TV REVIEW:NUALA O'FAOLAIN lived such a full life – equal parts excess and success, on top of layers of chaos and fragility – and then, just when her personal and professional life had taken on a comfortable rhythm, in her late 60s, the writer was struck with incurable cancer and died. Hers was not a life unexamined or unknown. She was a high-profile, plain-speaking figure in Irish life for at least three decades, and her international success came when she wrote her upfront memoirs.
So the O’Faolain we met in the biodoc Nuala (RTÉ1, Monday) was familiar. If there was a surprise in her story as shown on screen, and not quite captured in her writing, it was the depth of the dysfunction in her home life as she grew up, the truth giving the lie to the many happy family photos. She was the daughter of negligent parents – a philandering father, who was a celebrity journalist in his day, and an alcoholic mother – and had eight siblings. She survived her inexplicably impoverished childhood: her father was a huge earner, but there was never any money at home. A less damaged person would have viewed her tremendous academic and professional success as a triumph over adversity. But she didn’t see it that way and carried a profound lack of self-worth, an intense neediness and a fixation with her father throughout her life.
As a film, Nuala was a stylish, substantial and absorbing piece of work. Its makers, Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, took as their source material the disparate elements in her full life: archive footage, old photos, interviews with friends, her various homes and, above all, her work. She recorded her memoir Are You Somebody? as an audiobook, so at times she narrated the film. It was both eerie and poignant.
The interviews, with long-time friends and three of her sisters, were closely and intimately shot at an unhurried, thoughtful pace, while many of the exterior shots, particularly the New York scenes, zinged with vibrancy. Her friends talked with apparent honesty, but there seemed an undertow in some interviews, as if they had spent too much of their lives rolling their eyes at her prickly, difficult ways.
But the name was wrong. This film, when viewed in this country, should have been called My Friend Nuala, By Marian Finucane, because Finucane was clearly on an intensely personal journey to understand O’Faolain, maybe create a celluloid memorial and come to terms with her death. This gave the interviews, particularly with O’Faolain’s New York friends, an intensity, as if these people could tell Finucane things she did not know, and her face was a study in inquisitiveness and, at times, raw grief. Finucane doesn’t normally give much away in terms of her private life or her personal opinions, but here she was open and deeply emotional, and even talked about the death of her own daughter, something she hasn’t previously done so openly. And all without letting the piece become sentimental. Often I found myself watching her and her reactions rather than thinking about O’Faolain.
The narrative was linear – from birth to death – but some things jarred. I could have done with much more about O’Faolain’s professional output, particularly her early broadcasting, and less about the number of lovers she had. Colm Tóibín even commented on them: why not let one of our great novelists give a full appraisal of O’Faolain’s literary work rather than her lovers? The discussions about whether she was bisexual seemed prurient.
And where was Nell McCafferty, O’Faolain’s partner for 15 years? Like a spectre at the feast, she was everywhere in this documentary – in personal photos, in gloriously happy anecdotes told by Finucane, even in deathbed emails between the two. But as the end credits said, she declined to take part. She was missed.
IF YOU THINK your child is smart, check out 11-year-old Jake. By the time the credits rolled on Kiefer Sutherland’s new series, Touch (Sky1, Tuesday), the boy had saved the lives of children in a school-bus crash, predicted the lotto numbers, made a struggling Irish singer an international phenomenon (she sounded distinctly English, although her sidekick, played by Simon Delaney, was pure Dub), brought an estranged couple in London back together (that was a real tear jerker) and prevented a teenager’s suicide-bombing mission in Baghdad. And, spookily, there’s a link between these people that they never could have guessed and never find out.
And he did all this without leaving his bedroom or saying a word. The premise (suspend all sense of logic right now) is that mute, mop-haired Jake can, through – well, I don’t actually know how, but it involves mobile phones and number sequencings – predict the future, and it’s up to his dad, played by Sutherland, to decipher his thoughts and make them happen. We’re all connected, on this planet of ours, and it takes a boy with special powers to see that (which sounds vaguely Messianic now that I think about it).
Danny Glover, who runs a makey-uppy, new-agey institute, diagnoses Jake with some sort of neurological gift and piles on the cod analysis as to why Sutherland, whose wife died in 9/11, who lives in a fancy New York loft and who works as an airport baggage handler, should be thrilled with his mystical maths whizz. It’s not 24 – more like Heroes, which was also about people with spooky powers and which, like Touch, was created by Tim Kring. Thoroughly enjoyable, slickly made nonsense, it is one to watch.
NOW THAT THE post-Christmas fat-fighting programmes have finished and we're back to our slothful ways, the cool and very calm surgeon Gabriel Weston reassured us in Horizon: The Truth about Fat (BBC2, Tuesday) that it's not all our fault for pigging out. Scientists have made a breakthrough in the treatment of obesity: two hormones control our appetites. In some people, the hormone hasn't been "turned on", so they are usually skinny minnies; in others, they claim, the hormone is on full blast, which goes a long way towards explaining the obesity epidemic. Weston looked a little put out to discover that her thin frame wasn't the result of her steely willpower but was something she couldn't consciously control. In theory it's good news for those who can't say no to a cream bun, but in practice nothing has changed. The hormone discovery, while exciting, is at the exploratory lab stage. Weston ended with the usual recommendation to eat less and move more.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
Get stuck into...
I’m beside myself at the thought that Mad Men (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday), the superstylish, compulsive series starring Jon Hamm that has become a cultural phenomenon, is back. It’s been too long.
