THE past is a foreign country, but how they do things there in the world of television depends very much on the fashions of the moment and the foibles of individual producers. Of all historical periods, the Middle Ages have undergone the most revision in recent times, visually at least. Jolly yeomen, knights in white satin and fair damsels have been replaced by muck, pigs and, most importantly, straggly facial hair. It's not surprising, therefore, that the BBC's new version of Ivanhoe boasted the most luxuriant crop of beards seen on television since the Dubliners' Late Late Show special.
With all that shrubbery, it took a while to figure out who was who in 12th century England, especially since most of the action in the opening episode took place at night, but it proved possible to distinguish between Normans (favouring a more clipped, sculpted look) and Saxons (Billy Connolly circa 1975).
Night time shooting is a sensible strategy when you're trying to make a Braveheart style drama on a Ballykissangel scale budget, but with so many characters to establish, it made for hard work on the part of the viewer. Steven Waddington plays Wilfred of Ivanhoe, returned from the Crusades and determined to clear his name of the allegations by Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert (Ciaran Hinds) that ended his betrothal to Rowena (Victoria Smurfit), who is now unwillingly proposed to the gormless Athelstane (Chris Walker) by her guardian, Cedric of Rotherwood (James Cosmo). Meanwhile, Prince John (Ralph Brown) is plotting to depose his brother Richard (Rory Edwards) as king, with the assistance of his adviser Waldemar Fitzurse (Ronald Pickup) ... I was exhausted already, and we were only 20 minutes in.
There's plenty of skulduggery, jealousy and murder going on, but sooner or later the cast is going to have to come out of the shadows (for next week's big jousting tournament, probably), and there'll be no avoiding the fact that they outnumber the extras.
Ivanhoe's producers have made much of their desire to get away from the men in tights image of past medieval adventures in the interest of greater realism, but what's so terrible about tights anyway? The medieval world depicted in gorgeous technicolour during Hollywood's golden age had its own internal logic and a lot more charm than this, and Sir Walter Scott's novel is hardly a textbook of historical accuracy. Give me Elizabeth Taylor in the 1953 version any day.
CAMELOT by the Potomac was the setting for the first instalment of Dark Skies, the latest paranoia offering to hit our screens in the wake of The X Files. The central conceit of the series is that all the quirks and tragedies of American history since the 1940s can be explained by extraterrestrial intervention, or its consequences. Ever since the Roswell incident (we now appear to have reached the stage where everybody is supposed to know about the Roswell incident), little slimy critters with lots of legs have been abducting humans and climbing into their skulls.
The clean cut young hero John Loengard (Eric Close), arriving with his girlfriend (Megan Ward) in Washington DC in 1960 to climb his way up the greasy political pole, finds himself working instead for an ultra secret government organisation called Majestic (or, since this is the 1960s after all, MAJESTIC). In the pre credits sequence, Gary Powers pursues an unidentified flying object into Soviet air space in his U2 spy plane, only to be blasted out of the sky and into the history books by an alien spacecraft, while an ominous voiceover warns that "these events are being presented as fiction to protect those fighting in the resistance".
The right wing, covert operations types at MAJESTIC, whose existence is unknown even to the president (Eisenhower, it seems, didn't like the look of Kennedy, and ensured he would be kept in the dark) turn out to be nearly as bad as the aliens, which means they're pretty darned bad. The two hour opening episode ended with the assassination in Dallas, which takes place the day after Loengard smuggles the alien file onto JFK's desk.
This is clever, passably entertaining stuff, the mutant offspring of David Lynch and Oliver Stone by way of Forrest Gump, and the historical references are generally well handled, but many possibilities for wit and mystery are avoided in favour of a flat style which doesn't take full advantage of the ingenious premise. Recent American history - especially the 1960s - has been plundered so often by contemporary pop culture that subjects like the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam war have more reality" as media icons than historical events, and Dark Skies takes this to its logical conclusion, but the consequence is that narrative anticipation is based on knowing exactly what's coming up.
