If ever there was a documentary that could be used to determine one's generation, it is The Road To God Knows Where. Alan Gilsenan's film, originally broadcast in 1988, had an enormous impact. It must have been an unnerving flashback for those who came of age in that Ireland, and for those who escaped from it. It was a sort of "I Don't Love 1988", in which all notions of nostalgia for the time are instantly quashed by successive, unnamed subjects describing the hopelessness of being Irish at a time when the Donnelly Visa was far more useful than the Leaving Cert.
For those who came into adulthood in the 1990s, though, it will have appeared almost alien. Surely things can't ever have been that bad. Surely people can't have been that miserable. Surely mullets can't have been that popular. Oh they were, but you wouldn't have liked to have been there to find out.
It's an easy thing to take a programme from a less sophisticated age and retrospectively ridicule it. At the time, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's cinematography was a revelation, an Ireland shown in a new light, or rather a drizzly half-light. Yet there's no avoiding that it is very much a documentary of its time. The central imagery, of a desolate, de-populated, wasteland of a country, now looks more than a little over-wrought. Gilsenan took the existing dreariness and ladled on thick, lumpy spoonfuls of misery. The beat of a dripping tap, the sound of hollow footsteps, the washed-out colour. As with so much from this decade that irony forgot, it has a worthiness that now borders on comical. A recurring motif of a grubby, blonde child running through wasteland to the howling of the wind would have made you wince, even if she hadn't ultimately found Aslan performing at the other side of a slagheap. It was The Day After and an Ultravox video in grey disharmony.
Getting both those references, by the way, represents generation test number two. At its core, though, The Road To God Knows Where remains an enthralling time capsule and a warning from the ghosts of Ireland's past. In many respects, it caught that era at its apogee. Things could only have got better, but how much better we could never have guessed. Given that, the premise of the follow-up was that it would be interesting to return to these people 13 years on. A pity, then, that the result was in equal parts dull, unenlightening, self-indulgent, infuriating and unfocused. That's unfocused in the literal sense.
The camera didn't know how to sit still, drunkenly waving at cityscapes, the road, suburbs, garage forecourts. It was attempting to say something, all right, but seemed too drunk on its own style to say it with any clarity. Even now, the original looks confident and clear in its intent, a film that knew its subject and knew in a very definite way what was to be said. Its sequel got lost somewhere on the road.
The camera work might have impeded the substance of the documentary if the journalism hadn't done that job itself. As in the original, none of the people were introduced, none of them given names or jobs. It was an apt technique in 1988, when there was a sense of youths still creating their stories, and of the people being only different octaves of the same voice.
What is the point, though, in calling on somebody after 13 years if you're going to engage only in small talk? If we learnt anything, it was only that where the anger once lived, platitudes have since squatted. "Of course we've more money now, but are people happy?" asked one. "Money isn't everything," said another. Of all of them, only Christy Dignam offered any true colour, hinting at what might have been if the working-class voices in the original had been tracked down as easily as the middle-class ones. He snarled about the treatment of a guy who robbed a shop to feed his habit or family compared to that of politicians who had robbed the entire nation. Of course, I know it was Christy Dignam only because he's a well-known singer now. He's the lead singer of Aslan, a guy who overcame a serious heroin habit to sell out the Point Depot.
While we're at it, Michael Mulcahy is the name of the young political buck who was once so full of vigour about the role of the youth in the future Ireland. He's now the Lord Mayor of Dublin. And Henry McDonald - the Belfast man who talked about how proud he was to have been present during the talks for the Belfast Agreement - is now the Observer's Northern Ireland correspondent. Each of the others, whatever their names are, must have done interesting things in their lives and are probably doing something interesting now.
The credits on Road II rolled to the sound of John McCormack singing Where are you now? It was reassuring to hear that he was as uninformed as we were.
The war in Afghanistan continues, although the US could do the media a favour next time and go to war against a country with better news-management skills. You can practically see the news corporations gnashing their teeth at the lack of pictures from the combat zone. Even the video-game footage taken from the bombers seems so last war. They're determined to give us action, nonetheless. The high-tech gadgetry, the 3D maps, Peter Snow pressing a map of Afghanistan and making little cartoon explosions appear; these are all devices to make the war that bit more exciting.
ITV has the daddy of them all - a giant, computer-generated studio filled with an orgy of graphics that the reporter strolls around but which, unfortunately, has no discernible function but to serve as the most expensive bullet-point chart on the planet. Whoosh, here's bullet-point number one. Zlam, an in-coming second bullet-point. Bonk, a bullet-point inadvertently takes the reporter's head off.
Meanwhile, in their search for real war, the journalists in Afghanistan have been queuing up at the counter of Northern Alliance Tourism Co. From what I can gather from the admittedly safe vantage point of my backside, they offer journalists a trip to the front lines that includes a relatively hazardous journey, a frisson of real danger while they're there and the added bonus of someone cracking off a few rounds from a Kalashnikov while the reporter delivers their piece to camera. The front lines are so crawling with journalists in chinos and flak jackets that the Taliban warriors can be forgiven for defecting, seeing as every time they pop their head out of a trench they find the numbers opposite have trebled.
Band of Brothers wants to offer the realities of the second World War as much as is possible without actually shelling your position on the couch. It is the latest push in this belated US attempt to recognise and glorify the sacrifice of the grandfathers who fought the good fight. Along the way, Hollywood has also rediscovered the war as a natural well of good stories, tales of ready-made brotherhood, unapologetic masculinity, good guys and bad guys. Not surprisingly, given that Steven Spielberg is executive producer, Band of Brothers opts for that hyper-real look of Saving Private Ryan: dirt on the camera lens, the camera shakily joining troops into battle, the scream and thump of the bullets, the spray of flesh and bone as soldiers get hit. It is predictable in the sense that you know there'll be two battles per episode, that a good character will get it and that there will be a pause to take in the horror of it all. But the battle scenes really are gut-wrenching at times; it is all given an extra dimension by having the actual men of Easy Company, the airborne company on which the series is based, interviewed about their experiences before each episode. It is increasingly difficult to reconcile these aged faces and fading voices with the young men who ploughed into battle with unbelievable courage, who faced into the brutality and sacrifice so the generations that followed could avoid them. What did you do during the war, Daddy? I watched it on television, son. But I saw some bullet points you wouldn't believe.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
