TV Review: The least palatable thing about The Real Father Ted: A Portrait of Dermot Morgan came before it started. The continuity announcer described it as the portrait of a "comedy genius", which unnecessarily prejudiced what followed. Shay Healy's programme was not so grand in its claims.
When he had admitted in advance that this was a film made about a good friend, insulin levels rose in preparation for the saccharine - but familiarity turned out to be its greatest asset. The film was affectionate but honest, loving yet measured. It looked back with nostalgia, but said things in the way only a friend can.
"He was an irritating bastard," said the Sunday Tribune's Paddy Murray. "He was self-centred. He was arrogant. He was charming. He was lovely. He was an honest, decent friend."
Morgan's cousin described how the comedian dug through an RTÉ bin to rescue tapes of his 1985 comedy series, Getting Morganised, but there was no indulgence in Montrose-bashing. He was, the film said, a man who lacked focus and self-judgment, who didn't like working with other people's material and who hated the pomposity of the establishment. RTÉ was the pompous establishment. There was no conspiracy, no political interference to sink Scrap Saturday, only a clash of personalities after which there could be only one loser. And at a time when RTÉ was the only employer, there was nowhere to turn but his own paranoia when he fell out with it.
Bertie Ahern turned up, as he tends to do. He was not as sharp a critic as P.J. Mara, who likened Scrap Saturday to the cartoons of Gerald Scarfe. The Taoiseach, however, took his opportunity to get one thing off his chest.
"I don't actually think it could be replicated. Most of the people who do political comedians, if I can say so, are disastrous. In actual fact, I don't find them one bit funny," he said. A little muddled in his delivery, perhaps, but it is still the clearest he has been on anything in a long time.
With Early Doors, Craig Cash finally stops being the name that follows Caroline Aherne's in the credits. With Aherne he wrote both the under-appreciated Malcolm and Mrs Merton and the gratefully appreciated The Royle Family. One bust-up later, and Aherne is relegated to the acknowledgements during the end credits, and new co-writer Phil Mealey now nestles in behind Cash's reputation.
The result, though, is another comedy gem, confirming Cash as one of the decade's greater writers. The show is set in a pub, The Grapes. Jon Henshaw plays landlord Ken, who we first meet as he is topping up the Courvoisier bottle with cheap stuff and belting out The Greatest Love of All. He opens the doors and the regulars dribble in. The likely lads (Cash and Mealey), a nerdish couple, local pole-dancers (Twin Cheeks), and two on-duty policemen interrupting their rounds with a surreptitious pint and a couple of chasers.
"What time do you knock off?" Ken asked them. "Just a couple more hours. Time for this and a quick one in The Oak."
Meanwhile, Ken's partner and his mam gossip over a plate of Wagon Wheels. It is Cheers cross-bred with The Royle Family. It is familiar as the deliberately paced observational comedy set in the northern working-class that Cash has been involved in capturing so perfectly before. Nothing much happens, but it does so with languid beauty.
The casting is also exquisite. Each actor comes with a face full of character. You can guess their story before they open their mouths. Old Tommy, the first through the doors, looks like he's nipped in for a pint on the way to his own funeral.
When Chechen hijackers announced themselves during a production of Nord Ost in a Moscow theatre last October, one woman in the audience watched with droll detachment.
"What a clever theatrical concept," she thought as a masked gunman fired off a couple of rounds. "Very trendy."
The subsequent siege lasted for 57 hours, ending in the gassing of the auditorium and the deaths of every hijacker and 129 hostages. Much of the event was recorded by a Chechen video camera. The Chechen rebels are prodigious film-makers. You can spend hours on the web watching unedited footage posted from a frontline long since abandoned by satellite trucks and well-groomed journalists.
This week, the Chechen war bobbed into the headlines briefly, just as it did, to the world's fascination, during the siege. Then, the cameras could only focus on the doors to the theatre. The footage shown in Terror In Moscow filled in the blanks in a unique way. The shock, the rancid conditions, the growing fatalism of the hostages. One man described how the experience answered his question of why people went so meekly to their deaths during the Holocaust and the Stalin purges. When the Chechens threatened to execute hostages, he says he realised what would happen: "A gunman would stand up on stage. He would point 'you, you and you'. Those people would stand up and go and the others would look away and do nothing."
The camera gave those with the guns personality. The women, with a bomb strapped to each of their belts, masks on their faces, some of them turning away so that they wouldn't be caught weeping. One had been an actor. Another a teacher. The hijacker whose job it was to detonate the main bomb admitted to a hostage that she had quite enjoyed the show.
The unmasked men pulled faces for the lens. The cameraman revelled in his job. He crept up on the group's leader, Movsar Barayev. "Look this way, handsome," he said. Barayev grinned with the coyness of a guest caught at a wedding reception.
When the Russian army raided the building, the first thing its camera caught was Barayev's fresh corpse, bent back, eyes wide with surprise. The camera panned across the other bodies. The female rebels shot where they had fallen asleep under the gas, the men slumped on the floor, blood flowing from the wounds. You found yourself looking at their faces, to see who you recognised.
Magnetic Flip lured the viewer with the possibility of apocalypse now-ish happenings. The Earth's magnetic field is weakening. At the current rate of decay, it could be gone within 1,000 years. "Without it, we'd be in trouble," we were told.
What kind of trouble? Ask Mars. Four and a half billion years ago it had a magnetic field, and with it an atmosphere and possibly oceans in which primitive life flourished. Then the magnetic field dissipated and the atmosphere was worn away by all that the universe could throw at it. The universe comes heavily armed: solar flares, exploding stars, collapsing black holes. The Earth's magnetic field, we were told, is "Earth's forgotten force". Now, puny earthlings, it may be tapping us on the shoulder on its way out the door.
As it turned out, though, it's not going anywhere. It is only shifting position. For half an hour we were treated to a dramatic reconstruction of "The End", accompanied by what may be the only pop song ever written about the Earth's magnetic core. Then Magnetic Flip came clean. For a few years now, scientists have known that for most of its life the magnetic field has flipped every 200,000 years or so. Magnetic North has become Magnetic South, and vice-versa. The last flip occurred 780,000 years ago, making another one long overdue. Before it can do that, though, the field must weaken and create regions of 'reversed flux'. This very moment, there are parts of the south Pacific in which a compass suddenly shows the confusion of a drunken scout leader.
"It is something to be concerned about, but it won't be catastrophic," a scientist assured us. It will, though, be quite wonderful. For a few thousand years, the Earth will be open to the cosmic elements. Humanity will face greater cancer risks, yet with several magnetic poles our near descendants will spend their nights under a thick blanket of the Aurora Borealis. They will hardly be able to sleep for the beauty above them.
"It will have enormous consequences for every human on the planet," Magnetic Flip told us. Nobody mentioned it, but it should make especially bad news for owners of homing pigeons.
