick Hornby-ish, intercutting wedding moments with simultaneous moments from Wembley. One of the groom's party was wired for radio to relay constant updates. As the newly married couple strode down to a beach for their wedding photos, the teams strode out at Wembley . . . and so on. The groom, Glenn Foster, a manager of a plant hire company, was smiling for the photographer when news of Paul Scholes's clinching goal blew the smile away. Later, a little boozy, he had calmed down and said it would have been worse if Newcastle had won the cup and he hadn't been there. Then he danced with his wife before the pair headed off to score with each other. The wedding band was playing Perfect Day. Hmmm!