Rebel Heart - RTE1, Monday
Vets in the Wild - BBC1, Friday
In One Year and Out the Other - RTE1, Sunday
Jools's Annual Hootenanny - BBC2, Sunday
Lenny Henry in Pieces - BBC1, Saturday
This year will mark the 85th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a subject that raises passions wherever Irish people and their descendants can still scent the burning Post Office and the thud of the firing squad's shots. During the six days in April, 1916, more than 400 people were killed; afterwards, at least 15 were executed and 2,000 interned. It is a commonplace that it was not so much the foolhardy courage of Pearse and his fellow republicans that damaged the British, but the executions.
(Only when one reads accounts of the pit General Maxwell wanted dug for 100 bodies, before restraining orders came from London, does one realise what might have been)
With this perennially emotive material the first episode of Rebel Heart (RTE1, Monday, and tomorrow night on BBC1) could not have missed its mark. But the other side of the coin at the time - the incomprehension and fury with which much of the populace, many of whom had friends and relations fighting in the British army in Europe, greeted the rebellion - was shown to effect in the opening stages. What were these fellows up to, at all? Some of this sense of general puzzlement at the small determined band was conveyed in Deirdre Bair's 1978 biography of Samuel Beckett. A 10-year-old living with his family in Foxrock at the time, "nothing more than an occasional report of the fighting troubled their placid existence until Bill took them to the top of a hill from which the fires in the city could be seen clearly". Bill and Frank, Beckett's brother, laughed it off, although Bair says that Beckett still spoke of the events with "fear and horror over 60 years later".
Yeats' terrible beauty had found spontaneous birth in the heart of a sensitive child.
Quixotic it might have been, but fear and horror there were in plenty for those caught in the midst of the strategically doomed and scattered operation. This was captured well with boom and blast in this RTE/BBC co-production, written (controversially) by Ronan Bennett. The bravery of Cathal Brugha, wounded, lying behind a table at the South Dublin Union building, still able to rally his men, was well done (although without his singing God Save Ireland, as some recorders of the scene have had it).
We didn't spot the beaky figure of de Valera and his well-managed defence of Boland's Mill, but perhaps there were already enough characters. It must have been hard for even the more committed to follow the action, and those without any great knowledge of the events would have been well and truly confused.
James D'Arcy plays the central character, Eddie Coyne, a nice upper-class boy (perhaps they would have known the Becketts?) whose mother somewhat implausibly brings him a slice of chocolate cake to enjoy while he is defending the GPO. D'Arcy looks right for this sort of part, doe-eyed and green as grass, but surely the convention of using an innocent idealist's experience to tell great historical narratives is rather tired.
Is there some sort of ban on telling such stories through one of the central characters? If the nationalist version were deemed too inflammatory, as this island still lurches to an "accommodation", then perhaps look at it through British eyes - for example those of Sir John Maxwell, the British forces' commander, mentioned in reference above to the planned burial pit.
The RTE drama about the signing of the Treaty, made some years ago, with Brendan Gleeson as Michael Collins, was excellent without resorting to the gauche element.
Romance must come for the gauche one in this familiar scenario; Paloma Baeza's Belfast accent as Ita Feeney was very well delivered from one who is half Mexican and half English. She made me think even more of the similarities between this and Ken Loach's 1994 film of the Spanish civil war, Land and Freedom, in which an idealistic young man enlists in a cause he understands imperfectly, sees the blood and pain, falls in love with a fiery dark-haired female revolutionary, etc., etc.. The Eddie/Ita love affair will come to fruition in the next three episodes of Rebel Heart, although differing opinions of the Treaty could cause a lovers' tiff. I have only seen the first episode of Rebel Heart, but fear the best is now behind us. Connolly, a powerful and fascinating character, is out of the picture. And what a shame to have so little of Padraig Pearse, the man "mindlessly revered and mindlessly reviled", in Professor Lee's phrase: surely more interesting television than a few smooches in period costume.
