PINNED on the wall was a local undertaker's phone number. It was written in biro but was heavily underscored to amplify its prominence. The camera lingered on it. Redmere Lodge, like every other nursing home, acts as a kind of supplier's holding tank for the final business in the death industry. Its residents, like characters in a Beckett play, reminded you that an existence can outlive a life. Paul Watson's latest fly on the wall documentary for Cutting Edge was titled The Home. It could, had the words not become a cliche for another kind of horror, have been called The Dying Rooms. But in these rooms of afternoon TV game shows, bingo and tearful listening to Danny Boy on the radio, there was much more sadness than horror; much more reason to weep than to scream. Mind you, there was care too, even if, in the cases of the abandoned, the care could never be a match for the loneliness.
"Is there anything you want us to pray for, especially today?," asked a young priest. "No, just pray I die," said Elsie March, with ironic determination. Like a child praying for a new bike, she was really yearning. Chronic arthritis had made her life a constant pain. Winnie Roberts walked cautiously down the stairs. "I don't know why I came here," she said. "It just happened. I had a son. He died." "What was his name?" asked Watson, off camera.
"I can't remember. Now, isn't that stupid? Sorry." Mrs Roberts couldn't remember the name of her husband either.
"Who was your husband?" Pause.
"Nobody really," she said. Then she recalled that he had been a TV repair man. The mention of TV induced the uncomfortable realisation that, perhaps, this TV programme was dubiously intrusive.
Certainly, the owner and staff were fit to grant or withhold permission to film them. But what of the more confused residents? They can hardly have supplied informed consent. "This film was made possible by the open and honest attitude of everyone at Redmere Lodge," said an acknowledgment in the final credits. But openness and powerlessness are not synonymous.
Yet, any reservations that The Hone was invasive or freak showish were countered by its sympathy and compassion. Yes, residents were shown naked and the staff spoke of the grimness, of prolapsed rectums and of coping with their charges' incontinence. But these, in spite of the horror such dignity drubbing dreads incite in the able bodied, were, correctly, not the central concerns of the piece. Primarily, this was a visual essay oh the intense loneliness suffered by some people immediately preceding death. Silences were punctuated by groans.
Stanley Harrison had been a gunner in the second World War. Very old and very craggy now, you could still see that he had, in his day, been a bit of a lad. We saw a photograph of a general pinning a medal on Stan's chest. Cut to see him now: a young girl was buttoning up his dressing gown. One time, Stan enjoyed "plenty of beer... pints ... plenty of music ... plenty of women. But now the times are altered. Quiet round `ere, isn't it? Quiet." Quite, Stan.
As a documentary on the modern way of dying, The Home was not just moving, but instructive. Clearly, some old people are forced into homes and forgotten. Equally clearly, nursing homes are the best places for others. But that does not stop traditional societies - often in a display of rheumatic sanctimoniousness - demanding guilt from the relatives of residents.
Sure, selfishness is at the root of some decisions to place elderly people in care. But it is also at the root of some elderly people's refusal to contemplate such a move. Above all, though, as the most perceptive recorder of the terminal state, Samuel Beckett, noted, loneliness is the problem that needs to be addressed. It's hard not to think that the most acute existentialists live - or, rather, exist - in nursing homes. A fine documentary.
THOUGH it dealt with the slaughter of the healthy rather than the natural dying of the aged, Timewatch's Hannibal And Desert Storm had none of the personalised sadness of The Home. This was much more pragmatic stuff, lapsing into gung ho machismo, at the drop of a cluster bomb.
General Norman Schwarzkopf who, had he been alive, could easily, with minimal assistance from US camouflage experts, have passed as one of Hannibal's elephants, revel led in comparing himself to the great Carthaginian.
The trick in war, it seems, has not changed since ancient times: hit them when they're off guard. Hannibal's success against the Romans in the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC was, Schwarzkopf said, the blueprint for his own Desert Storm campaign against the Iraqis. At Cannae, Hannibal's outnumbered army killed 50,000 Romans in one day... "more than three times the British losses on the first day of the Somme".
To convey the horror of the close up fighting at Cannae, we were shown a watermelon being sliced in two and then gutted - all deep pink and squishy. Andy McNab, the SAS man turned bestselling author, said that when training British soldiers in close combat, he would throw a pint of milk, mixed with red dye, over each man to simulate what it would be like to fight covered in the blood of your comrades and enemies. Charming, Andy! Anyway, Schwarzkopf insisted that the footprints of Hannibal's elephants were discernible in the desert sand. "Hannibal was my inspiration," he said. The voiceover, as is the way with military history, spoke of slaughter as chess. At Cannae, Hannibal duped the Romans into attack, before encircling them. Computer graphics demonstrated the tactics. It could have been Andy Gray's Boot Room. Film of Schwarzkopf's tanks racing around the desert to encircle the Iraqis accompanied the graphics.
