THIS COLUMN was going to be about how Britain and America need far fewer films based on real lives; and about how Ireland needs far more. That idea was overtaken by events, dear boy, events. In other words plenty of other columns had been written about the ethics and the aesthetics of basing films on the lives of others.
After all, The Iron Lady, the film about Margaret Thatcher, had been released in early January. Clint Eastwood's biopic of J Edgar Hooverhas been out for a couple of weeks. So the idea was abandoned. Then I found out there is a biographical drama about Charles Haughey in development with RTÉ.
Both RTÉ's drama department and the production company involved are phenomenally tight-lipped on the subject. RTÉ's drama department emerged from purdah – which seems rather a strange place for a television department to reside – only to be killjoys and deny that the working title of the project is Citizen Charlie."At present it has no working title," said their press officer. Although some of us could think of a few.
The idea is that this film about Haughey will consist of three 90-minute episodes – that's long. RTÉ did not deny that this was the format. Nor did the production company, Touchpaper Television. On the one hand you've got to look forward to the way the production will examine the destruction of the Irish Republic. (Alternative title: We Went Wrong Here, Here and Here). On the other hand this is indeed like looking at a history of Eden from the point of view of the snake.
Who's going to play the gormless electorate now that Goldie Hawn has pretty much retired? Is there enough yawning pinstripe in the world to clothe the cast of this production? To be sure, as the RTÉ spokesperson said: "We can [have] any number of dramas in development at any one time." This is probably not the first time that RTÉ has contemplated a drama based on the life of Charles J Haughey, who has become a sort of Moby Dickto the modest whalers of Irish contemporary writing: the ultimate target and the ultimate prize. Sebastian Barry was the first to chug out of harbour, with his play for the Abbey Theatre, Hinterland, starring that excellent actor Patrick Malahide. Haughey was alive and presumably well at the time of that portrayal.
Biographical dramas have become the tribunals of our television and film culture. Remarkably, given the high cost of production, they are cheaper than the so-called real tribunals that have played such extended runs in Ireland, and the television series have the advantage of operating under a new-fangled invention called a time limit. Certainly the multi-episode factual television series is already Irish television’s only serious response to just about everything, from The Famine to The Crash to The Boss. They must make someone feel better.
But in a cinema in Clapham, on the first day of its release, The Iron Ladymade no one feel better. It seemed to be greeted with a sigh of disappointment by both Thatcher's enemies and her friends. While there is a thesis to be done on British cinema's portrayal of two brilliant women – both Thatcher and Iris Murdoch spending much screen time wandering around helplessly in their nighties looking confused, as if dementia was the price to be paid for having been a powerful female, at the same time giving the rest of us the delicious opportunity to pity them – most people's objection to this tactic in the Thatcher film is that it was simply boring.
Figures such as Thatcher and Haughey, who loom so large in the memories of the film-makers – nowadays, perhaps even more powerfully, looming large in the childhood memories of the film-makers – are frightening prospects. In Britain the Left does not want to look at Thatcher because of what she did to them; and the Right does not want to look at her because of what they did to her – betraying her at the end. In Ireland the media is peopled by those who disliked Haughey from the start (Anseo!) and are so afraid of having their dislike labelled snobbish – a favourite Fianna Fáil tactic – that they witter on about how good Haughey was with the stallholders in Moore Street.
These are fevered circumstances in which to produce a biographical drama. Who, after all, besides Madonna, really gives a damn about the life of Wallis Simpson, the subject of the new film W.E.? Or about Freud and Jung and their unfortunate female patients either, even though David Cronenberg has made a film about exactly this subject? Not many people could care less, is the truth of it, although the females will turn up for the excellent costumes and the men for the wars.
But Thatcher and Haughey were the makers – or destroyers – of their countries. A good dramatic television series on Haughey could be dynamite. It would present a whole different set of moral dilemmas for its makers and its audience. Or it could be a bitter disappointment, leaving us to ask once again if the biopic is really the best way for a country to deal with its recent history. It would be nice to have the opportunity to ask that question.