The bit of snow that gave us a wintry thrill after Christmas pales into insignificance when one considers the town of Resolute, Canada, 800 km from the North Pole. Even on a relatively mild day the temperature is 25 degrees, and the wind chill 15 over 50.
Vets in the Wild (BBC1, Friday) showed the eponymous vets, an attractive couple named Steve Leonard and Trude Mostue, accompanying scientists who have been studying the polar bear and the effects of global warming on its habitat. You'd think there was plenty of snow in those polar regions, lit by the midnight sun, but in fact the planet's rising temperatures are nibbling away at the beautiful bear and its food sources.
Temperatures have risen by four degrees in the area in the past decade, we were told. A region the size of Texas has melted. For the bears, who can easily survive temperatures up to -70 degrees the problem is not so much "warmer" weather but the fact that the seals they eat need packed ice in which to give birth. If the ice melts and the seals can't reproduce, the bears will starve. Two of the Canadian scientists worried about this, Malcolm Ramsay and Stuart Innes, were shown in their pursuit of bears to take statistics about their body weight, condition, and so on, to build up a picture of the creatures' prospects. They go off in helicopters to regions of total whiteness, with just a pale blue roof of sky giving colour.
Trude Mostue was frank about her feelings in the helicopter, to the point of allowing the camera to show her using a sick-bag. What was really impressive was the ease with which Professor Ramsay leaned out of the helicopter and casually popped a bear a hundred feet away with a stun dart. The 'copter then landed and the team took their observations. First the bear got an injection: "It's because of the stress and the dirt," explained Ramsay. Do you think we could get those for O'Connell Street?
This programme was beautiful to watch, informative (polar bears actually have black skin, but have evolved white fur, the hairs of which are hollow, for maximum insulation and water repellence), and fun: but it was laced with tragedy, for on the day after the BBC team had accompanied them, Profs Ramsay and Innes were killed when their helicopter crashed in a white-out.
I'VE already admitted in these pages to being a social misfit who watches breakfast television; even worse for the coolerati, my New Year's Eve was spent in watching telly! But at least that way you don't have to worry about getting home, getting plastered, and having the WILDEST time; also the champagne goes a lot further. Indeed, what more would I have wanted than to be watching the History of the Pop Video (Channel Four, Sunday), very much talking 'bout my generation. John Kelly did a good job hosting RTE1's New Year's Eve party, In One Year and Out the Other. His unpretentious style comes as a relief to the I-ama-television-presenterrrrrrr mode of some of the old stagers we know so well. But JK and his guests couldn't compete with Jools Holland's 8th annual Hootenanny, on BBC2. One of these days John Kelly will become a Jools-like figure on the Irish scene, a fount of musical knowledge, slightly eccentric, and liked by all. In the meantime, Jools has the best acts - although the band for IOYAOTO, Brendan Quinn and the Kicking Mule, had a great sound. But over at the Hootenanny, when Ray Davies of the Kinks played the finale - Lola - and the camera panned a studio crowd including Jane Horrocks, Lenny Henry, and Mo Mowlam dancing with a Scots Guards bands-man in full regalia. I was aching to be there.
Speaking of Lenny Henry, it was a pleasure during the week to see this British comedian doing what he does best. Lenny Henry in Pieces (BBC1, Saturday) was a collection of character sketches, with Henry in costume as Donovan Bogarde, an amorous old aged pensioner, as a tramp, as a gangster, and as the hero of a new version of the film The Matrix. It was generally very funny and Henry was in top form. In the past 10 years he has been in situation type comedies which fell flat as pancakes, and yet he was brilliant as Brixton DJ Delbert Wilkins in his 1987-88 Lenny Henry show, and in other character roles such as the Barry White send-up Cornelius T. Wildebeest.
So a Happy New Year - but why did no television station show 2001: A Space Odyssey on January 1st? At last the monkeys would have come into their own.