Panorama (BBC 1, Monday)
Making Ends Meet (RTE 1, Monday)
Still Life (Network 2, Wednesday)
Engine Earth (RTE 1, Wednesday)
Pushing a wheelbarrow, its contents covered by a grimy, orange rug, Fadil Zeqiri stopped for the camera. His hands trembled as he peeled back folds of rug to reveal the horrifically charred corpse of his 77-year-old father. It looked like petrified tar which had congealed roughly in the shape of a human being. "Look, look, let the Serbs see just what they have done," read the subtitles to Fadil's furious but tearful plea. The disfigured black corpse was a glimpse of a scarcely imaginable hell. Locals insist that the old man was burned alive.
Such burning of human flesh, living or dead, carries, unavoidably, the stench of Auschwitz. Despite all the "never again" and "lest we forget" sentiments in the decades since the Holocaust, Europe has done it again. Panorama reporter Jane Corbin was in Kosovo to front a film titled Valley of the Dead. If ever the dictum of "show don't tell" showed its power, this was it. The sights were an appalling array of the butchery done to human beings by bullets, blades and burnings. Clearly, the violence inflicted was not simply about killing to lessen the power of an enemy. It was characteristically more diabolical than that.
Survivors spoke of the "incredible aggression" of the Serbs, who, forensic scientists said, "mutilated in the worst possible ways". There was proof that ears and noses were severed from living people. There was no need to be equally explicit about other "worst possible" dismemberments. The scale of killing in Kosovo is, of course, only a fraction of that inflicted by the industrial machine of Nazi Germany. But this violence seemed, if anything, less functional, more demented and deliberately sadistic than that of the Nazis.
A higher proportion of the slaughterers of the Kosovan Albanians knew their victims. Such parochial intimacy suggested not war but sadism bred of demonic hatreds. The report opened with a camera panning across the remains of two 19-year-old shepherds. Their hands were bound with chains and there was evidence of torture. Both had been shot in the head. You had to hope that they were killed shortly after capture. But it's unlikely. Some atavistic force was unleashed in Kosovo, and we can see from the defiant triumphalism of the vermin who planned and carried out the massacres, that at least some of them were happy in their work.
Scenes of utter vileness unfolded one after another. Fadil Zeqiri's village is named Velika Krusa. It is known to have had KLA connections - not quite a stronghold, more of a sympathetic junction - so it was singled out for the Full Monty of Serb sadism. Its fate was decided in Orahovac, a bigger, Serb-dominated village just a few miles distant. Likewise the fate of another nearby majority Albanian village, Bela Crkva. About 40 people, including women and children, were lured into a trap under a railway bridge in Bela Crkva. Investigators have found documents in Orahovac outlining the plan for the massacre.
There are still several thousand Serbs in and around Orahovac. Though protected by Kfor troops, they are really under siege, fearful of risking the journey through more than half of Kosovo to reach Serbia proper. Toma Vitosevic is one of them. A greying, portly, indeed slightly overfed-looking, man, Toma may be as innocent as a newborn. Then again, he may be guilty of organising and/or participation in massacres or of supporting, actively or tacitly, such actions. Not surprisingly, the region is rife with suspicion and paranoia. Inevitably, some innocents will suffer; some of the guilty will escape punishment.
Home video, shot from mountainsides overlooking these villages, showed a Serb "clean-up squad" in action. Realising that a mass grave of 120 people in one village would reveal damning forensic evidence, Serb commanders contracted an Orahovac undertaker to disinter the bodies and rebury them in an ethnic Albanian cemetery. The undertaker, naturally, complied. But not all of the new graves face Mecca, so Serb claims that the dead suffered natural deaths are now untenable. Such is the kind of evidence that investigators are compiling.
Corbin concluded that with tensions rising out of control, NATO must make some arrests soon to pacify returning Albanians. We saw video of distraught relatives being forcibly ushered away from sights considered too horrible for family members to bear. Decomposing, mutilated bodies, many tar-black from burning, were swaddled in old rugs and curtains and heaved on to tractor-pulled trailers. It's a daily occurrence as Kosovo buries and reburies its dead and fears are that the slaughter may well have been carried out on a "far greater scale" than hitherto assumed.
It's high summer in Ireland. Television audiences are, of course, at a minimum. Panorama reports from Kosovo are not typical of the doldrum TV of summer. But this documentary - even allowing that, statistically, it can't really have unearthed the worst atrocities - was as shocking and repulsive as any in the 1990s (allowing that Rwanda was its equal). But Rwanda, though, like Nazi violence, vastly greater in scale, appeared to be the result of incited frenzy. Much of the Serb butchery in Kosovo appears to have included sadism for its own sake. It reminded you that the quality of mass murder can be at least as horrific as its quantity.
