Real Life (ITV, Monday)
@last tv (Network 2, Monday)
Images Of Ourselves (TG4, Sunday)
Citizens (RTE 1, Wednesday)
As he was bashing his mother to death with a champagne bottle, 18-yearold Simon Geldart allegedly shouted "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love ya". After 16 frenzied blows, his mother's head was "caved in to a pulp and shaped like a rugby ball" said Simon's father, Paul. Last year's murder of Kathleen Geldart in Darlington, England was the subject of Real Life: My Son Murdered his Mother, the latest, lurid true crime documentary on British TV. In a week when the Yorkshire Ripper and the Moors Murders also had prime time slots, we were witnessing a true crime wave across the schedules.
The genre has long been popular in the US, where even news bulletins regularly carry courtroom footage and interviews with lawyers and criminals. But in Britain, as here, there is no such footage. So, Real Life contented itself with interviewing Paul and people who know him. Mercifully, we were spared reconstructions. Even so, this was sordid and disturbing television. True, its makers could argue that it had a public interest justification (shedding light on a true crime) but right from its rousing, introductory music, it was clear that we weren't more than a few quavers away from slasher movie shocks.
It wasn't just the music either. The language too was revealing. Paul, a former Tory councillor and magistrate, spoke of his son facing a charge of "Murder One". Given the American roots of this genre of documentary and the fact that Murder One was the title of one of US television's most hyped crime dramas in the 1990s (which, in truth, was no more than an absurdly pompous whodunnit in designer clothes), Paul's guff was telling. So too were some of the comments of people who know him. Paul Geldart, it appears, is obsessed with publicity. "He was known in the local media as a `rent-a-quote'," said an elderly reporter.
Paul and Kathleen had divorced five years before Simon committed matricide. All contributors agreed that Paul had become so besotted by local politics and publicity that he had little time for his wife and son. A hardline Thatcherite, Paul called for birching and hanging to fight crime, adding that he believed criminals should be "humiliated". Saturday afternoon birchings in the town centre were Paul's idea of justice. He admitted that he had been a disciplinarian with his son, who, struggling academically, dropped out of college without telling either of his parents.
Gradually, a portrait emerged. Ironically, the portrait which emerged was much more revealing of Paul than of Simon. The fundamental question underlying this programme had to be: why did the son kill his mother? We never got beyond hearing that he was afraid Kathleen might not lend him her car. Well now, if that were a common cause for teenage sons bludgeoning their mothers to death, we'd have matricidal massacres every weekend. Entire estates would be populated by widowers. There was more to this murder than was explained. By all accounts, Kathleen and Simon got on well and frequently went to the pictures together. Hmmm, familiarity breeding contempt, perhaps?
Anyway, Paul's mania for the media resulted in his hiring Max Clifford to handle publicity. Clifford did a deal with the Daily Mail, which printed the story from, naturally, Paul's perspective. It was clear that Real Life was rather tut-tutting the Mail deal but the moral distinction between having a horrendous family tragedy printed in a tabloid and told on ITV is not the starkest. There is, of course, the question of how a story is told, a fact which does dent the typical tabloid defence that other media are merely following their leads, while hypocritically denouncing "lurid" journalism.
Still, in not accepting Paul Geldart wholly at his own appraisal, Real Life did, in fairness, adhere to proper journalistic standards. But in neglecting the rightful focus (why did the son do it?) in favour of wondering if the pro-hanging Paul still felt the same when his son was in the dock (he said he did), a secondary issue, albeit legitimate, was disproportionately foregrounded. It may be that Paul Geldart was, at least, partly responsible for his son's psychological problems. Certainly, he did seem to be a coldly detached man, voraciously seeking a personal identity through politics and publicity.
With non-fiction having trounced literary fiction in terms of popularity in the 1990s, it should be no surprise to see "true" crime make such gains on TV. But there are grave dangers. Audiences used to fictional crime yarns, with all their emotional hooks, will expect similar thrills from real crime stories. Sometimes, however, real crime is more banal and more evil than that. The temptation to create a hybrid form - on the cusp of reporting and entertainment - could murder, or at least do grievous mental harm, to viewers' abilities to distinguish fact from fiction. If you doubt this, just think about soap opera.
THERE was more "real life" on @last tv, where a young man-about-town named Gavin acted the party animal. With Ansbacher and other scandals leaving us in no doubt that at least some of Ireland's more ostentatious displays of wealth and social position are based on real crime, Gavin's celebration of Grafton Street hedonism was at odds with the prevailing public mood. We saw him preparing to throw a party, driving a convertible, mulling over a pair of shoes in Brown Thomas, engaging in continental kissing and being a social jack-the-lad with some of his hundreds of "closest friends".
