Modern Times (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Luke (RTE 1, Monday)
Mullingar Mojo (RTE 1, Sunday)
Reading In The Dark (BBC 1, Monday)
Saturday Live (RTE 1)
Bull Island (RTE 1, Thursday)
TO the strains of Nat King Cole crooning When I Fall in Love, a limo glided towards the gates of the mansion housing the woman the British tabloids called "the Wife From Hell". Behind the gates, Julia Clark and her lover, John, were in a tizzy. The mansion they shared with Julia's menagerie of pets was about to be taken from them. Julia threw a tantrum as Dynamo the duck made an understandable bid for freedom. Suddenly, Nat had never sounded so sarcastic.
Modern Times: Ex-Wives followed the fortunes of three women whose marriages to multi-millionaires had ended in divorce. Besides Julia we met Jenny, the ex-missus of a man known as Earl Cadogan, and Vira, the former wife of a mega-wealthy American. As ever in this strain of documentary, the central mystery was why these women allowed themselves to be filmed. Vira, to be fair, had parted amicably from her hubby after 33 years of marriage and is intent on "dying broke" - if she can find the time to dispose of her £36 million divorce settlement.
But back to Julia, the real star of the evening. She was 41 and penniless when she met George, then 78; the couple married in 1992. The marriage was never consummated and George, the tabloids reported, was forced to sleep in a caravan on the grounds of his own estate. Not so, said Jenny. Old George had kipped in the caravan only once - and then because he wanted Julia to have a good night's sleep. He also, she said, thought it would be fun and he liked the shower there. Ah, that explains it. But why did she marry George in the first place? Simple one, that: because he looked "cuddly".
For some reason, Cuddly George got tired of married life - maybe it was because Julia had taken a lover named John into the mansion. Who knows? Men can be so bloody awkward. Anyway, the upshot of this disagreement was that poor Julia was soon divorced and expected to make her way in the world with a mere £820,000 settlement. What was a girl to do? Clearly, she had to appeal against this monstrous injustice. She did, and as a result she had the terms of the settlement changed: she was awarded £150,000 instead. "It would be hard to conceive of graver marital misconduct," said the appeal judge.
Still, jobless John wasn't going to take this insult lying down. So he sprang into action. When he couldn't find one solicitor in England to take Julia's case, he decided, as gentlemen do, that he'd better go to the top. In a scene of memorably chivalrous gallantry, we saw him approach Tony Blair's missus, Cherie, at a forum for female lawyers. When it became clear that the prime minister's wife didn't have the gumption to back Julia, justice-seeking John lobbied the House of Lords. The lads in robes didn't want to know either and so it was curtains for Julia.
Perhaps John believed the cameras following him were making a programme for Rough Justice. Whatever . . . Julia and John, as lovers do, consoled each other by drinking mugs of champagne. "It's to anaesthetise the pain," said Julia, adding that, because of back pain, she couldn't go out in any car except Cuddly George's Bentley. Life is tough, eh? We finished with Julia and John as the bailiffs arrived. There was great despair and much hysterical packing on our heroine's part. For viewers, it must have been a Schadenfreude-fest. Indeed the malicious enjoyment was so rich that it was demeaning - well, almost.
Meanwhile, Jenny, divorced from Earl Cadogan, the 25th richest man in Britain (with a stash estimated at about £750 million), busied herself with "etiquette classes". She demonstrated the "proper" way to eat a fig. Nineteen years younger than Cadogan, they had spent two and a half years together. The cameras found her lunching with her pal, Alexis. "We've been waiting centuries for the champagne we ordered," Alexis snapped at a waiter. The rest of the guff you can imagine for yourself. The gist of it involved the pros and cons of young but poor virile bucks contrasted with those of old but wealthy blokes. Sex and money - the gossip columns know the score, all right.
Vira, with homes in London and New York, had been a schoolteacher and could see the absurdity of her financial good fortune. Contented to be single, she laughed a lot and is busy setting up foundations to dispose of her loot. Watching her do a gig in a poor, black school in New York, it was clear that she had a genuine rapport with the kids. It was equally clear that, unlike Julia or Jenny, she was as happy as a lark. As Cher belted out Do You Believe In Life After Love, only Vira could escape the sarcasm which skipped sneering satire for sheer scorn. Yet again, Modern Times had suggested that in two out of three cases, the larger the loot, the lower the values.
IT'S not difficult to imagine what Luke Kelly would have thought of Julia and Jenny. More than 15 years have passed since Kelly, whose politics were as red as his beard, died. Watching Luke, the Sinead O'Brien-directed tribute cum profile, it was impossible not to be struck by just how much Dublin and Ireland have changed since the city's last great balladeer was in his heyday. It wasn't only the old, black and white footage of O'Donoghues and Zhivago's and Sloopy's, though they inevitably acted as nostalgia-triggers - it was the distinctiveness of Dublin, now fading rapidly, which was most striking.
It wasn't even the putative Dublin-ness of The Dubliners, which always suggested a kind of overstated, showbizzy, broths-of-boys, navvies-with-banjos, retro caricature of Ireland, that emphasised this fading distinctiveness. It was, more likely, that The Dubliners hit it big at a time when the city was emerging from the the long 1950s hangover of the previous decade's yawn-inducing "Emergency". The journey from isolation to integration (fuelled primarily by television) which has accelerated throughout the 1990s, was at its most stark when The Dubliners, like The Late Late Show, began in the early 1960s.
