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The X-Files BBC2, SundayIn a week that saw the mass invasion of the reality game show almost complete, it was another, altogether more horrifying moment of reality which was to haunt it. The home video footage of the Israeli wedding disaster (news bulletins, Saturday) was a rare occurrence; death on the television screens - although it was probably because it was not explicit death that it was shown at all.
Death on the news is usually confined to the sight of bodies after the event, or the moments before it. The video footage that we see of Omagh is shot after the bomb. The recent Concorde footage showed the aircraft on fire, but not the final crash. In battle zones, footage is shot everyday which never gets shown, instead we are given the impression of war as an event where people shoot from a distance at each other, duck from building to building and bombard each other from hills. When, during the Gulf War, the last moments of Iraqi soldiers were shown, it was only as glowing blobs of heat caught in the crosshairs of what was relayed to the world as a multi-billion computer game. The reality of the news seldom deals in the ultimate reality.
What allowed the Israeli wedding footage to be shown largely uncut was that it fell somewhere in-between. We did not see the actual, physical deaths. We saw no blood, no body parts, no crush of bodies, as most certainly followed. The death was implicit, the horror soaked into the anticipation of what was to come, and the knowledge we had of what happened after the floor collapsed. It was the normality of the scene in the moments before - the man bouncing his child in his arms, the wedding couple kissing, the music playing, the crowd dancing - which made the foreboding unbearable. And when the floor did collapse, a brief dip followed by utter catastrophe, it sucked the breath out of you no matter how many times you saw it.
It was, as you would expect, shown over and over again. Sky News repeated the footage with every bulletin on Saturday, although its declaration that it represented an age of the video witness reaching new levels was hyperbole born out of journalistic excitement. The Zepruder film - that grainy, frame-by-frame view of Kennedy's assassination - has a resonance that will always go far deeper. It has become iconic, long ago entering another realm altogether, in which fiction drowns out reality.
If there is a new level being reached, it is only in the regularity of the video witness; the CCTV film of Diana leaving the Ritz, Jamie Bolger being led away by his killers, Trevor Deely walking along the canal, Damilola Taylor skipping to catch a lift.
Cameras are everywhere, so that it is almost more surprising now when an event is not caught on one. The Israeli wedding film may also have served a genuine purpose beyond mere witness, though. Up until that point it could have been mistaken for just more rubble in a place where it never seems to stop piling up. But the video placed it in a universally recognisable setting, showed it to be a singular tragedy. A wedding party trapped forever in a moment somewhere between life and death. The video footage of the Grangegorman murder scene shown on Prime Time this week was eerie, the daylight blanching the screen, the house quiet, save for a purse spilled on the floor, open drawers, drops of blood on a bed. The rooms in which Sylvia Shields and Mary Callinan were stabbed to death.
The investigation concerned itself with establishing how Dean Lyons not only spent four years in prison for a crime it was later realised he didn't commit, but that he had managed to give accurate descriptions of that murder scene in the three Garda interviews leading up to his eventual confession. A report commissioned by the DPP had decided that he was highly suggestible, a man who would have said anything just to end the interrogation. Oddly, this information wasn't used in the repeated questioning of a Garda spokesman as to how Lyons could have had such detailed knowledge of the murder when he wasn't actually there. Aside from that, this was clear, effective journalism, unburdened by self-satisfaction and clearly explaining the awful irony of the outcome.
Although convicted killer Mark Nash has admitted to committing the Grangegorman murders, it is the unreliability of Lyon's own confession that makes Nash's so inadmissible. It is unlikely that there will ever be a resolution of this case, no matter how much someone like Stella Nolan, raging against a system which allowed the killer of her sister Sylvia to escape, yearns for it. Lyons, meanwhile, died of a heroin overdose in Manchester last year. "I wouldn't wish him back, to go through that all again," said his mother. It was tragedy seeding tragedy.
IN Boomtown, Dublin suffered from the weird geographical shift that occurs during property booms. Restaurateurs Christian and Simon Stokes were looking to buy an apartment close to the city centre. "Meanwhile, back in Ballsbridge..." said the voice-over, returning to our heroes after a brief diversion. The thing is, though, they were quite clearly standing on a balcony over looking Boland's Mills, which is in Ringsend. Somebody call the estate agent quick and tell them they've made a mistake on the brochure.
The latest in the documentary strand was titled "Spenders", although we learned nothing about cash that we didn't already know. People with lots of money are fine. People who insist on waving it in your face are not. Boom or bust, you wish them nothing but bankruptcy.
As pure comedy, however, this was about the funniest thing on television this week. The star of the show was Ed, a 23-year-old so keen to show his love of spending that he would have lit cigars with £50 notes if he'd been asked to do so. That he was the owner of a mobile phone shop may have explained why he spoke only in statements.
He was shown carrying a bag full of dirty washing. "A couple of years ago you wouldn't have seen someone doing this. They would have washed at home." With that he walked into the laundrette, undermining his point just a touch.
He had it clear in his head. Take a businessman, 40-years-old, goes to the gym three times a week, the golf course on Saturday, drives a Mercedes. People might think he's successful, said Ed. But hold on. "Then, Boom! Something tragic, like cancer. Now, he's worked all his life and maybe in the last two years he's started on the golf course or something. A lot of people are just going, 'Not this guy'." Fifty years ago, he said, you could meet a girl when she was 20, marry her and she'd have had her kids by the time she was 25. Not now, he huffed. He wanted to be sole earner, to build a house himself. "The world is changing a lot faster," he said. Not so fast in his own head, though.
The Stokes brothers, despite their initial strutting, quickly realised that they couldn't afford the penthouse apartments from which they could survey the city and instead eventually settled for a modest terraced house in Blackrock. Ed, meanwhile, went on a shopping spree with his girlfriend/future housewife in which he only just stopped short of blowing his nose with £20 notes. It was nice to think that this was the exuberance of a young man with a bit of cash in his pocket, but he doesn't have the air of someone who will mature into middle-age content with a modest saloon car and a new jumper every Christmas.
Not this cowboy.
Spooky Mulder finally disappeared from The X-Files this week, after seven years of chasing inter-galactic bounty hunters, cloned alien-human hybrids, shadowy conspiracies, buried spaceships and a social life. It goes on without him, which is good, because the show is still expertly made, has wonderful dialogue, nonchalant acting and an underplayed humour.
In the end, Mulder took a route out of the programme not seen since Farron Carrington Colby was abducted by aliens intent on learning the chemical ingredients of lame. He walked into an invisible energy field and under the intense white light of a giant UFO which took him off to a place where there are more stars than in the sky itself: Hollywood.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
