Grim past, grim present

TVReview: The Rocky Road to Dublin, RTÉ1, Tuesday; Prime Time Investigates RTÉ1, Monday; See No Evil: The Moors Murders UTV, Sunday and Monday; The Line of Beauty BBC2, Wednesday; Eurovision Song Contest Semi-final RTÉ2, Thursday.

So much had been written and said about Peter Lennon's documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin in the run-up to its first showing on RTÉ this week, almost 40 years after it was made, that garnering one's enthusiasm for the film felt a little like mustering up the necessary chutzpah for your Auntie Dot's photo album, again. A welcome surprise, then, to discover that it is, after all, an extraordinarily fresh, beautifully paced, aesthetically pleasing and moving film.

Rocky Road is an emigré's work, Lennon having returned from 1960s Paris with a radical perspective and an immersion in the work of the New Wave film-makers. Atmospherically shot (in black and white and many shades of grey) through the eye of another outsider, cameraman Raoul Coutard, the film proceeds in a succession of rhythmic sequences, the camera seeming to run its hand with cautious avarice over its subjects, as if trying to sneak beneath their skin: the bouffant-haired girls at the tennis-club hop, the boyish hurlers on the GAA pitch, the beautiful young boy in the classroom struggling to remember his catechism, vainly trying to list insidious threats to chastity ("bad books and fillums").

Lennon's film is angry and deeply personal, casting a cold eye over "the shabby afterglow" of revolution, including an all-singing, all-dancing Fr Michael Cleary espousing the merits of chastity, a depressingly decorous wedding breakfast (chain-smoking groom, worried bride), and a couple of skinny, self-conscious children in a boxing ring. His choice of images seems to be a bleak answer to his central question: "What do you do with your revolution now that you've had it? . . . Perhaps you have to sink into another kind of bondage."

If, in our spanking-new, over-priced millennium, watching the film from the comfort of our irreligiously languid beds, Lennon's focus now appears narrow, it was - provocatively so. But the film still makes for a powerful and valuable piece of history. The stunning closing sequence shows a large group of children in uniform chasing Coutard's camera through a Dublin housing estate, their bravado poignantly tempered by their school ties and belted gabardines, a flicker of wary prudence in their curious eyes. That was the pre-millennium us.

Was it my imagination or did Mary Harney look vaguely bored during this week's edition of Questions and Answers, when she and a panel of health professionals assessed the latest contribution by Prime Time Investigates to the debate on the A&E crisis? Maybe she's just catatonic with frustration; frustrated that, despite attempts at reform, people in Ireland are still, as Prime Time contributor Dr Adrian Fogarty said (much to the chagrin of the Taoiseach), being treated in conditions similar to those found in the Third World.

Most of us have already overdosed on print-media analysis of an overstretched system, applauded Brendan Gleeson's stirring indictment of A&E on The Late Late Show and resolved to nurse Saturday's injuries at home until Monday, but if there was any doubt left as to the horror of the system, it was brutally eradicated by Prime Time's exceptional contribution - it's one thing hearing about it, another seeing it.

Taking hidden cameras into A&E departments around the country over a three-month period, the programme exposed the chaos caused by overcrowding: trolleys (populated by pixillated faces) parked outside communal toilet doors, bloodstained tissues littering the floor, Buxton chairs housing the cold, pinched and uncomfortable faces of the elderly. The sick and vulnerable had been stripped of privacy and dignity, abandoned to draughty corridors, sleep deprivation and the endless wait for a bed. While new statistics replace old statistics, junior doctors become senior doctors, and viruses become super-viruses, the situation just keeps on getting worse.

"I'd rather die than go back there," said several patients, all of them lifelong taxpayers and contributors to our booming economy. The Prime Time team encountered stories that should make Harney sit up and weep: an elderly patient with a broken hip sitting on a plastic chair for 29 hours before getting a bed, patients treated in ambulances because there isn't even a chair available in the hospital, a terminally ill man battling for peace in bedlam. We've heard it all before, but will seeing it provoke any change?

