SEEING Kevin Myers in a documentary titled The History Of Croke Park was strange - like seeing Micheal O Muircheartaigh as a pundit on the story of the Oxbridge boat race or Marty Morrissey consulted about Ascot's horseracing lore. Like the new stand at the GAA's old ground, it didn't quite fit in with its surroundings. It wasn't, after all quite cricket. Then again, Croke Park has a history of featuring less than convincing Gaels".
Recall Tina Turner, Neil Diamond and Muhammad Ali. This week, Garth Brooks has been limbering up on the pitch and on Sunday, July 27th, the Pittsburg Steelers and the Chicago Bears will attempt to reenact a family version of Meath v Mayo 1996. So, the history of Croke Park is not just a history of Gaels - but it is (granted, with some valid political reasons in the past and perhaps, some valid commercial reasons in the present) a history which has always been vehemently antisoccer.
Well, if the GAA wishes to behave in that manner, it is perfectly entitled to do so. Indeed, in fairness, the association's antisoccer stance is not (with most of its members anyway) its most defining trait. But, in a week in which the GAA's latest, eh, spat, in Dublin, has split the organisation in the capital, it seemed disingenuous and excessively tame not to include any mention of Croke Park's abiding animosity towards soccer. The topic does, after all interest most Irish sports enthusiasts.
It was a pity then that a documentary, which was rich in archive footage and included engaging anecdotes from a variety of sources, should have opted for a safe PRish omission where such a contentious issue was concerned. Apart from the concerns, which were voiced by Tony Gregory, of local people living in the shadow of the colossal new Cusack Stand, this was pretty much a love in for the association.
"They got the planning permission for a structure of that scale simply because of who they are," said Gregory. The attitude of the Croke Park administrators towards the local people has been beyond contempt. Really, they have refused to recognise the existence of the locals." Well now, surely the Croke Park administrators have a case to make too. But the question of grossly disrupting the lives of local people was never put to them - at least not on camera.
This was a pity. It's not that a history of Croke Park needed to be a highly controversial and confrontational slice of social affairs TV. But, it needed to be more than a promo video, albeit a very well made promo video, for the largest and most influential sports outfit in the country. Anyway, that said, it did score in terms of evoking the spirits of decades past.
Railways, bishops, culchies, cycling, Kerrymen and Dubs, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork hurlers and, of course, the Artane Boys Band . . . it all coalesced into an impression of de Valeran nationalism at play. Even at play, though, there was an austerity about so much of it. And yet, at the same time, for all the ascetic baggage which the games were expected to carry, they were often marvellously spirited.
Recalling that many Irish adults visited Dublin for the first time to see their county teams in Croke Park this documentary must have seemed astonishing to the more affluent cubs of the Celtic Tiger. In the sense then, of recording the accelerating rate of change in Ireland, it will survive as an historically useful documentary.
But, for more discerning media analysts, much of its interest lies in its relationship to GAA officialdom. Ever distrustful of the media and likely to go apoplectic over the slightest criticism, the association is a difficult customer for reporters and commentators who refuse to play by its rules. Still, it must be admitted that the season ending today has not been a vintage one for English soccer (even with Cantona strolling, Manchester United were too strong) so it's set up nicely for the GAA to impress this summer.
But the omens are knot good. Last year's All Ireland Football Final was a brawl; Dublin and Offaly U-21s was, by all accounts, barbaric and now we have the spitting spat. The sense of siege (which makes some people liken the GAA to a Catholic Orange Order") is thoroughly understandable in the North - just think of this week's murder. But in the Republic, the dinosaurs in charge would do well to wake up. There are powerful TV programmes (documentaries and discussions) to be made on the GAA yet. There's much to praise - but there's been too much backslapping to date and this week was no different.
TOO much living on reputation for Alan Bleasdale, I'm afraid. Back in the 1980s, his Boy's From The Blackstuff and The Monocled Mutineer made splendid, defining TV drama. But his latest, Melissa, though puffed by Channel 4 as a major TV event" is, at once too trite and too demanding. It's too demanding because the commitment required of viewers on bright evenings almost four hours this week and about two and a half next is excessive.
And it's too trite on a number of fronts, not least Jennifer Ehle's, whose industrial strength Wonderbra made her, and her front, such a success in Pride And Prejudice. This time, Ms Ehle has chosen to act every scene by varying theatrical laughs. Even when conveying sadness, she seems to be smirking, suggesting a doomed attempt to portray an overarching wisdom, as though she can monitor even her own extreme emotions as she experiences them.
