Murder on the streets

TV REVIEW: Five DaughtersBBC1, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday This is . . . Nell McCaffertyTV3, Monday
Martin's Mad about FishRTÉ1, Thursday Ó Bhéal go BéalRTÉ1, Monday

OUR APPETITE for crime as entertainment is insatiable. The bestseller lists are packed with crime fiction and prime time has more than its fair share of bloody detective dramas, making even the most casual TV viewer fancy themselves as a bit of an expert in forensics.

That's probably what made the whole premise of Five Daughters, the big drama of the week, so intriguing and ultimately so deeply moving. The three-part drama, broadcast over three consecutive evenings, was based on the murders of five women in the UK city of Ipswich in December 2006. And not "loosely based" which crime dramas so often are – and which usually loosely translates into "sexed up". This was soberly and factually written by Stephen Butchard (whose credits include House of Saddam) who talked to many of the people involved in the tragic and – there's no escaping it – sensational events of the time.

In the space of 10 days the naked bodies of five young women were found. They had two key things in common: they were drug addicts and they financed their habit through prostitution. It wasn't Pretty Womanfantasy land or that silly happy hooker Billie Piper vehicle Belle Du Jour; the women were on the street to feed their addictions and on the rain-soaked Ipswich streets lit by the headlights of cruising Ford Mondeos there was nothing glamorous about it — it was exploitative, relentlessly grim and ultimately deadly.

As the bodies were found, the police work begun and the families informed, it could have been any crime-busting police drama, but the use of actual news clips from the time, including the extensive international coverage, were an intermittent shocking reminder that while this could be the plot of this week's CSI Miami, it really happened and only four years ago.

Ian Hart played detective Stewart Gull, the policeman leading the enquiry, in a powerfully understated performance with none of the macho swagger that defines fictional cop shops. The focus anyway wasn’t on the whodunit element (the DNA database quickly delivered up the killer); it was about making the women real human beings and not the sum of their drug habits and occupations. It worked.

In the first part of the drama in the archive footage the newsreaders consistently referred to the women only as “murdered prostitutes” and the shorthand description didn’t jar. By the end of part three, when we had seen their families (including an extraordinary performance by Sarah Lancashire as the mother of one of the women), their friends (a beautifully nuanced Ruth Negga) and the tragedy of their addiction and the sad lives they led, the casually applied label prostitute seemed not just reductive but cruel and simply wrong.

JARRING FOR A whole other set of reasons was Ursula Halligan's interview with Nell McCafferty ( This is . . . Nell McCafferty). Halligan is the station's political correspondent so direct questions are her forte, not cosy chats. And maybe because she is a heavyweight reporter it was reasonable to expect that an encounter between her and one of the country's feminist firebrands would delve into such topics as the civil rights movement in the North, the development of feminism in Ireland, the changing role and image of women, gay rights – the whole socio-political caboodle on which McCafferty would, it's safe to say, have insightful views. Not a bit of it.

While McCafferty said in passing that the Ireland she came of age in was defined by the three S’s – shame, secrecy and silence – we didn’t hear how she worked to break down those spirit-sapping barriers. And that would have been interesting. Instead, the first half of the interview was taken up with reminiscences of growing up in Derry and in particular her relationship with her father, the second half with her relationship with Nuala O’Faolain.

If you had just arrived in Ireland and tuned into the interview you could easily get the impression that McCafferty was famous for being a retired lipstick lesbian with a daddy fixation. Where was the life’s work? Where was the politics? There was a sniff of it, but it was as sensation-seeking as the rest of the editing. Halligan asked if she had intimate relationships with men. McCafferty said yes and talked of one male encounter when she was being walked home by a politician from the pub one night. Halligan’s political correspondent’s eyes were out on stalks – which was a grand bit of acting because this looked like a cheap-as-chips single-camera programme with Halligan recording the questions after the interview so they could be cut in during the editing.

Anyway it was, said Nell, “a politician in the Irish Dáil – a minister, Michael O’Leary, a big tall fellow, with a face on him, thin.” If that doesn’t sound like a line from Synge where the old woman in the shawl pokes the fire and reminisces about things that may or may not be true I don’t know what does.

“The Labour man?” asked Ursula, positively fizzing with excitement, though really what sort of a question is that? Anyway, when they got to her front door, with Nell knowing she was going “to my execution” (a “shag” she said would have been expected), “thank God there was a guy there from the IRA on the run who I had given the key to my flat to. The minister looked at the IRA man, they said good evening and the minister went home and I thought I’d been saved.”

Maybe, just maybe, the idea was to be a sort of "on the psychiatrist's couch" in the vein of Pamela Stephenson's brilliant Shrink Rapon the BBC, but that would demand a different presenter and it still needed to put the interviewee in context and not fill it with fairly prurient stuff.

AS ISLANDERS we should be fed up to the (ahem) gills eating fish but it's safe to say, from the dearth of fishmongers, paucity of fish restaurants and giant price tag on fish, that we're not. Martin Shanahan from Martin's Mad About Fish, the thoroughly engaging new cookery series, might just change that (well, not the price – he's fantastic but he can't do everything). There's nothing particularly new in the formula: Martin cooks a couple of easy-to-do-at-home recipes and tries out his fish dishes on the public (in this second programme in the series to great success with schoolchildren and Kinsale's firemen), but it's his ease and ability to convey his enthusiasm for cooking fish that works. It helps that Kinsale looks gorgeous.

And perhaps in homage to the grandaddy of TV cookery chefs, the great innovator Keith Floyd, Martin takes comments from and talks to his (off-camera) director Rory Cobbe, which makes the whole thing seem deceptively easygoing. One to watch.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Little historians The homework assignment that grew to become a valuable folk archive

What a relief to see a programme about school life in Ireland fadó fadó and which is not all about corporal punishment, deprivation and the rest. A half-hour documentary, Ó Bhéal go Béal, described, through a mixture of re-enactments and – better still – interviews with a group of spry octogenarians, an ambitious folklore-gathering project undertaken by the Irish Folklore commission in 1937. Children in fifth and sixth classes were asked to go home and quiz their parents, and particularly their grandparents, about old traditions, stories and sayings (a favourite from one potty-mouth granny being fán fada fútor go to hell). Then they wrote them down.

Ninety per cent of the schools in the country took part, with the enthusiastic involvement of the teachers. Wonder how the teachers’ union would handle that nowadays? Between them the children amassed a vast store of folk history and the ordinary copy books that they wrote their findings in still exist and are archived and given the same white glove treatment as any precious document.

Some of the participants were shown photocopies of their work. Reading their own beautifully accomplished writing, the two friends sitting side by side in the classroom in Ballyvourney just as they did over 70 years ago, said the days spent quizzing their grannies and transcribing the stories came back to them as if it was yesterday.