"It's a dream," said Gavin, who works as a gossip columnist. Well, he was partly right because it was really a nightmare. It's not as though young people with a few bob shouldn't enjoy themselves. What the hell! But there was a vulgarity and a crassness to many of the performances on display. It all seemed so self-congratulatory, so sure of its place in Dublin's social milieu, that it was simultaneously irritating and sad. Presenting the party as trendy and cool, it was alarming to realise just how sheep-like social wannabes can be.
And what of friendship? Who, even at the age of 23, could possibly have hundreds of close friends? The time taken in maintaining such close relationships with such numbers would preclude even gossip-columning. But, as with Paul Geldart, there exists, it appears, a widespread and insatiable desire for publicity, for affirmation of identity: "I'm gossiped about, therefore I am." But it is undeniable that such froth sells newspapers and magazines. And fair enough too, most of Gavin's hundreds of friends seemed young and youth passes quickly, so why not enjoy it? Well, quite frankly, it was the noxious whiff of social snobbery which caused the enterprise to stink.
Without doubt, the current news context coloured reaction to Gavin's gig. It may well be that all the young luvvies are immensely talented, sophisticated and fully deserving of considering themselves some kind of social elite. But in the prevailing social climate of sleaze and parasitism in suits and designer dresses, a celebration such as Gavin's bash cannot but raise questions. Oh, there was absolutely no wrongdoing in evidence but the evidence available from past eulogies to self-styled social elites might have encouraged prudence among the revellers, even if decorum is clearly beyond some of them.
After Gavin, Fiona Looney performed a monologue about representations of Irish women on RTE. It included the memorable line that "Mrs Riordan was Dev's wet dream come to life". Fair enough, even if Mrs Riordan wasn't, as Fiona suggested, named "Maura Riordan" (she was "Mary Riordan" named after the mother of God and De Valera's Ireland). The final sketch was a weak J'Accuse effort against fast food, in which a young man pretended to butcher and eat a kitten. Then, @last, it was over.
IN contrast, real "real life" TV could be found this week on TG4. Images Of Our- selves spoke to three generations of Connemara women. Their reminiscences ranged from walking barefoot eight miles to school in the 1930s, through 1950s emigration and on to the comparative affluence of today. It wasn't, in fairness, a celebration of any golden age of poverty - older women admitted that life in Dev's Ireland was characteristically hard. But compared with Gavin's performance in the shoes section of Brown Thomas, the recall of barefoot realities had meaning.
The format was a simple kind of generational oral-history. The moral fascism of traditional Ireland, in which children born outside of marriage were routinely taken from their mothers, was remembered. Certainly, Gavin and his hundreds of friends are, rightly, not bullied like that. There has, we can see, been considerable progress. But listening to the older Connemara women recount the reverence in which they held Catholic dictates, it was impossible not to feel that today's worship of ostentatious consumerism is, far from being sophisticated, merely a predictable peasant-like reaction to plenty.
It's impossible to be sure, of course, but none of the women featured in Images of Ourselves seemed likely to be Ansbacher account holders. Perhaps some of them have availed of Gaeltacht grants down the years - they didn't say - but they showed a commendable realism about their lives. Sure, they agreed that the landscape was beautiful but some of them spoke about "the violence and darkness" at school. In that, this was not an Alice Taylor fairy-tale of traditional Ireland, extolling the simple, bucolic life. It was real people talking about real lives. Its one fault was that it might have been a little tighter.
Finally, Citizens. Nell McCafferty and Jonathan Bell, equipped with camcorders, provided, respectively, Northern nationalist and unionist perspectives on the North during the week of Drumcree. The title, of course, was inappropriate, as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn't permit anything so liberal as citizenship. No, Nell and Jonathan are mere "subjects" of a monarch, the same queen as in "the queen's highway", which is Orange-speak for the Garvaghy Road.
Anyway, what was most remarkable - Nell's urination scene excepted - about this one was how little attitudes have shifted on both sides of the sectarian divide. Jonathan stressed democracy and family values; Nell admitted that she does not feel unionist pain as she does nationalist grief. Visiting Darkley "the scene of the Protestant Bloody Sunday", she acknowledged her own feelings by stressing her deficiency of feeling for Protestant suffering. This, at least, had the ring of honesty, of real life, about it. Jonathan's range of reference did not encompass such emotional complexities. It wasn't surprising but it is worrying that his (albeit genuinely-held) convictions also had the ring of real life. That's the real problem, eh?