Mind you, there was no mention of media involvement at Cannae. Perhaps a Katius Adius, in fashionable fatigues, complied with military wishes and called it reporting. Perhaps not. It is debatable, too, whether or not Hannibal's 37 elephants represented a step up in technology over the Romans, comparable to the allied forces' advantage over the Iraqis in the Gulf War.
Not that any such considerations bothered Schwarzkopf. The very linking of his name with Hannibal elevated him above the mere geography of the desert and into the history of Western civilisation. PR and propaganda were essential weapons in the Gulf War and it was clear from this documentary that Norman Schwarzkopf has not forgotten their value. Strangely, Hannibal never advanced on Rome and Schwarzkopf backed off Baghdad. Perhaps Saddam Hussein knows his military history too.
IN keeping with the theme established by The Home and Hannibal Schwarzkopf death was also the focus of this week's Network First. Titled A View To A Kill, this episode followed a Texan family the Kelleys - whose two children had been murdered. The Kelleys were granted permission to witness the execution of the killer and, boy, did they relish their revenge.
This was discomfiting viewing, for all sorts of reasons. Watching the relatives watching the execution (how long now before even these are shown?) entailed a kind of complicity in the voyeurism of the whole thing. And yet, because the children murdered were their children, it was impossible to make a rational, ethical argument which could nullify their emotional desire for vengeance. What if it were your children? Still, the family seemed motivated by a darkness which was to be feared and pitied in equal measure. "People magazine isn't interested in our story because they can't see the execution," said Linda Kelley, exasperated. It wasn't clear whether she was annoyed at the magazine for being so ghoulish or at the authorities for being so prudish. Whatever, she continued to case the death chamber, measuring eyelines (like a person with a choice of cup final tickets) for the big day.
She was a bit upset too about the plushness of the upholstery on the death couch. "I think he's going really nice. Wouldn't we all like to go so easy." Undoubtedly, Elsie March and some of her coresidents would swap their retirement home for the death couch. But the man being executed, Leo Jenkins, was merely middle aged and looked as healthy as a horse. Ms Kelley decided that she was going to hold up photographs of her murdered children once Jenkins was strapped onto the couch.
Before the execution, the witnessing relatives were counselled. Alter it, the Kelleys gave a press conference. Linda was "very happy for him to be down below". She looked it too. In fact, she beamed.
Watching her, it was impossible to deny that watching criminals die makes some of their victims feel a lot better. At the Houston chapter meeting of Parents of Murdered Children, more members pledged to seek permission to witness executions. Scary, really.
THOUGH it sounds like the sort of nightcap you might expect in a nursing home, Brendan O'Carroll's Hot Milk And Pepper was lively enough. With a screaming green and pink (shades of Andy McNab's watermelon) studio set, it was always going to be loud anyway. It was disjointed though, and there was a strong sense that O'Carroll would have been happier pandering to a bawdier audience than RTE's typical 8 p.m. Sunday night family punters.
It's a quiz show. The green team (two males, two females) were hairdressers. The pink team (same gender configuration) were fitness instructors. "The short `n' curlies against the hot `n' sweaties," said O'Carroll. It's that sort of humour - rough house wisecracks strait jacketed for television. Certainly, O'Carroll can be funny, but the format given to him here could have the soporific effect of hot milk by cooling his steamier material to lukewarm.
Don't Drop Dead is another new cut price RTE offering. It's a six part lifestyle series on "how to survive the 1990s". Like Hot Milk And Pepper, its opening episode [was lively, if jarring. I'll return to it further into its run, by which time presenter Tom Dowling and the villagers of Rathdrum will, [presumably, be further along the route to the programme's promised nirvana.
Finally, Davis. Given the week that was in it, it was no surprise that the topic was, of course death. More precisely, it was about life after death or "life after life" as the Rose ringmaster put it. The contributions from people who had died and been resuscitated, from those who believe in reincarnation and from an assortment of clerics almost all carried faith's note of hope, cast as fact.
Dr Paddy Leahy was less sanguine. He believes that it's over when it's over, arguing that rationality cannot support any other view. Thinking of the fading lives in The Home and of the lives snuffed out by war, murder and state execution, the idea of a compulsory afterlife seemed cosmically unyielding. So much for free will.