Lion king of Dalkey

TV REVIEW: Arts Lives: Hugh Leonard – Odd Man InRTÉ1, Tuesday In Treatment3e, Monday to Friday Idir MnáTG4, Thursday

‘LIFE IS A bad playwright – it’s not neat, it’s not tidy.” So said dramatist Hugh Leonard, the subject of Charlie McCarthy’s moving and considered portrait, Hugh Leonard – Odd Man In.

A superb addition to the consistently excellent Arts Livesstrand, the film was made in the year leading up to Leonard's recent death and featured extensive interviews with the writer himself. Leonard, we were told, was a writer whose populist talents resulted in him slipping under the radar of academics and cultural historians, whose maps are sometimes drawn with rarefied ink. Exploring Leonard's reputation, some colleagues in the theatre argued that the work, of which there is a considerable amount, could be viewed in a more political light, while critic Fintan O'Toole described the playwright as "the great laureate of new money" ("the best of the bunch – of two-week-old bananas" was how Leonard, somewhat less warmly, once described O'Toole).

Mottled, occasionally hunched, and with the watery film of ill-health washing over him, Leonard, despite his infirmity, was still an acerbic and deft speaker, well able to answer those critics who routinely claimed that his work was lightweight. Indeed, to twist a Grouchoism, one was left in no doubt that here was a man who didn’t want to be in any pantheon that would have him as a member.

McCarthy’s film was studded with archive from the 1960s. Leonard was seen working in London and Manchester, writing and adapting plays for television, a confident-looking man in polo-neck and sports coat, eyes glinting under hip, heavy-framed glasses. His return to Dalkey, where his adoptive parents had brought him as a week-old infant, and where he developed his caustic social observation, was viewed almost as if from a home-movie reel. His modernist home, Lazy Acre, looking quite Californian under the Irish sun, was where he and Paule, his beloved wife of 45 years and his great sparring partner, lived with their daughter, Danielle, and where the prolific Leonard worked, from one in the afternoon to six in the evening, and then again from 11.30 at night to 3.30 in the morning.

"I am often asked to give advice to young writers," Leonard said, "but writing is an incurable illness. They are sick; advice is unimportant." There was something pervasively sad about the film and, to paraphrase Leonard (badly), I think it was simply that the inexorable march of time, the ticking of the clock, could be heard too clearly, as in the poignant footage of a young Donal McCann performing in Daor some of the passages that Leonard wrote after the death of Paule, describing how the events of five minutes can unleash years of pain.

Forgive my sentimentality, a weakness in which Leonard didn’t indulge. “The sense of mortality is there, but I don’t give a fig about it,” he growled.

Ah well, maybe, as in the memorable line from Da, he's on Lambay Island living on pollock and horny cobblers.

HEY BABY, talking therapy has so totally come to 3e! For the telly anoraks in the audience, 3e used to be Channel 6, an entirely unmemorable outfit that largely consisted of a logo (a lonesome lime-green number six) and endless Sex and the Cityreruns. 3e is the sister channel of TV3, and, if you can find it in the margins of the hieroglyphics that dance around the modern TV screen, you'll discover that it has brought a rather addictive little nugget to the viewing table.

In Treatment is a smart, delicately acted and joyfully well-scripted series from HBO, which revolves around encounters between psychoanalytical psychotherapist Paul Weston (a measured Gabriel Byrne pitching personal anxiety against professional conduct) and a series of screwed-up clients who inhabit the accommodating couch in his upstate east-coast practice.

Weston, himself steering an unbroken course towards a major midlife crisis, has some interesting cases to unravel. There is Monday’s patient, luscious Laura, who, with a nasty case of erotic transference, is more than willing to relieve Weston of the frustrations within his stale marriage. Tuesday’s patient is Alex, a US fighter pilot with atonement issues, Wednesday’s is Sophie, a suicidal young Olympic hopeful, while Thursday is reserved for the ass-whipping Amy, with the skinny knees, the designer suits, the unwanted pregnancy and the husband, Jake, who was once her bit of rough but has now gone squashy.

On Fridays, at the end of four sessions with his clients, Weston goes to his confidante and one-time supervisor, Gina (the wonderful Dianne Wiest), where he gets to vent his spleen and let his dark side breathe a little under her satisfyingly critical gaze.

The script sings. In episode one, Laura, though infatuated with her therapist, tells how she almost had sex in a toilet cubicle with some dude in corduroy pants, despite the fact that corduroy pants are apparently a badge of the Republicanism she despises. In a most uncommon way, and with a degree of theatricality, the characters, including Weston, are allowed long, unbroken, dramatic monologues and duologues, refusing to mimic the dull conventionality of many studio dramas.

I really liked this little analytical fillet – it is well worth staying awake for, or, better still, self-medicate on Sunday with the omnibus edition.

‘IF SHE HAD offended him, his way of letting her know that he was displeased was to leave a hunting knife lying across her pillow, which she would find when she went up to bed. Words were unnecessary.” Idir Mná is a six-part series investigating high-profile cases in which women have been convicted of serious crime in this country. Within our prison population there are 155 women, five of them serving sentences for manslaughter, and the second programme of the series featured the case of one of them, Dolores O’Neill, who was convicted of the manslaughter of her husband, Declan, in 2004. A civil servant and mother of two, living in a well-appointed Dublin suburb, O’Neill repeatedly hammered and stabbed her husband while he lay in their bed. Dr John Harbison, the State pathologist at the time, described the result of her actions as overkill.

Idir Mnáis a sober, quietly made series which attempts to look at the underlying social causes that drive women towards violence. There was little new to add to a familiar litany from the contributors, mostly lawyers, doctors and health professionals: domestic abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence, obsessive possessiveness and issues of control pitted against inadequate State resources and the grim choices that exist for women who have to leave their homes.

It’s not startlingly new or anything, but one contributor said that the most-asked question of women who have suffered at the hands of husbands and partners is “why did you put up with it?”, a question that reveals an immense ignorance and further victimises the sufferers. It seems that the questions we rarely ask are, “why did he do it?” and “how can we make him change?”

Those are the questions we as a society need to be asking, the programme implied, before “another ordinary day becomes a day of killing and hurt”.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Naked camera Taking off their clothes for the men in the white lab coats

Speaking of the psychoanalytical process (were we?), Horizon this week asked some probing questions of our tremulous selves in What’s the Problem with Nudity?, one of those deeply silly, quasi-scientific bouts of sexed-up science which, with alarming regularity these days, drop like doughy bellies on to the schedules.

This particular effort featured eight volunteers, men and women of varying shapes and sizes, who offered to take their clothes off, on the telly, to assist the programme-makers (who all remained fully clad) in a 48-hour experiment to ascertain a human being’s level of discomfort when it takes its clothes off on the telly.

I assume some of these people are certifiable, or deeply lonely, or awash with a rampant narcissism, or, hell, maybe it’s just that having your rectum painted bright yellow (no, I’m not making that up) by a complete stranger, while a TV camera is attempting to lodge itself in one’s bottom, is simply another way of having a jolly good day out.

Apologies if you are wondering what the point of all this was, but I haven’t actually managed to retain the science bit. However, it did involve a lot of discussion about fur and a dressed man, in a laboratory, explaining how understanding the evolution of head lice can help us ascertain when we, as a species, lost our hairy pelt.

Then he showed us some magnified images of crab lice, whose habitat is human pubic hair, and who seem to hop around from host to host during intimate contact.

These truculent little blighters also live, happily, on your average gorilla; the man in the white coat left us to work out how or when the little geezers hopped onto the homo sapiens.

Probably simpler to get on with the bottom painting.