Frankly, it's all too melodramatic. Guy (Tim Dutton) is a British hotshot hack, who has been recently widowed in South Africa. On a line, bound for Blighty, he has a whirlwind romance with smirking Melissa (Ms Ehle). They got married in a hurry leaving behind a growing pile of corpses in South Africa. So, it's a kind of whodunnit that's OK but why did they bother to clear the schedules for such routine hokum?
Frankly, it doesn't make much sense. It is true that waiting too long (as in the original Murder One) to find out just who did dunnit, is frustrating for viewers. But the alternative - asking people to put large chunks of their lives on hold to speed up the process needs the material to be truly gripping. And Melissa the character and the drama long way short. It's just too difficult to sympathise with these characters.
Consider that when Guy wins an award for journalism, we see footage of him beating the daylights out of a few white extremists. So, he's a cross between Robert Fisk and Clint Eastwood? Please! Or, that he first meets the "mysterious" (you're meant to think that she might be a killer) Melissa, when her chiffon scarf, whipped off by a sea breeze, wraps around his head. Perhaps Bleasdale is taking the mick. Good luck to him if he is, he's having more fun than his viewers.
It may, indeed, be parody. During the opening credits, a camera pans across a selection of common scene and class setting, whodunnit images: deposit box key, shining manual typewriter, a smoking champagne bottle. Then it settles on the front page of a Cape Town newspaper. Carnage" screams a banner headline, before the camera glides up to the day's capsule weather report - outlook - sunny it says. Hardly an ideal time for TV drama then.
THE difference between real war journalism and Guy's war journalism could be seen on Everyman: Kim's Story - The Road From Vietnam. In 1972, Kim Phuc was the little girl photographed running naked down a Vietnamese road, by Nick Ut. Her clothes had been burned off her body and her back was so badly burned that she was not expected to live. She came to symbolise all the victims of napalm, though, in truth, many others were burned much more severely. In the footage which includes Kim, there is a baby in his mother's arms. The child is so badly burned his flesh is hanging off like shreds of torn clothing. Fortunately for him, he died. Compared to Hollywood's extremely hollow reparation and spurious repentance for American warmongering in Vietnam, this Everyman documentary was the real thing. Even so, it rankled.
Twenty five years on from the photograph which, even though claims that it "stopped the war" were exaggerated, certainly helped to do so, Kim Phuc lives in a two room flat in Toronto, with her husband and two and a half year old son. Since she was sprayed by flaming napalm (a mixture like petrol around jelly and which can burn to the bone), she has defected, undergone 17 operations - some in Vietnam; more abroad - trained as a nurse in Cuba and now has travelled to the US to promote peace.
Until recently, she and her husband lived on welfare. That's what rankled. It's not as if Canada owes her anything. But the US, after almost burning her alive - albeit in a botched bombing mission - might have helped out a bit more. Anyway, while in the States, Kim met some of the surgeons who first operated on her. These were moving scenes but insignificant compared to the shock of seeing her back all these years later. It looked like the skin of the back of a very old person's hand: furrowed, lined, wrinkled every which way.
The climax of the documentary was Kim's meeting with John Flummer, the former US military captain who ordered the attack on her village. Plummer is now a Methodist minister. Wearing a huge, Confederate style hat, he said that guilt had driven him to alcoholism and broken marriages. Kim Phuc forgave him and the pair sat together and embraced. Good for him - but throughout, it seemed that Kim, the immigrant, was extremely conscious of being on enemy ground. She just seemed more grateful than (most of) the Americans seemed repentant. Fine TV, all the same.
FINALLY, A Good Age, RTE's latest Thursday evening series. The opening episode, titled Ageism, made a number of solid, sociological points - too easily dismissed as whingeingly PC - about attitudes to older people. Among the more interesting - to me anyway - was a statistic quoted by a St James's doctor, which said that - only about 5 per cent of old people end up in long term care in institutions.
The downside to the series, though, is Ian McElhinney's narration. In itself, there's nothing wrong with Mr McElhinney's voice or delivery. But, given the script by Sheila Barrett and Jimmy Duggan and the context (remember the subject is old people), it sounds precisely as it shouldn't - patronising. Like a 1950s propaganda film aimed at schools, the excessively instructional voice is suspicious. Like nurses talking to old people at the top of their voices and saying "we" when they mean "you", it's not really acceptable. It doesn't, I'm afraid, quite fit with the spirit of the series.