Against this backdrop of emerging social change, Luke, the fourth of sixth children, born into a poor part of the city, studiously articulated the then fading voices of generations who had given their lives to Britain's railways, canals and general hardship. At 12, Luke left school; at 17 he headed for Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham. In between, he had moved from a beloved Corpo flat to suburban Whitehall. In England, he joined a socialist choir and became a CND activist. Lefty, compassionate and introspective, he read as voraciously as he drank.
Indeed, The Dubliners, it seems, got their name because Luke was reading James Joyce's Dubliners when the decision to change from The Ronnie Drew Group was being taken. Anyway, a gallery of luminaries (Bono, Gerry Adams, John Hume, Shane McGowan, Eamon Dunphy, Anthony Cronin, Mary Maher and Des Geraghty among them) queued up to have their say on the essence of Luke. Christy Moore - artistically the best-placed of all - did too. In a week when fresh concerns have been raised about Christy's health, folk-singing yet again demonstrated that it should be pursued only after wannabes have fully understood the health risks involved.
Judy Friel's script, narrated by Stephen Rea, was unusually comprehensive without sacrificing crispness. There were, mind you, irritating, almost mid-sentence ad breaks which disrupted the documentary. And worst of all, there was an intrusion (by John Hume, though he can't be blamed for the cutting) into a rendition of Luke's definitive rendering of Paddy Kavanagh's Raglan Road. In soccer terms, this was as outrageous as cutting to the ads as a penalty-taker has set off to strike a vital kick. Luke, who played as a boy for Home Farm, would understand this.
But overall, this was one of the better documentaries screened by RTE. Footage of anti-apartheid marches and anti-internment rallies in the Dublin of the late 1960s and early 1970s, reminded you that the left in the city is, with a few exceptions, as dead as its greatest singer. The accounts of Luke Kelly's demise and death, before he had reached 44, stressed that a brain tumour and not alcoholism was primarily responsible.
Still, for all its extravagant love of life, the north inner city culture, which produced and killed Brendan Behan just as Luke Kelly was beginning to achieve fame, had to be seen as destructive too. Nowadays, of course, many kids from the area don't even reach half of Luke's age. Heroin instead of drink - Dublin has changed, all right!
MIND you, Joe Dolan hasn't. After four decades on the road, the white-suited singer pointed up the irony of the fact that, while singing ballads should come with a health warning, belting out big ballroom numbers may well be the elixir of youth. This was, as might be expected, seeing as its subject is still alive, a more observational documentary than the Luke Kelly tribute. Indeed, Mullingar Mojo (Mojo?) was as acute in observing Joe's fans as it was in observing Joe.
Apparently Joe has become a post-modern, ironic Joe in recent years. Well, whatever it takes, I suppose. Certainly he can still belt them out. But if Luke Kelly was the voice of the oppressed, what is Joe Dolan the voice of? He is the only one of the 1960s showband stars still growing strong. Is he the voice of longevity or non-political nostalgia or midlands glitz? Perhaps a bit of all of these - but principally he seems to be a voice for people, mostly female, who are anything but ironic in their desire to have a good, sweaty, old-fashioned night out. Watching his frenzied fans blowing plastic saxophones, even the air-guitar rock kids seem tame. Good fun.
AND so, after the balladeer and the belter to the bookworm: Seamus Deane. Like Luke Kelly, Deane was born in 1940. Unlike Luke he was able, despite humble beginnings in Derry's Bogside, to avail of an education which made him a professor of English and a respected literary critic. His novel, Read- ing In The Dark, was the subject and the title of this exploration of his grounded fable about life in 1940s Derry. If the cuts in Luke were rather abrupt, the extracts in this one were, arguably, excessively long for television.
Nonetheless, the power of Deane's images (especially the one about local men burning infesting rats) was remarkable. And yet, there is an acute literary knowingness to this book. It's not as though it were written by numbers but it does seem to have been written with a powerful consciousness of literary technique. It is, as such, the novel of an albeit gifted literary critic - but a critic's novel for all that. Explaining his theme of how life in sectarian Derry spontaneously created charged intimacy and charged division, Deane sounded like his own most lucid critic. Unusual, that - but he probably is.
FINALLY, Saturday Live, RTE's replacement for Kenny Live. Tracey Piggott presented this opening show and had George Best as her principal guest. Best is still probably the most famous living Irishman (though quite a few people have heard of Bono, too). Like Luke Kelly, his combination of talent and drunken-ness - though it must be a nightmare to live with - ensures a loving public. Another 1960s icon, he has greyed now and trembles a little. His routine was, well . . . routine - set-piece answers worked out from countless appearances on the chat-show circuit. Real irony in that, when you consider his remarkable innovation on a football field. Most alarmingly, though, he didn't look too well.
POSTSCRIPT: After the balladeer, the belter, the bookworm and the ball-player, Bull Island, RTE's latest venture into satire. It's a splendid name and many of its impersonations and targets had merit. But given the scale of our contemporary scandals, the bull needed to gore the Tiger with much sharper horns. The problem was the tepidness of the scripts.
Targeting politicians is standard satire - fine. Likewise, aiming at media darlings such as Duncan Stewart, Paddy O'Gorman and Gerry Fleming and showbiz efforts like The Corrs and Michael Flatley. Charging at the banks, the gardai and house prices is the right idea too. But there was a light-hearted, parish-hall panto tenor to this bull, which rendered it too safe. It did tickle a few bulls eyes but it takes a darker, more edgy strain of comedy to acknowledge the fact that institutionalised corruption isn't really funny.