The first series runs as far as the mid 1970s, and there are plenty of signposts to tell us where we're going. "We've got this damned election coming up in less than a year's time," Bobby Kennedy tells Loengard as they stroll through the autumn leaves, just so we'll know what happens next. At the end of this week's episode, our hero and heroine went on the run, with Buffalo Springfield playing over the credits - don't forget to tune in next week for alien counterculture.
SOME less adventurous cable viewers may not even know they have the French channel TV 5 tucked away amidst the Eurotrash and community noticeboards at the double digit end of their remote controls. They will therefore have missed Mary de Cork, a stupendously awful feature length drama set during the War of Independence and Civil War. Mary is a staunch republican, but her lover, Beckett (that's his first name, I'm afraid) is an officer in the Free State Army, and dies in an ambush in a valley at the end (sounds familiar).
The sense of period was shaky, to say the least - most of the peasants seemed to have been costumed from the left overs of a Kerrygold commercial, with lots of tweed jackets, turtleneck sweaters and floppy scarves. The Free State troops wore German style coal scuttle helmets, which must have had interesting resonances for French viewers but was more than 10 years before its time for the Irish Army.
It would appear that French television drama scorns la vice Anglaise of fetishising the past in costume drama - the action unfolded against a backdrop of double glazed windows and tarmacadamed roads - but the Gallic influence was all pervasive. Not only was Beckett an improbably good cook, but the motley band of revolutionaries had a free and easy air with the opposite sex that hardly seemed like a realistic depiction of Ireland in the 19205. None of that repressed sexuality or over enthusiastic male wrestling here, although all the protagonists had a tendency to burst into song at the drop of a hat.
Whether for reasons of aesthetics or just for padding, each song (including The Soldier's Song. Or O Se Do Bheatha Bhaile and Danny Boy) was rendered in full, taking up around 30 per cent of the whole thing, and somebody with more greed than sense allowed chunks of Sean O Riada music to be used as well.
There was a thank you to Bord Failte at the end of Mary de Cork, but there hasn't been a less enticing portrait of Ireland since Roddy Doyle's Family - the film seemed to have been shot in the dead of winter, and the actors looked uniformly cold, damp and unhappy, which at least had the ring of truth about it.
IRELAND will not be free till every Englishman is dead," according to Mary, who would artily approved of Ruairi O Bradaigh. The leader of Republican Sinn Fein popped up like a bad penny on Leargas, which this week recalled the attack 40 years ago on the RUC barracks at Brookeborough, in which two IRA men, Sean Sabhat and Fergal O'Hanlon, died.
Three years after the lifting of Section 31, we've become used to the circumlocutions of Sinn Fein spokespeople around the question of political violence in Ireland. So O Bradaigh's hardline republicanism, talking of the "disease of constitutionalism" and denying that the Irish people had a democratic say in their own destiny, sounded shocking coming out of the television set.
Harry West and Raymond Ferguson provided a unionist perspective on the attack, but the real subject of Gerry Gregg's programme was the parting of the ways within Irish republicanism since the late 1950s, which has led to the establishment of (at least) five different political parties. Proinnsias De Rossa and Tombs MacGiolla, who both supported the 1950s campaign at the time, talked about the changes in their political thinking over the last 40 years, while O'Hanlon's sister, Padraigin Ui Murchu, who is now a Sinn Fein councillor, spoke about her brother's death and about the current situation from what might, in this context, be described as a "mainstreams" republican" position.
Whether you think that O Bradaigh represents the true face of militant republicanism, unpolished for international media consumption, or believe, that his hardline position is what the current Sinn Fein leadership is trying to move away from, his views are repugnant to the vast majority of people on this island (which hardly bothers him, as he explained in the programme). The argument that lifting Section 31 would allow those who supported anti democratic violence to hang themselves in front of the television cameras has largely been proved false (and was never the right reason to argue against censorship, anyway), but, O Bradaigh certainly did himself no favours here.
It's unfortunate, therefore, that Gregg was determined to over egg the cake, running unflattering footage of the Republican Sinn Fein leader strutting along the street like a martinet, which only served to undercut the perceived objectivity of the programme.
