TV REVIEW: Arts Lives: Patrick McCabe: Blood RelationsRTE1, Tuesday Sonia's Last LapRTE1, Sunday I'd Do AnythingBBC1, Saturday What in the World? Burma: The Generals' GenocideRTE1, Thursday
LIVING, AS I DO, in a household occasionally salted by literary rejection, I watch portraits of writers' lives with the fervour of a drowning man clutching at a raft. Arts Lives: Patrick McCabe: Blood Relations made a buoyant vessel for my anxieties; a gripping, intimate hour with a writer afloat with humour and warmth.
McCabe, who looks like he's been rolled in beard and then baked, had two novels published before achieving literary stardom with his "pigs and priests book", Butcher Boy. Chilling, insouciant and utterly heartbreaking, its central character, Francie Brady, is a kind of Dennis the Menace with the dust of Hades in his hair, and he still stalks the imagination years after reading the book (which, if you haven't yet, you should do now).
Somehow, in my mind - and I don't think I'm alone in this - Patrick McCabe was Francie Brady; grown-up and feted with literary accolades maybe, but Francie Brady all the same. Expecting, then, this portrait of the artist to reveal a difficult, even malevolent character, guarding his muse like a tweedy Cerberus, it was a stroke of directorial genius when the film opened with a soapy McCabe under the shower in his flat near Angel station in London's Islington, while his wife, painter Margot Quinn, scrambled the eggs, a harmonious domesticity prevailing where one might have anticipated a literary bloodbath.
McCabe and Quinn share their time between the London flat (where McCabe writes in a duck-egg-blue room while Quinn paints next door) and their home in Clones, Co Monaghan, where McCabe grew up. "I thought the world was astonishingly beautiful," he said of a childhood dominated by his relationship with his vivacious, entertaining and occasionally bleak mother.
The "blood relations" referenced in the title also included his father, who died suddenly not long after a falling-out with the teenage McCabe, a grim coincidence echoed years later when his mother also passed away while at loggerheads with her son ("you crossed the woman at your peril, and I did"). These losses, combined with a process that Colm Tóibín described as "memory and the imagined self working together", have vigorously shaped McCabe's fiction, but one left the film with a sense that the lifeblood of the writer lies in the relationship he and Quinn have created, starting when they were teenagers.
"The book bender," laughed their confident daughters, Ellen and Katie, describing McCabe's ritual when a novel is completed. "He goes to the bad, and comes back with a torn suit." Lucky man: his life seems an eminently sane way to "make sense of the madness".
THE OTHER DAY, walking out of my bedroom with a mug of coffee in my hand, I tripped over the saddle-board. Bang! Bruised shin, mug smashed, coffee decorating wall, toe broken.
I tell you this in an effort to explain (possibly to myself) why I watched Sonia's Last Lap through a veil of sentimental tears. I am usually pretty nonplussed by sport, which I realise gives me more in common with the average android than the majority of the population, but hey, there you go, we all have our peculiarities (my mother, for example, won't put the bins out without her lipstick on, though that's an entirely different story). Anyway, I'm glad I made the effort to limp over to the box, elevate my leg, and catch this moving documentary (it's about as much exercise as I got this week).
Aired on the night before the women's mini-marathon in Dublin, and hopefully providing inspiration for all the runners out there, busy ironing their singlets and unravelling their hamstrings, the film followed O'Sullivan during the final nine months of her athletic career as she contemplated hanging up her spikes. "I suppose I'm looking for the storybook ending," said Sonia the sinew, who resembled the love child of Road Runner and an east Cork panther when she sprinted to the finish to take gold in the 1995 World Championships and a silver medal in the 2000 Olympic Games.
O'Sullivan, who first came to prominence after winning the mud-splattered junior and senior cross-country championships aged 17, was described variously as "the greatest Irish athlete ever" and "an iconic, inspirational figure in Irish sport"
by a line-up of colleagues that included Ronnie Delaney and Eamon Coghlan. For me, though, the fascination of the programme, beyond her tenacity and endurance in clip after clip culled from her career, was the chance to observe O'Sullivan off the track.
Having lived with an occasionally hostile media tethered to her achievements and failures, recording her tears and triumphs and scratching away at her obvious sensitivity, here, finally, was O'Sullivan at ease, seemingly happy to allow the cameras to observe her and her husband, Nick Bideau, with their sweet little daughters, Ciara and Sophie, in their Melbourne home and on a visit to her old stomping grounds in Cobh.
It must be extremely difficult to assess one's achievements and lay to rest the ghosts of one's failures after a life of stringent dedication and personal self-denial, but it seems that is the challenge for the bashful, gentle Sonia.
"I ate less and ran more," she said pragmatically at one point, explaining how she'd get back to maximum fitness after a couple of days off the track. Beached in my armchair, I have to say I'd take your advice if I could, Sonia, I swear.
IF WEEPING AND WAILING and the gnashing of newly whitened teeth are your thing, it really didn't get any better this week than the final of I'd Do Anything, which found a brand-new Nancy for Cameron Mackintosh's forthcoming production of Oliver! in the West End. The latest in a brilliantly made trio of series featuring humiliating extended public auditions for leading musical roles (previously, there was a search for a Joseph to fit the technicolor dreamcoat and a trawl for a Maria for The Sound of Music), this year's competition eclipsed the others for excitement as the gripping story of red-headed 17-year-old Jessie Buckley from Co Kerry unfolded.
Jessie auditioned with thousands of other hopefuls and ended up among the handful of wannabes who made it into the contest proper, where 10 Nancys were whittled down to one through a process of public voting and the not-quite-divine intervention of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Having blown Lloyd Webber away with a couple of Garland-esque performances, this lovely gangly child with the muscular voice gradually began to see off the competition.
"I think she was born to play Nancy!" exclaimed Mackintosh. "Jessie has the sacred flame of star quality!" enthused Lloyd Webber, his suspiciously youthful eyelids pulled back to reveal his urgently glistening orbs.
Eventually, under the supervision of MC Graham "it's a fine life being a Nancy" Norton, Jessie and her last remaining rival, Jodie Prenger, awaited the final public vote. With Ireland unable to participate in the telephone poll, Prenger, a shiny big girl from Blackpool, who had shed stones and tears to achieve her dreams, was elected to the role.
Still, who loses? With upwards of six million people watching the show each week, Mackintosh can expect a hell of a box-office return from his drawn-out PR coup.
Poor Jessie: she took a hell of a punch, but maybe with the cameras looking the other way she'll finally get what she deserves, a dignified entree to the musical ring.
JUST TIME TO alert you to the third series of What in the World?, which returned this week with a grim portrayal of life under the Burmese military junta. In The Generals' Genocide, film-maker Peadar King entered Burma illegally to talk to some of the four million Karen people who live by the Moei River on the Burma/Thailand border, one of the many ethnic groups who make up Burma's population of 55 million.
Its distressing interviews with survivors of torture, imprisonment and brutal displacement under the Chinese-backed gerontocracy made the film a pocket guide to a terrifying state, one that has hosted the world's longest civil war. Made prior to the recent devastating cyclone, it was eloquently enlightening as to the nature of a regime that shrugs its epauletted shoulders so callously when faced with the suffering of its citizenry.
The series continues over the next five weeks with reports from Bolivia, Angola and Argentina, among other destinations. How was it Patrick McCabe described his work again? "A primal hunger to make sense of madness." God knows, there's enough of it out there.
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