Letting go of the past

TV REVIEW: Five Minutes of HeavenBBC2, Sunda
The Lost Art of OratoryBBC2, Sunday
Budget Special RTÉ1,Tuesday

HAPPY EASTER – one more sleep till you can officially crack open the eggs! I’m a bah-humbug old Easter chick myself: I don’t much like chocolate, have a deep-seated antipathy towards anything bonnet-like, and haven’t quite managed to forget a detailed description a German scientist recently shared with me of the market-led mass extermination, by lethal gas, of one-day-old male chicks. Hey, cheery stuff; bet you’re glad you picked up the newspaper today.

I did see a fantastic film on the box this week though, a drama which engaged with some rather Easter-ish themes; Easter in the redemptive/Christian rather than the rotund/Cadbury sense, that is.

Based on real-life events in Lurgan in 1975, when 17-year-old UVF member Alistair Little murdered 19-year-old Catholic Jim Griffin (a murder which was witnessed by Jim's 11-year-old brother, Joe, and for which Little eventually served a 12-year sentence), writer Guy Hibbert and director Oliver Hirschbiegel's superb film, Five Minutes of Heaven, dealt with the notions of reconciliation and forgiveness and the complexities of letting go of the past.

Hibbert's previous television work includes the brilliant and devastating Omagh,and while Five Minutes of Heavenis a less graphically disturbing piece of work, it too resonates with authenticity and a deep compassion for its subjects.

After extensive interviews with Joe Griffin and Alistair Little (who now works in counselling and mediation both in Ireland and abroad), Hibbert went on to imagine a fictional meeting between the two men, and the resultant film – funny, tense and poignant – premiered at Utah’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won a clutch of awards.

The opening scenes of the film alternate between flashbacks to the shooting, and the two men, 30 years or so later, travelling to a gothic mansion, set in pastoral Northern Irish fields, to take part in a televised reconciliation.

I remember, a few years ago, watching Facing the Truth, the series of televised reconciliatory meetings from the North facilitated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and being nervily agog and somewhat uneasy at witnessing, from the neutral comfort of my armchair, the coming together of killers and the families of their victims. The meeting between loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone and the family of Dermot Hackett was an especially vivid confrontation. Obviously, healing (I never quite trust that word) is a damn fine aspiration, but there is something about dragging an essentially private process into the public arena that makes for perturbing viewing.

In Hibbert and Hirschbiegel’s film, the proposed televised meeting between the two protagonists falls apart and the men are left to their own violent, messy, but ultimately successful way of finding a mutual peace. As Alistair Little, Liam Neeson was delicately chilling, a remnant of a man, almost destroyed by the ghosts of his past, who is finally freed from self-persecution by Joe Griffin, a superb James Nesbitt, who abandoned the self-effacing comedy and strained machismo for which he is better known to produce a revelatory performance as the edgily articulate, emotionally traumatised Joe.

The script, though, was so good I wanted to kiss my television (which, unfortunately, can’t stand such public displays of affection). Hibbert is the man, in my humble opinion. In one example of wry, exhausted irony, Griffin is leaning over a parapet of the blithely indifferent gothic pile, sucking on a cigarette, trying to psyche himself up to confront Little and talking to the young eastern European woman who works as a runner for the television company. “Vladivostok and Belfast?” he asks her incredulously. “Does bad luck run in your family?”

MEANWHILE, ALAN YENTOB, a man well-endowed in the lexicography department, presented an absorbing look at the power of the spoken word in The Lost Art of Oratory, a compelling investigation into how language can be both persuasive and transformative. From Cicero to Churchill, JFK to Martin Luther King, the oratorically gifted have lifted the human spirit and imbued listeners with a sense of the possible. Yentob, who presented the programme as he walked among the throngs descending on Washington's Capitol Hill in January to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, also focused on some notable exceptions to the leader-as-wordsmith rule.

“After eight years of a president who could barely manage the English language, we now have Obama,” said former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorenson, with visible relief. This succinct appraisal of Dubya’s deficiency was quickly followed by footage of one of the more astonishingly gobsmacking Bushisms picked from a wide and varied selection: “Our enemies never stop thinking of ways to hurt us, and neither do we.” Obama was, of course, central to Yentob’s thesis that the ancient rules of rhetoric are still relevant and are undergoing a revival. A man whom few might have thought had a hope of being elected president of the United States has, largely through the power of language and his ability to communicate, revived a nation and inspired people across the globe with a sense of hope and personal responsibility.

In the end, after the sun had risen on a sea of expectant faces, Yentob's among them, Obama didn't blow the crowd's winter woollies off with magnificent, soaring rhetoric, choosing instead to temper his phrase-making with humility and realism, a choice that moved Yentob to ponder the adage that one should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The captatio benevolentia, the praeteritio, the "delivery, delivery, delivery" beloved of those old marbled Greeks and Romans, is back though. Obama, post-racial, post-media and operating in web time, as the lippy Bob Geldof observed, has restored oratory as a tool of 21st-century politics.

FROM ORATORY IN the Americas to the fine Irish art of obfuscation. Despite his brisk, rattling delivery throughout the length of his Budget speech, I found it very difficult to get Brian Lenihan’s message into my saturated noggin (numbers are not my strong point) as I watched him tear down the curtains and rip up the house on Tuesday. There was a kind of unpalatable poetry lurking inside the speech though, occasionally glimpsed through the swirling mists of references to the global financial crisis and the blurring lash of the cat-o-nine-taxes.

So, the following is an impressionistic montage, in verse, of the finer points of Mr Lenihan's speechifying. I was going to call my poem Chamber of Horrors, a phrase that has been skipping around proceedings all week, but that expression is a little too gothic for such a simple ditty. I also played around with one of Lenihan's more esoteric utterances from the day, one of the few lines that permeated my consciousness: "Everyone wants fairness, but what does fairness mean?" Unfortunately, however, much as the query intrigued me, I couldn't make it scan. So I'm calling my verse Living on Easy Street, which is, according to the glossy-haired Lenihan, where we've all been residing for the last decade or so of the current administration. Here we are then, Lenihan reduced:

O, the benefit of hindsight,

O, the hard soft landing,

O, the global upturn, downturn,

O, the new tax-banding,

O, quangos piled on one another,

O, my sainted, skinted mother.

We’ll be chewing on each other

When Santa comes to town.

Let’s hope the sun shines for Easter – this damp old pile could do with a bit of divine intervention.