TVReview Hilary Fannin'War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" - Orwell's bleak prophecies turned up twice on television on Sunday night, as both fictional and factual programmes attempted to hold a mirror up to the neocon mindset.
The first of these, Spooks, in the vein of contemporary thrillers such as 24 and Sleeper Cell, opened its new series with a deeply tense double-whammy gleefully exploiting our importunate times. In a most Orwellian plot, Harry (Peter Firth), the miraculously resurrected Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) and the rest of the MI5 team of talented psychological oddballs battled what appeared to be a terrorist cell bent on destroying the British political system. It's not rocket science apparently, destabilising a democracy: a bit of sinister graffiti, a few rumours of biological warfare, a couple of random attacks on Londoners with a chemical that makes eyeballs bleed, a pair of passenger planes over Westminster narrowly missing each other, a major fuel depot and a home secretary blown up, and you've pretty much done the trick. Throw in fuel shortages, hospitals under siege, panic inculcated and exploited by vitriolic tabloids and, hey presto, you've got a government on the brink of collapse in jig time (as the nice lady on the Odlums ad says).
It all felt remarkably, chillingly plausible. Of course, the mayhem had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, or Muslim extremists of any ilk; it was, in fact, a conspiracy dreamt up by a couple of pasty-faced blokes from MI6 and the debonair ex-ambassador to Russia.
Spooks is extremely watchable, a split-screen, techno Avengers with all the interpersonal shenanigans and neurosis you'd expect from a bunch of bereaved and beleaguered spies (half of whom would have been in their Pampers when the Berlin Wall collapsed).
And the dialogue is really pretty slick, as when corpulent media mogul and junta member Paul Millington (Roger Allam) decried the fetishising of democracy, delighting in the certainty that the erosion of civil liberties would be quickly forgotten by a passive, disenfranchised public as long as his newspapers continued to provide them with pictures of Will Young in the shower.
The only problem with the first two highly entertaining episodes was the question of just what exactly the conspirators wanted to achieve by seizing power in the first place.
Spooks left us in no doubt that the unseen presence in No 10 was Tony Blair (the PM even had a grungy, pacifist, college-student son called Rowan instead of Euan), but one would imagine, given Blair's special relationship with President Bush, that if a junta wanted to promote a neocon agenda, it'd happily use Tony as a mascot rather than an effigy.
IF THE VISION of the future by Spooks was divertingly alarming, the second offering on the Sabbath night, Robert Taicher's documentary, Rush To War, was enough to make the blood run cold. Yes, the programme did have an agenda - Taicher originally distributed 40,000 copies of the film to voters in Florida (his home state), hoping to influence them prior to the 2004 US presidential election. And yes, in its exploration of the events leading up to 9/11, the film did line up all the white-haired, liberal, collegiate pinkos, such as Noam Chomsky and George McGovern, and even some not so white-haired contributors, such as the forceful and articulate former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter (who played blind man's buff with those non-existent WMDs), all of whom oppose the war in Iraq and many of whom drew a sombre picture of the future if the US persists with what they see as its arrogant, unilateralist approach to the Middle East.
Former presidential candidate George McGovern was the most arresting of the contributors: now in his mid-80s and looking and sounding impressively vigorous, he offered a simple yet fascinating history lesson. There were people during the Cold War, he reminded us, who prescribed a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia and China, people for whom annihilating half the world was all in an afternoon's work; luckily, there were also those, such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, who refused to open the doors to that tragedy.
Would the US have sacrificed the lives of more than 2,000 of its soldiers (not to mention those of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians) and spent millions of dollars on war in Iraq if that country's main product was cabbages and watermelons rather than oil, McGovern asked.
Rush to War was a bleak analysis of our times. Bush was accused of hubris, bravado and arrogance, of using the concept of perpetual war as a way of tightening his initially tenuous grip on power, of asking Americans to swap liberty for security and of failing to protect democracy.
Tough charges, expertly argued.
HE'S BLAIR, HE'S there, he's everywhere. The ubiquitous British premier, garlanded in a pink shirt and tie which matched his garden cushions, even ended up entertaining Jamie Oliver on the wicker sofa in the No 10 backyard during Jamie's Return to School Dinners.
Oliver is a phenomenon who will be remembered not simply as the lad who put the "pukka" in our char-grilled asparagus but also for his determination to improve the eating habits of Britain's schoolchildren. Oliver's return saw him continue his battle on two fronts: in Greenwich, the rock upon which his campaign was built, where his apostle, Nora, the dynamic Irish dinner lady, was leaking money like a sieve, having closed down the junk-food-laden school tuckshop; and further afield in chilly Lincolnshire, where he was attempting to organise local amenities (pub kitchens, local farms and taxis) so as to provide hot meals for hundreds of children who, as in many of the other poorer areas of England, are living on a diet of Coke, crisps and pot noodles.
Oliver's commitment to improving the nutrition of vulnerable and ultimately hungry children led to some very moving television. Talking to six- and seven-year-olds who buy their lunch in the local sweetshop, he was told that for many of them a hot meal at home is a rare occurrence.
Meeting their low-wage parents, he discovered a generation who can unscramble a DVD but can't boil an egg, who (whether through poverty or low-lying general depression) have somehow become disempowered to provide for their children.
Persistent, arrogant, bullish and uncompromising, Oliver threw everything at the problems he identified: declaring a junk amnesty in Greenwich, he asked parents to give the quid or so that usually went to the sweetshop directly to the school instead, to set up a healthy playground catering wagon serving salads, home-made hamburgers, paninis and fruit slushes. For Lincolnshire and similarly deprived counties, he managed to elicit (in Blair's child-friendly garden) a promise of a further £240 million (€356 million) towards school meals and a commitment to stay with Oliver's reforming agenda until at least 2011.
Well pukka, that lad.
I WAS GLUED to the first part of Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, a fascinating look at the actor's efforts to understand more about his recently diagnosed bipolarity. Fry revealed a life of extreme highs and lows, of scaling the roof of his public school in a mania of self-aggrandisement, of drinking cocktails in the Ritz on the credit cards stolen from his parents' friends, of expulsion and reform school, of booze, cocaine, fame, despair, delusion and suicide attempts (one of which saw him sitting in his closed London garage, a duvet stuffed under the door, with his fingers on the ignition key, the morning after his much-publicised walkout from a West End theatre production of Cell Mates).
Fry's journey brought him to Hollywood, where as one film producer famously said, to survive in this town "you don't need to be gay or Jewish, just bipolar". There he met bipolar pin-up Carrie Fisher, who told him: "When you're high, God is saving you parking slots." Other contributors included comedian Tony Slattery, who described his months of being holed up in his flat above the Thames, throwing electrical goods and furniture into the murky waters, and chef Rick Stein, who showed Fry the spot on the Cornwall cliffs from which his manic-depressive father had jumped to his death. Several interviewees, including a former naval officer who had survived a suicide attempt when he threw himself under an articulated lorry, said that despite the horror of the low phases, they would not change their condition, which for him, during the highs, brought him into contact with angels.
Fry, who was diagnosed at 37, finished the first programme by looking at the distressing possibility that his condition could get worse with age as the cycles of intense depression increased in regularity.
And, after all the glittering talk of euphoria, fantasy and angels, he spoke to a woman in her mid-40s who had gradually lost the life she loved and, in a quagmire of despair, had attempted to kill herself.
"I have to change my life," Fry concluded.
I have to lie down now - this week's televison has taxed my delicate psyche. Whatever happened to good old dumbing-down, eh?
tvreview@irish-times.ie