Redemption and remorse

TV Review:'So f***ing delicate, people. They die so easy." The work of two serious Irish talents was in evidence this week in Channel 4's penetrating, painful and quite beautifully rendered film, Boy A.

Adapted for the screen by playwright Mark O'Rowe (from a novel of the same name by Jonathan Trigell) and directed by the superb John Crowley, Boy A told the story of a young man coming to terms with life and liberty after a decade of incarceration for a murder he and a friend had committed as neglected, vulnerable 10-year-old boys. Echoing the case of murdered toddler James Bulger in 1993, and events surrounding the subsequent release (to war cries from a vengeful media) of the child's killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, this subtle and provocative film concerned itself with the nature of identity and the mercurial notion of forgiveness, asking whether the past can ever really be left in the past.

With a new name and the assistance of case worker Terry (the brilliant Peter Mullan, so grittily realistic you could almost feel the texture of his skin), Boy A - now Jack Burridge - begins a new life. Working-class Manchester soon provides digs, a job, mates and even a lover with whom this fragile young man begins to unfurl, experiencing an emotional freedom through sexual tenderness that is as alien to him as the menu card in a local cafe.

"What's a panini?" he asks Terry, when really he could be asking, what is this world? An astoundingly good central performance from Andrew Garfield as Jack, conjuring an almost embryonic character, as delicate as a caul, was interspersed with flashbacks to a cruelly isolated childhood, resulting in many heartbreaking moments.

But there was a point in the story, after the events of Jack's past had become public knowledge and the media had begun to hunt him down, when one began to question this cleverly manipulative film. In Boy A, unlike the Bulger case, the victim of the boys' crime was the same age as the two killers, a girl who challenged their anti-social behaviour, and the extent of Jack's involvement in her murder was never actually revealed. In a film that so powerfully endorsed the idea of redemption, it might have been interesting to challenge viewers uncompromisingly with a less palatable and attractive protagonist. A fantastic piece of work nonetheless.

YOU CAN'T TURN on the box at the moment without being assaulted by some precocious child actor inveigling you to swap your credit-card details for some hazardous choking parts. It's that time of year again, when telly is held hostage by toy advertisers. Their weaponry, at least, is imaginative: unnerving, metamorphically challenged dolls with glittering hair extensions and horrid yapping puppies with simultaneous doggy-language translations coming out of their furry rectums. So thank goodness for some restrained old global terrorism and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it drama, courtesy of the spiky Spooks.

The espionage series currently offers a dissection of western/Iranian relations through the prism of remarkably unblinking actors and a script freighted with exciting techno-poetry (maybe the scriptwriters should utilise that word-pooping puppy to put the frighteners on some terrorist pod). This mad technological pantomime manages to be, simultaneously, side-splittingly absurd and completely riveting, even if you do stop believing that the double-crossing ice-blonde, Ros, really can avert world war three by talking into her earrings.

This week's episode saw a live current affairs discussion programme taken over by a bunch of right-wing extremists, determined to broadcast to the world the extent of Iran's nuclear capacity and expose western complicity. After much re-routing, rebooting and crawling around the gantry, a crisis was averted, leaving frosty Ros and her colleague, Adam, to indulge in some will-we-won't-we mind fornication. By the time we got to the debriefing, I was pleasantly confused and (here comes the techno-poetry) felt a little like that "uploaded flash-worm in the logic bomb".

IT SEEMS THAT baddies just ain't what they used to be. While Spooks relies on cranky racist right-wing extremists to populate its scripts, a rather good new series, The Company (based on Robert Littell's book on the murky machinations of the CIA), deals with spying in its Cold War heyday, when the big fun game was played for high stakes and the enemy was the one hiding under the bed with a hammer and sickle. Far from a bloodless computer game, The Company is populated by pretty boys from Yale and Oxbridge who run around eastern Europe with suitcases full of false moustaches and hair dye and have international sexual relationships with skinny ballerinas called Rainbow.

This meaty, solid old block of a show opened with the obligatory campus flashback to three preppy, muscular varsity boys toasting the end of innocence as they set off to take on the world. Five minutes later, two of them have been recruited by "the company" while the third, Yevgeny, parties in a sunny Dachau and signs up for the KGB. It's The Big Chill meets James Bond, dressed by Tommy Hilfiger, but it has some great lines, most of them spoken by Alfred Molina's CIA agent, "the Sorcerer".

"I'm as serious as a five-dollar whore," he tells Jack (Chris O'Donnell) as the rain pours down on a furtive east Berlin, and (my particular favourite) "We want you to wash the bear, without getting it wet" (a phrase that I am now adding to my book of handy ambiguities).

Besides quite a bit of dewy romance (Rainbow's lines would be enough to dampen your ardour for Russian ballerinas, as in "Ven I avake, I am in a huge void and I feel myself dance like I have never danced before"), there is also a bit of history. A lisping Kim Philby (Tom Hollander) was rumbled, much to the astonishment of the CIA counter-intelligence chief adroitly named "Mother" (Michael Keaton), who seemed more than a little put out.

The Company continues for a further two Saturdays, and if Simon Callow promises not to do any more deeply irritating cameos it may be worth setting the record button for.

STURMED AND DRANGED and shocked and awed after hours of espionage and vicarious struggles against totalitarianism, imperialism and fundamentalism, one was still unprepared for witnessing the fiasco, the real-life debacle, the mind-bending arrogance and egocentricity uncovered by the excellent Prime Time Investigates. In the first of the new series, reporter Mike Milotte brought us The Pressure Zone, an examination of the power wielded by councillors as they zone land for development, enabling some of their constituents to become overnight millionaires while others live with the dire consequences.

The programme revealed that almost a quarter of all councillors are directly involved in developing or dealing in land; be they auctioneers, farmers or landowners, it claimed that many pay scant heed to government directives aimed at transparency and the common good, instead cutting the community cloth to snugly fit their own measure. Other councillors claim to have come under intense pressure from local landowners determined to get their property rezoned.

As a result, we saw house after unserviced house festering in fields of green, urban pimples bursting out of idyllic rural backdrops, populations (as in Gorey, Co Wexford) quadrupling, strained resources, water shortages, communities beached without schools, supermarkets or transport. As this litany of bad planning unfolded, the word that wanted to burst from the lips, much like a crescent of three-bed semis from a flooded marsh, was gombeenism; straight-up, hold-the-ice gombeenism.

That field would "rarely" flood, said one comfortably upholstered councillor as the camera panned to a bog dotted with languid swans and clusters of damp-looking houses. The estate "floods two or three times a year", one weary resident then informed us. "If anything, it's getting worse." It went on and on, from one region to another across the State. One contributor described the attitude of some preening councillors as akin to the rulers of medieval principalities.

It's enough to spawn a Disney epic. You see, there are all these animated toads in pink shirts and loud ties ripping the weed out of the duckpond to build hundreds upon hundreds of toady shelters for the shivering and starving duckies, and then a kind of pale and interesting (if somewhat nervy-looking) heron called Green Gormley flies in to sort it all out, only the duplicitous Coalition fairy has disabled one of his wings and . . .