TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: There are rare weeks when you watch something that knocks the wind out of you, so that it requires real effort to bother paying attention to anything else. Interface was that sort of viewing. Not remarkable film-making by any means, but the sort of thing that took your optimism and rammed a pipe bomb up it.
On Monday night, it took us through several months on the Ardoyne, and Tuesday gave us nine months in Glenbryn. Two communities whose generosity of territory is expressed only in the size of the bricks they can hurl over the newly built "peace wall". If you had taken the names off the screen, scraped the paint off the paving stones and removed the football shirts from their backs, you would not have known to which side whom belonged. These are two communities at war, yet the depressing irony is that either would be hard pressed to find neighbours with more in common than those on the other side of the military cordon designed to keep them apart.
On both sides were women battling the mental exhaustion that comes from living in a riot zone, from not being able to put your lights on at night for fear of becoming a visible target. Mothers who choose their child's bedrooms based on the likelihood of them waking up and finding a petrol bomb on their pillow. To each community, the police were in either passive or direct collusion with the other side. Both sides were on the defence, both sure that blame lay squarely with their neighbours.
The foot soldiers were children. Teenagers and young kids, climbing the roofs in search of a better line of fire, impudently swatting at Land Rovers. On the Ardoyne side, 21-year-old Arlene had taken her young boy to Co Donegal for a few days, where he spent his time on the beach with a pocket full of pebbles, perfecting his stone-throwing.
They didn't show the Interface programmes on the rest of British television. It was a regional production for a regional problem. On Monday, the rest of the UK got a bubbly documentary on Dolly Parton. On Tuesday, they got a jiving look back at the Jackson Five. Interface should be shown, of course, but it would only be seen as an excuse for people to turn over to something else.
As a species, however, we do have our moments. There can be few greater markers of our intelligence than that we can play the piano. To those of us whose repertoire consists solely of the tune from Close Encounters it looks physically impossible. Watching John O'Conor or Hugh Tinney in The Piano: King of the Instruments you could only marvel at how it doesn't result in a pile-up of knuckles. Count the fingers on that man's hand. Ten? Count them again.
The piano tends to bring out the obsessive in a person, but Seán Ó Mórdha's elegy to the instrument took it apart without ever being clinical. This harp with attached keyboard is, as Tinney pointed out, "a one-man orchestra". The average piano has 10,000 parts. It is only 300 years into a long residence in livingrooms, on stages, in bars. "Unless there is some breakthrough," said professor of piano Mabel Swainson, "I think our piano, more or less as it is today, will still be here for a long time to come." It has always had a status unlike any other instrument. A piece of grand furniture in the livingroom, rather than something to be placed in a box once the chord fades. It was, they used to say, the third most important investment a family could make after the house and the car. When the piano tuner called, in his three-piece suit, Trilby and carrying the old Gladstone bag, he did not enter by the tradesman's door, but through the front of the house.
You can't cover everything in an hour, so Ó Mórdha stuck closely with its role in classical music, touching on jazz and popular song, but pulling back before it was in danger of wandering into a whole other programme. Otherwise it was a warm, engaging 60 minutes of which only one had passed when you found yourself yearning to squeeze a baby-grand in the corner of your suburban semi-D. And not a single person played Chopsticks.
The Shield's first series finished this week with Det Vic Mackey sobbing over the ruins of his marriage. Det Mackey, it should be noted, is totally bald and possesses a torso stolen from a bull buffalo.
When he cries he resembles a wrinkled bullet.
He is played by Michael Chiklis with demonic ferocity. He is forever holding his gun to people's heads, pounding suspects, glaring at them as if it's they who have stolen his eyelids. Ask him the time and he'll stab you in the eye with the big hand of his watch. In this episode, a fleeing suspect jumped over a wall to escape. Mackey ran through it.
His blubbing was a bad end to an otherwise good day for him. Not only did he catch a cop-killing gang, he also managed to bring down possibly the only cop more corrupt than him: his own police chief. Not wanting to indulge in favouritism, he held a gun to the chief's head, pounded him a little, glared hard for while and still managed to cuff him in time for an old-fashioned press conference.
The chief's bad deeds had involved killing the only witness to a hit-and-run he'd carried out while on a sojourn with his mistress. She had helped him in a crooked land scam involving the withdrawal of police resources in order to affect the price of property. The second series, presumably, will return whenever a tribunal figures that one out.
I'll avoid the obvious link from Mackey to the patchwork of cod psychology that was Channel 4's Inside The Mind of Roy Keane, and turn instead for Winston Churchill.
The BBC this week gave us another chance to catch The Gathering Storm, its co-produced dramatisation (with HBO) of Churchill's battle to convince his government that they should shake off the lethargy of appeasement with Hitler.
It was also timed to take full advantage of the man's recent appointment as Greatest Briton. It at least brought a multi-dimensionality to the man rarely realised. It was worth appreciating once again Albert Finney's masterful performance. He grabbed Hugh Whitemore's script and made his Churchill vulgar, egotistical, self-absorbed, the man of whom Lloyd George said: "He would make a drum of his own mother's skin in order to sing his own praises." Yet he was equally vulnerable, oftentimes pathetic. A man who welled up at the sight of England's unconquered pastures, who fought his "black dog" depression and fought against his own irrelevance, and who saw in the rise of Hitler a foe through whom he could fulfil his destiny. Finney inhabited the character as if he himself was fulfilling a personal destiny.
Footballers' Wives returned for a second series this week, with ridiculous plotlines piling up like a Christmas fixture list. If you believed everything you read, then the first series of this was a wonder of post-irony, a commentary on trash through the medium of trash television and a cunning feminist satire. You may have thought that it was nothing but cheap melodrama, but that's only because you don't know what you're talking about. Leave this sort of thing to the experts.
The second series opened with Chardonnay (last season: breasts caught fire) and Kyle adopting his mother's new-born baby (conceived on a snooker table).
They don't realise that child's godfather, team-mate Jason, is the child's real father. Jason doesn't realise it either because he's been too distracted by the rape trial involving his wife, Tanya (had an affair with the club chairman after putting him in a coma) and the club chairman, Frank (was seduced by a crazy nurse during his coma). Meanwhile, Ian (slept with several girls) and Donna (having an affair with Italian player Salvatore) are awaiting news of their kidnapped baby (which is probably quite happy wherever it is).
By the time the credits rolled, there was a body in Kyle's pool and when the plot gets around to it he'll discover that his baby (not his baby, remember) istrans-gender. And his mother will have had a lesbian fling with the child's godmother.
The real plot twist is that even when it's this daft, it lacks sparkle. At times it has the pace of a rain-hit nil-nil. It throws a bit of light on all those theses, however. When you present something this empty, it makes sense that people will see in it things that just aren't there.