Ken Loach's The Navigators was a drama set around the privatisation of the British railways. If there's ever a plot synopsis guaranteed to have you searching for Cliff Richard: Embalmed by Royal Appointment on another channel, then that's got to be it. In the 1980s, The Comic Strip once made a spoof documentary, The Strike, on the making of a movie based on the miners' strike in which the faithful, delicate, heartfelt script of the local writer was hijacked by a big-shot Hollywood studio and turned into a blockbuster starring Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill and Meryl Streep as his wife. It included, if I remember correctly, at least one scene in which Scargill crashed through a plate glass window while riding a motorbike.
If there's one thing you can predict in a Ken Loach film, it's that Al Pacino will not come driving through a plate glass window. The Navigators, like all Loach movies, was a requiem for the working classes. There is seldom any pretence at them having a happy ending. Scripted by former railway worker Rob Dawber, the characters inhabited the lowest rung in the food chain, forced to become employees in a private company in which all union agreements became null and void, where the managing director spoke only through the creepy stage-management of the corporate video, and where the mantra of Prospect for Partnership had an uneven tilt to it. As things developed it became clear the company was forcing the workers into redundancy before re-hiring them as agency workers, employees more fearful of keeping their jobs than complaining about the decline in safety. All messages came via the medium of their tactless supervisor. He read from the new company mission statement: "Deaths have to be kept to an acceptable level."
Television is very kind to Loach's work, his cinΘma vΘritΘ almost gaining from the claustrophobia of the small screen. The Navigators, his first film to go direct to television in 20 years, was pure telly vΘritΘ, then, in which the camera hung so far back that at times it was almost voyeuristic. A cast of mainly unknown actors, surely improvising many of the scenes, painted a camaraderie so real that it was little surprise to discover that several of them were genuine railway workers. Of course, I subsequently spent the week waiting in a gale for late trains and then having to squeeze into a packed carriage when they did arrive. Maybe Ken Loach could do the PR for Irish Rail.
Simply because Loach's films are made with such an eye to the natural doesn't mean that his work is not heavily stylised. In a way, it is only because it is so stylised that it can be so effective; it's just not so obtrusive that you spend half the piece fixated on it.
Tony Marchant's new drama, Swallow, on the other hand, is so self-consciously stylistic that it requires more than a little concentration to keep your focus on the plot. Swallow began with an impressive overhead shot that could almost have come from a satellite, and then set about skewing the camera along every angle on the compass, running it through corridors, spinning it around rooms. The aim was to give a sense of the mental torment being suffered by Lorraine (Christine Tremarco), a woman steadily coming to believe that the withdrawal symptoms of her anti-depressive wonderdrug may be worse than the illness itself. Swallow portrays a practically Orwellian London, of cold, hard-edged streets, and empty late-night supermarkets, big lobbies and clinical offices filled with uniformly unsympathetic characters, not only disbelieving Lorraine's story but insisting she continues using the drug or face losing her health and her kids. Her only ally turns out to be Stuart (a bleary-eyed Stephen Mackintosh), lawyer for the offending pharmaceutical company, whose sister is suffering through a course of chemotherapy at the same time as he is questioning his own ethics.
The argument, of course, is that pharmaceutical companies are more interested in your wallet than in your health. Like The Navigators, it is about the working classes suffering at the hands of big business and the point about the hold medicine has on modern society was made early, made often, and then rammed home like a particularly bulky suppository. Unlike The Navigators, though, Swallow ended its first episode with a broad hint that the victim will ultimately win her fight. Also, the lack of humour and obdurate stylising makes Swallow far less engaging. It has much going for it, but the truth is that it is so dark and grim that it will hardly have you wishing the days away before it comes back round for another exciting instalment. After an hour and 20 minutes of that, even finding Cliff Richard dueting with Lulu on ITV1 (The Way They Were: Rock and Pop) became the equivalent of dipping the burning seat of my pants into a trough of ice-cold water.
True Lives: Big Boys Don't Cry posed the question of why it is that as Ireland has become increasingly wealthy, the suicide figures have risen hand-in-hand. The answer lies somewhere deep in a society that pressurises young men to succeed and tolerates increased levels of drinking, of individual isolation and of pent-up emotion and bravado. The overall feeling was that we have created an environment for which we haven't evolved. Big Boys Don't Cry was a finely crafted documentary, but was flawed by becoming a little too intent on giving us the broader picture than the specifics. Statistics were almost entirely absent. Sometimes it's fine to only allude to the scale; in this case it could have done with being properly spelled out.
It's easy to see how Madigan Men made it on to US television - a movie star and an Irish theme - but it's less clear how RT╔ thought this comedy flotsam should come washing up on our screens. I suppose there is a certain appeal in seeing Gabriel Byrne's return to the small screen for the first time since he last threw on his black duffel coat and strolled out on to the harsh land at Bracken and headed straight for the Hollywood Hills. He and the duffel coat, film buffs will already know, would later make an emotional reunion in The Usual Suspects. That appeal, however, lasts as long as it takes to realise that this is the television equivalent of turning up at cousin Paddy's place in New York to find that instead of being the high-flying chief executive his letters always told of, he's squatting with a dozen others and working nights handing out flyers outside peep shows.
Byrne plays a man whose father (British actor Roy Dotrice) comes all the way from Ireland to stay with him. We know he's Irish because he wears an Aran jumper, hangs his washing out on the balcony of the penthouse suite and says "Ireland" in such a way as to get through every vowel before reaching a consonant. Gabriel Byrne, to his credit, looks as aghast as anyone. In the US, people stopped looking in even to be aghast and the show lasted only eight episodes before being canned. You may be tempted to watch one out of curiosity before it's too late. Read a book or visit an elderly neighbour instead. Gabriel Byrne is a fine actor who's made a mistake, that's all.
Madigan Men was written by Cindy Chupack, who also brought you Sex and the City, so maybe she used up her good lines on that show and left nothing else to go around. A new series began last Thursday on TV3, and it is as excellent as ever. As the four girls debated the merits of the elusive soulmate, Samantha - the sexual raptor - found hers, quite aptly, in a church. A Franciscan priest, he found his vow of poverty unchallenged but his vow of chastity clinging on to the tails of his robe. It led to a scene involving Samantha screaming Handel's Messiah in a way the composer did not envisage, and which I'd rather not describe for fear of ruining your breakfast. Use your imagination. She did.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
