Shane Hegarty reviews Out of the Blue (RTÉ 1, Wednesday),Would You Believe: Forgotten Children (RTÉ 1, Thursday), Fortress Europe (RTÉ 1, Tuesday) and Tributes to Spike Milligan (all channels).
Out of the Blue is a consistently watchable series. Derek Davis's programme on all things nautical peeks out from the early Wednesday evening schedules, pitched against the might of Coronation Street. It can be both pleasingly educational while delightfully ambient, a soothing digestif after a big dinner. A half-hour of small waves slapping against a hull, of streams burbling, of sharp blue skies. It conveys a joy of the outdoors, even when the driving rain and battering wind outside your sitting room tells you that the outdoors are anything but joyful. It makes standing up to your waist in a freezing river almost more tempting an idea than just sitting by your fire watching someone on television do it.
Out of the Blue, though, struggled this week when it visited Normandy to make a programme about the D-Day Landings and the subsequent battle for France, how tens of thousands of Irishmen fought for those beaches: it is an instantly arresting subject. Until recently, we hardly acknowledged the slaughter of those Irish who died during the first World War. And yet there is a continually unacknowledged toll from the second World War - the fabled "Good War" - when the idea of sacrifice had not been hollowed out by history, where the consequences of victory were still utterly tangible. It is especially relevant given that the world has cared to look in recent years, that, in both the US and the UK, the war generation has begun to speak, and, more importantly, their children have finally begun to listen. Out of the Blue introduced this major topic, but couldn't carry the weight.
Apparently 165,000 Irishmen fought in the Allied invasion of France. This figure, the programme claimed, was 10 per cent of the eligible population, although there remained the unanswered question of how many of these were living in the Republic at the time of joining up. It seems like nit-picking, but is an important point, because only then can the public understand both the scale of the sacrifice and the subsequent ignorance of this history. For all its good intentions, Out of the Blue did not have the time nor the resources to take more than a glance at the subject. How many of these people came home to Ireland? Where are they now? If so many men fought, Ireland must be teeming with stories untold. There must be so many others like Frank Sheridan, an Irishman with all the conditioned pragmatism you would expect of a British army veteran. He fought for the famous Pegasus Bridge, which for the first 24 hours of the battle was known as the Antrim Bridge, because the Irish fought for it. There must be a wealth of these accounts. Of why and how these men sneaked North to join up, of what awaited them, and of how they adjusted to post-war life. Stories of identity and of subsequent silence.
Rather a worthy attempt than none at all, however. The sight of Irish names and Irish birthplaces on straight rows of white gravestones added to the poignancy. Around 200,000 Allied soldiers died in the push to Berlin. On the Normandy battlefields, the flags of several nations fly, but not the Irish tricolour. The plaque at a cemetery reads "Their Names Liveth Forever More". Not in Ireland, it would seem.
Would You Believe's Forgotten Children was a quite heartbreaking film. Reporter Gemma McCrohan followed John Mulligan and Eugene Garrihy as they travelled to inspect an orphanage in Negru Voda, in rural Romania, on behalf of Trade Aid/Focus on Romania.
Negru Voda is a place of shocking depravity. These were scenes identical to a decade ago. The pitiful children, untended to, unloved, rocking in their beds. The incessant wailing. The self-abuse. A little girl, Ruby, with cloth wrapped around her head to minimise damage as she cracks her head repeatedly off the stone walls.
"What our pictures cannot communicate is the smell here," interjected Gemma McCrohan. As the Irish are spotted pulling up outside in their van, they know that the clean-up has been triggered. When the foreigners come, the children are given clean clothes, fresh sheets, the corridors are wiped down. "You can smell the bleach," said John Mulligan, resigned to this ritual. "There's been a lot of cleaning done in the last half an hour."
Many of the children's horrendous physical deformities come from being tied into their cots as babies. Most of their mental illnesses are not congenital, but have developed out of lives of neglect. There was one scene in which a child appeared to be crouching on the floor licking up his own vomit, just as a dog would do. It was a sight that hit you full in the chest. There was another boy, left on his bed, "rockin' and rollin'", as John Mulligan put it. Mulligan took the child by the hand, caressed his cheek and sat him up. The boy, like other children, immediately stopped rocking, grasped his hand, discovered a raw smile. Mulligan demonstrated the hell of this child's life by releasing the grip and moving away. The child, distraught, wanting to gorge on even the smallest scrap of love, began hitting himself in the jaw. Not slaps, but hard, repeated punches. Knuckles rapping against jawbone, until John would take his hand again, and he would be still. Each time John moved away, he began punching himself again. "How can you go to bed that night and not think about that?"
The Irish have developed a confused view of Romania, or rather of its people. On the one hand was the response to the plight of the children, the hundreds of adoptions. Yet on the other hand, it is the image in so many Irish minds of the "Romanian refugees" as being the most obvious representation of economic immigrants, to the point where it became a general, increasingly derogatory term for any immigrants of obvious Eastern European origin. It is disturbing how we can separate these two factors so easily. How we can be horrified by the conditions for the children in that country and yet convince ourselves that those adults escaping that country in search of a better life for their children are simply economic parasites?
For those looking for a balanced and expert explanation of the roots and consequences of the refugee problem as developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the final part of Fortress Europe next Tuesday will be worth catching, even if you have missed the first two. Last week, remarkable footage followed refugees attempting to cross borders by night. This week, it examined the reaction of the governments to the influx, the trend towards deportation centres and the reliance on the Geneva Convention, set up after the second World War to cope with the displaced, but now hopelessly outdated. The adherence to these guidelines led to a purge of the system, sorting out those who met the criteria from those who should be deported home. Of course, there where mistakes, explained a bureaucrat. People where returned to countries where their lives where endangered. But when you are dealing with those numbers, that kind of thing happens. All this was said with the perfunctory shrug of someone who has been looking at figures on a piece of paper for much longer than is healthy.
It was predictable, but the death of Spike Milligan meant that more clips from his television sketch shows were shown over a couple of days than have been aired in a couple of decades. He had been on a crusade throughout the 1990s to get the BBC to repeat his anarchic, surreal series Q, but the reels stayed in the vaults. Even in this age of digital television and dedicated comedy channels, you will not stumble across an old episode of Q in the way that you will often delightedly wander across The Goon Show on radio.
On television, he was less loved for his sketch shows than for lighting up chat shows, for dropping oral bombshells at awards ceremonies or, ironically, for the televised production of the final Goon Show. Even in the unevenness of his television work - it ranged from standard 1970s double entendre gags to all-out satire - you can instantly see how he influenced two generations of comedy since. His brilliance had a casualness to it that belied how the writing of it often drove him over the edge. There was the sketch of the policeman on the altar, reading from the parable of the Good Samaritan: "And it came to pass that a man - Jewish, five foot three . . . " When Spike Milligan turned up on the television, it felt like you were being given a treat. That will never change.
tvreview@irish-times.ie