TV REVIEW: Mission to the Moon: News from 1969UTV, Monday Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11RTÉ1 and UTV, Monday In the Shadow of the MoonChannel 4, Monday The Big StoryRTÉ1, Sunday Flesh and BloodRTÉ1, Tuesday
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the moon landings last Monday was primarily, of course, a celebration of one of the most significant achievements in human history – the moment that immutable rock in the sky became part of mankind’s domain. It was also, however, the anniversary of the first shared global televisual moment, when a huge proportion of the Earth’s population sat in front of a screen to watch that famous, grainy shot of a man walking on the moon, in the knowledge that everybody else was watching it too. Hundreds of millions of people, united at exactly the same moment – July 20th, 1969 might have been the high-point of the space age, but it marked the true arrival of the televisual age.
Last Monday night's collection of programmes to mark the anniversary, however, perfectly demonstrated what a mixed bag the televisual age has been. UTV had Mission to the Moon: News from 1969, a short news bulletin hosted by John Suchet, presenting the great day's events in "real time", as if they had just happened. This probably sounded like a swell idea in the commissioning suite, but the conceit was laboured; hearing Suchet describe Neil Armstrong's first steps in the present tense was just bizarre – "For centuries, men have gazed up at the moon. Tonight, man is on it." Wait, why is Richard Nixon still the president? Were we going to get a breaking news ticker to say Hendrix has been added to the Woodstock line-up? Suitably marking what is probably the culmination of all human civilisation is important and all, but pretending Neil Armstrong was bouncing along on the lunar surface just above our heads was probably taking it too far.
The main anniversary dish on both UTV and RTÉ was Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, a drama about Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and their historic mission. As stories go, few are more exciting, and it's blessed with great characters to entertain us, stunning visuals to inspire us and an achievement to make even the most wonder-averse gulp with awe. Which makes the relentless dullness of Moonshotall the more unforgivable. In a cut-price attempt to do for Apollo 11what Ron Howard and Tom Hanks did for Apollo 13, we were treated to an interminable potted history of the Apollo project that felt like it lasted the duration of the Apollo project, as well as some ropey acting and low-budget production values that jarred with the authentically grainy archive footage. Moonshot only approached the requisite level of excitement a few minutes from the end, when Buzz and Neil finally landed on the moon – or a dusty studio in Pinewood, by the looks of it.
Indeed, the chief achievement of Moonshotseemed to be to disprove once and for all those crackpot conspiracy theorists who doubt the moon landings ever happened – for if we are incapable of convincingly faking the moon landings in 2009, with all the technology now at film-makers' disposal, then they were certainly incapable of faking it in 1969. Sending two men to walk on the moon, it would appear, is actually easier than creating the impression of two men walking on the moon.
To fully appreciate the scale of those events 40 years ago, we needed to go no further than In The Shadow of the Moon, a magnificent, moving documentary by David Sington. Consisting of interviews with 10 of the Apollo astronauts, including Aldrin, Collins and Jim Lovell (more interesting than Tom Hanks could ever be), and beautifully restored archive footage, this film captured the optimism, endeavour and unremitting self-confidence that made the moon missions possible.
Those astronauts are in their 70s now, well-preserved and wise, and hearing their stories is a privilege, though Armstrong, unsurprisingly, doesn’t appear. While his absence is acute, it’s also somewhat fitting – as soon as he took that most famous of steps, he transcended his own name and life, becoming for ever more the man in the moon. Talking about things like feelings or fears or memories or regrets is unbecoming a mythical figure – it might only break the spell.
The most surprising insight the film offered was that the bond that unites these men is less their exploration of an alien world but their unique perspective on Earth. Only the Apollo astronauts who ventured to the moon ever saw our home in its entirety – “like a jewel hung in the blackness” as one of them puts it.
Collins – a self-deprecating and brilliantly wry individual – described the sensation he felt as he became the loneliest man in history, orbiting on the dark side of the moon with all of humanity on the other side. The sensation he felt was exultation. Watching this life-affirming movie prompted a similar feeling in me.
THE PROGRAMME ALSO served as a timely reminder of the role Walter Cronkite played in American life, his avuncular authority a comforting presence at moments good and bad. Cronkite is remembered for a few moments in particular – the moon landings, JFK’s death and for questioning the Vietnam war. In that final example, Cronkite went beyond merely reporting the news, and felt compelled to engage with it. It is an important journalistic principle that journalists not become part of the story, but it is often the instances that defy that rule that are held up as the greatest journalistic achievements, whether it’s Cronkite and Vietnam, or Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, or Seymour Hersh and the My Lai massacre, to name some fabled US examples.
The often complex relationship between journalists and the stories they cover is the subject of The Big Story, which began by examining Charlie Bird and his coverage of the case of the Negros Nine. When an Irish Columban priest, Fr Niall O'Brien, was among a group arrested for murder in the Philippines in 1983, Charlie was packed off to southeast Asia by RTÉ. The first thing he had to do, Bird recalls, was look up the Philippines on the map. His prolonged trips to the country, during which time he befriended O'Brien and reported on the plight of the accused, brought him prominence and established him as one of RTÉ's most capable reporters.
The Big Story, however, could never quite make up its mind as to whether it wanted to be a mini-biography of Bird or an examination of how he became so closely identified with one particular story, and as a result fell between two stools.
This series will hopefully develop into more than just another vehicle for material from the RTÉ archives; the next programme looks at Maggie O’Kane and her experiences in Sarajevo in the 1990s, which should offer fertile ground for a deeper examination of the relationship between reporters and what they report.
Personal effects: A fraught father and son relationship reopened by a suitcase
As metaphors for abstract concepts go, “carrying baggage” has a wonderfully visual quality, precisely evoking that accumulation of psychological scars and emotional wounds that we all pick up through our lifetimes, to some degree or other. There’s a satisfying heft to the phrase, a weight that rings true. But this type of baggage is unwelcome, and the process of leaving it behind, the unburdening, is a mainstay of narrative fiction, the character arc of self-improvement and reconciliation.
Rarely, however, has such an unburdening been acted out in quite such a literal way as by Carlo Gebler in the final episode of Flesh and Blood. Gebler's fraught relationship with his father, the writer Ernest Gebler, was already the subject of a memoir, and this programme saw Carlo come to terms with this relationship by going through the contents of the suitcases Ernest left him after his death. The suitcases contained all manner of items, including letters and a scathingly annotated copy of Carlo's first book, but the heavy symbolism of working through his own baggage by working through his father's luggage was almost too perfect – indeed, it seemed like a carefully crafted fictional device.
The programme featured interviews with JP Donleavy and Carlo’s mother, Edna O’Brien, who shed light on Ernest’s, well, troubled personality and his “rampant jealousy” – when O’Brien began to find success as a writer, Ernest tried to claim credit for her work. But it was when Carlo discussed his father that the programme was at its most fascinating – the physical similarity between the two, with those deeply grooved cheeks, made the central relationship all the more tragic. “The loving parent is taken for granted,” Carlo said at one point, not needing to mention the unloving parent.
The personal honesty that characterises the bravest writers was everywhere in evidence, but nowhere more so than in the unexpected finale, when Carlo produced an urn with his father’s ashes, unceremoniously stored in a garden shed. All that baggage had been reduced to this. “What does one do with this stuff?” he asked.
Hilary Fannin is on leave