TV Review:On the day the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, was drawn through the streets of London, garlanded by a sea of flowers, I walked into Dublin city centre with my son in his buggy to buy him his first pair of shoes. The shops were shut.
While London echoed with the low moan of the nation's collective grief, in Dublin the shutters were down as well, as thousands turned to their television screens to witness Diana's parting. I was, I realised, out of step.
Diana was a beautiful young woman with a lousy marriage, a luminous wardrobe and two sweet little boys, and her death in a speeding Mercedes in a Parisian tunnel was awful and tragic and unnecessary, like all accidental deaths are awful and tragic and unnecessary.
And so, the baby in the buggy is nearly 11, Diana's sweet boys are men, her unprepossessing husband has finally been allowed marry the person he should have married in the first place, and all over the world her image continues to haunt, from washed-out tea towels to coffee-table collections. My overwhelming instinct when I read of Diana: Witnesses in the Tunnel, Channel 4's much-vaunted, indecently hyped exploration of the role of the paparazzi on the night of her death was: for Christ's sake, let the poor woman rest in peace. Her children did not want the programme to be aired, and that matters - that is really all that matters.
But, despite a request from Clarence House, Channel 4 had the bit between its teeth: a conciliatory continuity announcer, using that alarmingly calm voice air hostesses have when they tell you to expect just a bit of turbulence, informed us that the programme was solely about the experience of the photographers who witnessed the aftermath of the accident.
Really? So why the hysteria, why the acres of newsprint over the programme's content? Why was it sold to the great British public on the basis of unseen photographs of the dying princess? In the event, there was one grainy photograph in the documentary of the back of a nice young medic who happened to be driving in the tunnel and who rushed to the princess's aid before the press had even reached the scene; in the photograph he was leaning towards a black shape whose face was obscured by a grey box. And that was that.
So why rekindle that almost carnal public voyeurism that sold-the-papers-that-paid-the-paparazzi-that-snapped-the-girl-who-hated-the-press-but-needed-the-press-to-be-the-people's-princess? The facts remain unchanged: her driver was over the alcohol limit; the car was travelling too fast; the press, as always, was in pursuit.
The conclusion of the programme was that the paparazzi didn't kill Diana, not directly, a fact that the French judiciary, having arrested and released a handful of photographers that night in the tunnel, had accepted years ago. It was nothing more than a competent piece of journalism about a number of innocent pressmen who were given a hard time in French police stations for 48 hours, while others in their profession were offering pictures of Princess Di's shattered body to the Sun and the News of the World for, wait for it . . . twice what they got for Fergie's "toe job". This was a documentary that should have had the balls to tell its story without stirring up sensationalism.
SALVADOR DALÍ WAS "a paradox of high intelligence and quite appallingly bad taste", opined art critic Brian Sewell, he of the languorous vowel and serpentine consonant, who illuminated the week with a wickedly amusing portrait of the Spanish artist who, quite justifiably, said of himself "I am surrealism".
Sewell's partially autobiographical film, Dirty Dalí: A Private View, began with a description of a trip he made to Dalí's native Catalonia, where the young Sewell, having been befriended by two dogs, found himself (thanks to a generous butcher) dicing the innards of a cow on the table of a local seaside cafe, only to be greeted by an ageing and preposterously theatrical Dalí, presumably fascinated by the Englishman's mannered carnage. Sewell's laconic recollections of his subsequent trip to Dalí's home made wildly entertaining telly (and who would ever have thought one could say "wildly entertaining" and "Brian Sewell" in the one sentence?). On his first evening chez Dalí, Sewell, the painter and Gala (Dalí's wife and muse, by then deaf) sat inside three separate giant cement eggshells to swap shouted but inaudible conversational pleasantries from a distance. Sewell was then invited into Dalí's garden to be initiated into the ways of his host's idiosyncratic voyeurism.
Exploring Dalí's complex sexual nature through the work and through his memories of time spent with the artist, Sewell speculated about Dalí's apparent inability to admit his homosexuality and about his obsession with the scatological and visceral. Memorably, he described Dalí being "rendered insensible by sheer erotic pleasure" when, walking along the shoreline, the two men came across a tanned, slim-hipped young boy limping from the water with a gashed and badly bleeding foot.
Sewell's brave and riveting tribute, which included a personal account of masturbating in the armpit of a giant Christ sculpture in Dalí's garden while the artist pretended to photograph him with an empty camera, made the candy-floss voyeurism of our Big Brother-dominated television world look like interference on a Teletubby's tummy. Doubtless, however, had Dalí survived until the era of reality TV, he'd have been a willing, if watchful, participant, twiddling his erect, waxed moustache ("a delusional monument to delusional virility," as Sewell noted).
Instead, Dalí degraded the originality of his imagery through greed and self-cannibalism, appearing in advertisements for chocolate bars and signing blank sheets of paper for the avaricious Gala to have imitators paint on (making an anagram of his fellow surrealist's name, André Breton had early on dubbed Dalí "Avida
Dollars"). Ultimately, "the last of the great masters", as Sewell called him, died a prolonged and solitary death in the late 1980s.
BRIAN SEWELL PROBABLY has more interesting things to do on a Monday night than watch Prison Break (write a thesis on the homoerotic nature of the bullfight? Work on his muse-ability? Whistle Dixie?), but the rest of us philistines have to make do with watching half-a-dozen shaven-headed actors splash through swamps and hijack a rickety old goods train. For those of you who have avoided it so far, let me avail you of the biting facts of the popular series. Series one: educated bloke called Michael (Wentworth Miller) whose big brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), has been wrongfully convicted of murdering the president's brother, has an intricate map of Fox River prison (where his bro is being held) tattooed on his manly and hairless young body. Michael then attempts a bank robbery, gets caught (all part of the master plan) and has himself jailed (in Fox River too, luckily).
Working from the map of Michael's pretty torso, the brothers then plan their escape. After much violence, moody camera-gazing and exasperated shuffling of monkey hats (which took up most of series one), the boys are now on the run, apparently being chased around the set of Deliverance by a pack of salivating Equity-card-holding Rottweilers and fat blokes in uniforms.
Unfortunately, the brothers are accompanied by an assortment of crims (a paedophile, a rapist, a couple of nice blokes who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, oh don't ask me) - and anyway, here we are, series two, and they are all dashing around the inside of your telly in pursuit of liberty and justice (one of them with his arm in a cool box). "Shadow is his friend, night his domain," as the chiselled FBI agent said, his upper lip beaded with droplets of Hollywood sweat.
As serialisation dramas go - 24 and the interminable Lost are the other big players in this genre - Prison Break is marginally more entertaining than preposterous, and if Brian Sewell wants to rough it with the middlebrows, he could do worse than while away an hour in its drawlingly efficient company.
"THE HOOR IS so tall he'd ate hay from a loft." Jon Kenny this week kicked off the promising new RTÉ series Class Clowns with a gig at his old alma mater in Hospital, Co Limerick, where the very funny comedian relived his bell-bottomed and pustular youth (boils were rampant in Ireland in the 1970s, he told us), strutting across the school stage doing his "Hairy Mickey Walk" in front of a hall full of balding contemporaries, ageing múinteoirí, and gobsmacked, squealing Limerick youth.
Refreshingly, Kenny's school days imbued him with the confidence to start a band, Gimik, Limerick's fuzzy-headed answer to the Bay City Rollers, who, with their Suzi Quatro covers, great big appliqué-d shamrocks and platform boots, were voted most promising band of 1977.
Now put that in your pustule and smoke it.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