THE quantity of RTE drama will never be overwhelming, but there was some quality this week. Making Ends Meet, the second of three dramas in the Real Time series, and Still Life, part of the Debut season of shorts, were heartening. The former was a black comedy crime-caper, set in the world of Dublin criminals. Much of the comedy was provided by the fact that most of the cast was recruited from Fair City, Glenroe and Upwardly Mobile. The main man was Fair City's Paul Raynor (the burly, Carrickstown mechanic) as Cal Callaghan, an Ordinary Decent Criminal (ODC), who encroaches on the turf of a rival criminal outfit.
Cal robs post-offices but uses his getaway car as a kind of taxi service to bring home OAPs collecting their pensions. This, of course, marks him as an EDC (Extraordinarily Decent Criminal), the kind that makes Robin Hood seem nothing more than a paedophile serial killer. Still, hyperbole is acceptable in comedy, and Raynor's faintly pompous sense of his own gravitas and community responsibilities are genuinely funny. His pre-teen son, David (Patrick Hyland) idolises him. It is this filial idolatry which thickens the plot.
Thoroughly pain-in-the-neck insolent at school, David is urged to change his ways by a thoroughly pain-in-the-neck idealistic, young teacher, Mr Miller. In Miller's case, however, the hyperbole does not work. He's just too much of a wannabe knight in shining chalkdust to be anything other than gormless and irritating. Even when David, confident of the protection of his distinguished EDC father, urinates in an older teacher's bag, Miller's immediate concern is emotional rehabilition for the delinquent. Having to teach him how to walk again might be more appropriate.
Anyway, David's attempts to flog a few dozen pairs of luminous green trainers (nice touch!) expose the fact that Cal has whipped them from a rival gang, one of whom our EDC has shot in the foot during a gang-clashing post-office raid. A mate of Cal's is executed outside a supermarket and the scene is witnessed by the delinquent. The denouement leads inexorably to a slapstick shoot-out at the school. "And where do you two wasters think you're going?" bellows the school's bullying head brother as he finds the assassins slinking along the corridor.
The Dublin criminal class, in which a murderer worries about getting a killing finished in time to collect his dole, is portrayed - even given the legitimate hyperbole - too affectionately. But the dialogue regularly rings with authenticity. "Massive," says a teenage girl upon buying a pair of the luminous green trainers. Making Ends Meet, directed by Declan Recks and written by Damien O'Donnell and Arnold Fanning, was often funny all right but its EDC sentimentality was suspiciously neat. It also robbed from an otherwise amusing cops and robbers fable.
IN contrast, Still Life, starring the late Agnes Bernelle, was a poignant little lamentation. Bernelle played Alice, an old Belfast woman, lying in bed reflecting on her life. Outside, the other houses in the street have been demolished, intensifying the sense of the aloneness of old age. In her bedroom, Alice is surrounded by photographs, snapshots of "show don't tell" biography: her wedding day; her long-since-adult children as children; herself in her prime. A radio broadcasts requests for others.
A poignant piano, playing over poignant strings, enhances the mood. It is almost overload, risking maudlin sentimentality; but the still-flickering anger in Alice prevents a gush of schmaltz. Through an internal monologue we learn that her husband, Tom, left her for another woman when their children were young. Cue a wedding photo of smiling Alice and smiling Tom before cutting to an, albeit rather technically too good, home movie of the day. A further home movie - of the children playing in what was once a busy street - follows.
The children, we learn, are both married and living in Toronto. Neither has any children. Alice recalls her stunted sex life, regretfully telling us that she has had "no man since Tom left". She imagines a youthful Tom making love to her - but she doesn't imagine herself as young. She is as she is now. The day rolls on towards night. A nocturne sounds as the camera pans across the street lights of Belfast city. Written and directed by Michael Hewitt, Still Life (whether "still" here means motionless or nevertheless) was a splendid little pictorial vignette of the existential truth of old age: each of us dies alone. So, that's hardly an original idea - but its nugget of Beckett-like truth is worth remembering.
FINALLY, Engine Earth. Engine Duncan Stewart might have been a more appropriate title for this latest, fourpart series from the architect who is becoming a kind of Green answer to Magnus Pyke. Following on from Our House and Wood from the Trees, the ubiquitous Dunc's latest series is a plea for the greater use of alternative fuel sources. He's right, of course, but his style is that of almost hectoring reasonableness. Showing us pictures of more smoking chimney stacks than you'd find in a Lowry painting, he railed against the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels.
Danish wind technology; Swedish municipal-waste-for-heat technology; various, largely unsuccessful attempts to harness wave power - it was all undeniably progressive. But too often it had the tone of a Green Party political broadcast. It's not convincing most of us need - just context. How efficient and affordable are these cleaner technologies? Is the principal opposition to the furtherance of their use the powerful, vested interests of oil, coal and gas barons? Which ones are most suitable for Ireland?
Most crucially, what energy source is Dunc plugged into? Some of that, provided there's a clean technology to eliminate the dodgy acting and hectoring reasonableness, will do nicely. Anyway, serious though the subject is, it wasn't the burning of fossil fuels which was most striking about TV this week. There were other burnings which will linger longer in memory.