TWO EXTREMELY GOOD British dramas hit the small screen this week, both beautifully crafted, if distressing, memory boxes encapsulating the spirit of their time. The first, See No Evil: The Moors Murders, was as grimy as the dirty red brick against which it was shot and as depressing as the newly built housing estates of suburban Manchester, where Myra Hindley (Maxine Peake) and Ian Brady (Sean Harris) indulged their macabre appetites.

"There has to be redemption. There has to be forgiveness for all of us," pleaded Hindley, the iconic face of evil in 1960s Britain, to her beleaguered sister, Maureen. But there was none.

Successfully avoiding prurience and made, we were assured, with the consent of the families of Brady and Hindley's young victims, the story was told from the point of view of Maureen and her husband, Dave Smith, as they were - unwittingly, it appeared - sucked into Brady's despotic world. See No Evil was a tale of cruelty, neglect and madness, of the insane egotism of a man whose self-proclaimed intellectual superiority wreaked havoc on a poor and stultified community. There are no simple answers and none were sought here, nor were we invited to feel the fear of the victims. Instead, and almost hypnotically, the focus was on family tensions, on the mundanity of Brady and Hindley's tight, insulated world.

Hindley, towards the film's close, attempted a half-hearted justification of her crimes, citing the "leathering" she regularly received from her father as a child. "He beat me too," Maureen replied simply. Maureen never recovered her equilibrium after the discovery of her sister's crimes, dying in her 30s, having been unable to care for her three sons or maintain a relationship with her husband.

THE SECOND DRAMA, an adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's hugely enjoyable Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty, could not be more different. Set in the hallowed leafiness of Notting Hill in the hedonistic days of Thatcher's 1980s, it tells the story of Nick Guest (Dan Stevens), a bright and impressionable young gay student who is befriended by Toby Fedden, son of the fabulously wealthy and influential Gerald Fedden, Tory minister and favourite of the PM. A shoulder-padded Brideshead, with lines of cocaine, Duran Duran, a lot of crisply energetic Calvin Klein underwear and a plethora of Italian watercolours, the three-part series should be one of those rare adaptations that will not disappoint lovers of the book. The sumptuous and effortless narcissism of the central characters, the decadently luxurious interiors of the Feddens' cavernous residences and a taut script by Andrew Davies illuminate an already glittering story.

The Line of Beauty is as carnal as it is aesthetic and Nick's is the young life caught between Thatcherism's preposterous certainties and the thunderclap of Aids. Well-acted and beautifully shot, this is a gilt-framed portrait of a decade to hang on your wall.

With the annual Eurovision thigh-fest fit to burst onto our screens, the welcome news is that Brian Kennedy and his self-penned ballad, Every Song is a Cry for Love, have passed through the fires of a crotch-heavy semi-final to represent Ireland in tonight's final.

The competition in the Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Final couldn't exactly be described as stiff. Startlingly tuneless, vociferously noisy and alarmingly retro, with a significant proportion of the contestants looking like the unhappy love child of Bucks Fizz and Alice Cooper, it would have been pretty amazing if Kennedy hadn't made it - the man may not look like a pregnant rhinoceros (did you actually see Finland?) but at least he can sing.

Personally, I'm pining for Portugal - there was just something comfortingly nostalgic about that bevy of well-fed women with their array of bottom-hugging ostrich feathers and their strapping legs nicely filling their ankle-boots. Iceland didn't make it either, which was a pity, represented as they were by a flaxen-haired confection who slid on to the stage via a pink stiletto. "People often say I remind them of Mother Theresa," she was reported as saying, "only rich and beautiful." Ah well, you can't have it all.

The excellent Marty Whelan is your compere for tonight's extravaganza. "There really were an awful lot of pants," he said at the end of the semi-final. You can say that again, Marty.