Produced by South East-based independent company Vinegar Hill, Little Town, Big Circus is a wry, affectionate look behind the scenes at the preparations by the people of Enniscorthy for the arrival of the Tour de France last year. Made on a shoestring by director/producer Mike Collins, the film shows few signs of its no-budget origins, its handsomely-shot images of the Co Wexford town en fete providing a sense of the excitement and camaraderie of the event. It's enjoyably light summer viewing, and one of the best television portraits yet of that very 1990s Irish phenomenon, the summer festival.
"About five weeks before the Tour was due to arrive, we decided `What the hell', and decided to go ahead with the filming," says Collins. "We got a lot of support from the local community and business people." A longer version of the documentary has already been released on video in the area, recouping some of the costs. "But it was tough enough making something up to that standard with so little money. All the people who worked on the film did it for nothing."
With three camera crews working simultaneously in the days leading up to the race, Collins needed to spread his resources carefully. "Despite the fact that Enniscorthy is such a small town, there were an awful lot of things happening," he says. "And we had to have a crew in Dublin as well, because we wanted to get a feeling of the whole event."
Tying in the preparations for the Tour with the bicentennial celebrations of the 1798 Rising in the months leading up to midsummer, the programme offers an affectionate portrait of the local community as it bands together to take on the task of coping with one of the world's largest sporting events. Collins follows several key characters: the local cycling enthusiast whose dream has come true; the County Council fixer who can make everything happen, and the young woman nominated as the local "Miss Tour de France". There are moments where chaos seems imminent, or where misunderstandings seem likely to lead to trouble, but disaster is always averted through a combination of hard work and good humour.
"We were kind of expecting that there'd be some kind of disaster or crisis, but that didn't happen," admits Collins. "It's quite an upbeat film about Enniscorthy having something to prove. It's a town that people often pass through and don't stop in, that hasn't quite got into the mainstream of boomtown Ireland. But they've done a lot of work in recent years, and now they're hoping to see some results."
Of course, last year also saw the implosion of the Tour de France in the face of revelations of drug-taking amongst the cyclists. The programme features Stephen Roche defending his former profession against the allegations. With the benefit of hindsight, it's startling now, only 12 months later, to hear the Irish doctor in charge of dope testing state that: "the riders would be crazy to be on drugs . . . because they'll get caught". Footage of the Festina team watching the World Cup Final and celebrating France's victory is given a different perspective by our knowledge that the very next day the team's systematic drug abuse would be exposed in the media.
"A lot of people were asking me whether the issue would be covered in the programme," says Collins. "The way it fell, the drugs crisis was signalled the day before the race started, and it really exploded two days after it left Ireland. There was a certain naivete about the whole issue among people before that, but that certainly wasn't just an Irish thing. In one sense, though, it's a record of the last moment of innocence of the Tour.
"Most people in Enniscorthy were very saddened by all that, and it's not the main focus of the programme. In fact, the cycling is only one part of the whole thing - you have these months of preparation and events, and then the peleton passes through in just a couple of minutes. So the programme is much more about that idea of the circus, of the whole world coming to town."
Little Town, Big Circus is on Network 2 tomorrow at 6.05 p.m.
