TVReview:The so-called "godfather of reality TV", film-maker Paul Watson, was apparently turned down by more than 80 hospitals when seeking co-operation in making his grim fly-on-the-wall documentary, Rain in My Heart.
One assumes the rejections were the inevitable response to an avaricious reality-TV culture that delights in the gory, anguished catastrophes of your average Joe Soap. Fortunately, Watson eventually met Dr Gray Smith-Laing, an equable, composed physician harbouring a justifiable despair about government policies that offer too little too late to his chronically alcoholic patients while reaping the tax benefits from a multi-billion-pound drinks industry.
From his hospital in Gillingham, Kent (which could just as easily have been anywhere here from Drogheda to Dunmanway), Laing introduced Watson to four of his patients: Vanda, Mark, Nigel and Toni. During the filming of Rain in My Heart, a period of less than a year, two of Watson's four subjects, Toni and Nigel, died. "Everything we do here is too late; we've missed the boat by a mile," said Smith-Laing.
Watson's emblematic genius, first seen in The Family in the early 1970s, is in his relentless, almost voyeuristic approach to his subject matter, a trait that was much in evidence in his latest heart- and gut-wrenching film. Watson's access to his subjects, during their treatment and after their release, insisted on us confronting the brutal reality of alcoholism. At one point, Vanda, a recidivist drinker somewhere in her 40s, described her "gremlins" to Watson, the "monsters in her head" that compelled her to seek oblivion: sexual abuse at the hands of her violent, alcoholic father and a series of failed and miserable affairs.
"You're manipulating me," she scoffed, glass in hand, at Watson, with the coquettishness of a woman about to enter into a glittering eclipse. Watson himself asked, and tried to answer, the question of whether his work meant he was an "ambulance-chaser", but any accusations of prurience were blown out of the water by the terrible power of this sobering film.
Having followed Toni from her treatment on the ward to her return home, having seen the framed photographs of her sons and heard her speak of how, for her and her remaining child (one infant son had died of MRSA), it was "time to have our lives back, proper lives", we also - shockingly - saw her comatose, yellowing and bloated beyond recognition, hours before her death. She was just 26 years old when alcohol ended her life. The night she was admitted to hospital, vomiting up buckets of blood, there were two other patients in casualty in the same condition - none of the three survived.
On our bleary island there are very few of us who would fail to recognise the broken, sardonic face of alcoholism seen in this unique and persuasive piece of work. If it helps any of us to treat sufferers of this hungry disease with greater understanding and humanity, Watson should finally be given the Bafta he deserves.
PRESUMABLY THERE WAS much celebrating in December 2005 when Shannon Sickels and Gráinne Close became the first same-sex couple to register their civil partnership under recent UK legislation in Belfast's City Hall. Ballymena-born Close met Sickels, an American, when they were both working in New York city. They enjoyed a shared life in Greenwich Village, where they could openly express their affection and joy at being together without stepping on other people's dusty mores or causing net curtains to twitch.
Their halcyon days were numbered, however, and Close had to return home to work in Belfast, where she was soon joined by the lovely, sunny and optimistic Sickels. I know The Weddingwas a film about two gay women publicly celebrating their love for one another (and, in so doing, affirming civil rights and equal status for many other same-sex partnerships), but it could also have been a film about the devastating effects of lousy weather.
God, I'm sorry, but Belfast looked bleak. Fabulous, balmy New York: women with hair extensions and sunken navels kissing on park benches, debonair boys in alligator shoes, poodles in alligator shoes! And then . . . grey rain and frosty gentlemen on damp Northern streets with placards reading "Homosexuals shall not inherit the earth". Well, you know what, chicken? - if your earth is as sullen and gloomy as this drizzling, parsimonious vista, you can keep it.
But despite climatic vicissitudes and its tardiness in decriminalising homosexuality, it was Belfast, with supreme irony, that allowed the women to register their commitment, while NYC, despite the gloss, could not provide them with the legal protection and rights afforded to its "straight" residents. And Shannon and Sickels, facing down an insatiably curious media and a lot of irate, umbrella'd placard-wavers ("Sodomy is Sin!" - psst, wrong sex, mate), managed to drag the sun out for their moving and historic ceremony. Close, dressed in retro vintage, and Sickels, in a white suit, were also joined by family, friends and a supporter in a pink costume on stilts who serenaded the protesters with All You Need Is Love from his exalted position of heavenly proximity.
"We are two human beings first," the women said, not "freaks" or "a human interest story", just two human beings challenging prejudice.
THIS MAY BE an opportune time to tell you that I am freezing - it's November and a significant proportion of the dwelling from whence I write is missing a roof (it's a long story). Not that my critical faculties should be unduly influenced by the fact that my fingers are turning blue, but let's just say that any old bit of telly with sun in it, I like. From Inis Oirr in Co Galway to Rann na Feirste in Co Donegal, the new series of Bean an Títraces the formidable journeys of a number of solid "beans" through a Gaeltacht summer as they open their hearths and hearts to great big bunches of hormones with belly-studs, cunningly disguised as teenagers.
Episode one saw the hostesses - bunk-beds assembled, potato cakes warming, fairy cakes twinkling - waiting by their freshly painted doors for their new charges, their wary faces wreathed in smiles (which, I have to tell you, was in stark contrast to what scant memories I have of my own pilgrimage). From the moment the students disembarked from their smoggy Anglophonic coaches, flicking their streaks and gripping their fluorescent wheelie luggage, they were in these women's floury hands.
"Every year I say it's going to be my last," said one bean, who seemed to be speaking for the sisterhood. Presumably feeding, scrubbing and washing for hordes of unpredictable teens must have its advantages, although I wish somebody had come clean and told us what they earned.
Returning to the weather preoccupation, my frosted vision was grateful for this gentle, undemanding saunter through the sandy light of sunny Gaeltacht afternoons. Although this aspect of the film was quite sweet, the series is unlikely to set your world on fire (unfortunately in my teeth-chattering case), but for many of us who endured three weeks of bottom bunks and watery bainne, it might stir a few memories.
'WOMAN IS DEFECTIVE and misbegotten," said St Thomas Aquinas (maybe after being served a soggy pizza on the way to the Forum). On the subject of challenging preconceptions, the week would be incomplete without mentioning Mick Peelo's superb two-part series The Last Judgement, which concluded with an examination of the Catholic Church's disinclination (to put it mildly) to embrace women priests. Focusing largely on the experiences of French woman and Irish resident Soline Humbert who, convinced of her calling to the priesthood and despite a threat of excommunication, practises the liturgy on a daily basis, Peelo's exploration of this controversial subject came down squarely, from both a historical and a practical point of view, for the inclusion of women in the priesthood.
Fascinating as the narrative was, examining what was described as "the systemic subordination of women" and looking at how Mary Magdalene came to be viewed as a repentant whore while Peter ended up as a rock, the most salient question for the Catholic Church was not solely confined to the role of women: "With no place for loyal dissenting voices, what can the future hold?"
I suspect my future holds a bruising inbox.
