Super duper Tuesday

TV REVIEW:  HILARY FANIN reviews Obama Tuesday various channels, Frederick Douglass and the White Negro TG4, Wednesdayand Charlie Bird's Arctic Journey RTÉ1, Monday

WELL, WELL, what a “monumentous” week, as the chirpy TV3 news anchor confidently dubbed it, just hours after Barack “Osama, er, Obama” (as Vincent Browne went on to call him moments later) took the oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States of America. Monumentous indeed, historicalous, remarkablous and, like, miraculous. This hitherto bleak millennium has just put on her rah-rah skirt and inaugurated the US’s first black president. So how was it for you, baby?

The TV began pretty inauspiciously this historic week, with newscasters across the channels feigning joviality as they announced that, statistically, the third Monday of January is the most depressing day of the year. Many of us didn’t need a statistician to point out that little gem, but, as shares crashed, banks tumbled, weighing scales accelerated (indifferent to fervent New Year resolutions) and cold children bleated outside wintry school gates, the procession of hope began as President-elect Obama set off on his historic last lap to the White House to become (all together now) the first African-American president of the US. If I was a crocus I would have lifted my shy head and beamed.

And yes, as every cat with tonsils has been saying for weeks now, the man is facing a gargantuan political task. Expectations are fragile, somewhat hysterical little beasts, and although Obama may be a judicious orator and look pretty hot in pin-stripes, as far as we know the man has yet to walk on water. He has, however, history on his side, or so it would seem. "Rosa [Parks] sat, so Martin could walk, so Barack could run, so our children could fly," as one contributor contextualised it later in the evening on Obama: His Story.

So, millions of Americans gathered in Washington, under leaden skies and woolly black-and-white Obama hats, their expectant shell-likes shrouded in ear-muffs, their gloved hands applauding, tears welling in brown eyes and blue, lined faces crackling with hope, young faces lit with enthusiasm. One felt a collective holding of frosted breath as Obama walked under the daunting portico of the Capitol; you could almost taste the crowd's craving, feel the weight of their hope. Obama seemed to move like a swimmer under water, the expectation of millions temporarily unsettling his customary composure. He pulled himself up for air, though, and, while his children jangled their cold knees under blankets and busied themselves with their digital cameras, the world watched and waited, and Aretha Franklin (in a tremendous hat) belted out My Country 'Tis of Thee, a new era in world politics began.

TO MARK THIS historic turning-point, TG4 screened Frederick Douglass and the White Negro, a moving and funkily told story which illuminated the life of an inspirational man (and hero of Obama's), the freed slave, orator, political dynamo, feminist and abolitionist, Frederick Douglas.

Douglas, having endured, from the age of seven, brutality, hardship and degradation on various southern plantations, eventually escaped his captors, becoming a writer, activist and fugitive, who arrived in Ireland in 1845. Here he enjoyed the society of Daniel O’Connell (who described him as “the black O’Connell of the United States”), took the pledge from a jangling Fr Matthew, and polished his international political savvy. It was here too that this extraordinarily brilliant man – who had never known his father, had seen his exhausted young mother buried in an unmarked grave, and had been brutalised by slave-breakers – observed, in the starving, ragged Irish fleeing the Famine, another suppressed population who, although a different colour, had also been afflicted by poverty and ruinous politics.

Now, as a general rule, as long as there are televised histories about, I’m never going to need a sleeping tablet. Give me a couple of copperplate etchings of bearded blokes in silken top hats and a mellifluous voiceover talking about the Young Irelanders and I’m gone, toast, cold toast (I usually wake up when my extremities are purpling and some academic in sandals is proselytising about the Act of Union). However, this vigorous documentary refused to fall into that category, instead focusing on racism and the Irish-American experience. Mired in poverty on the streets of New York, we Irish, who had previously displayed a sophisticated political acceptance of Douglas and his cause, fought in the most horrific and insidious ways to elevate our status in the race riots that rocked the city during the American Civil War.

It was depressing stuff. Douglas was deserted by old allies such as Fr Matthew (who, suddenly, could find no opposition to slavery in the Bible) and Young Irelander (they turn up everywhere) John Mitchell, who bought himself a slave-stocked plantation and a porch swing. On the sidewalks of America, we were told, the Irish and the freed slaves were adversaries who also lived in a kind of intimacy, an intimacy not always apparent as we gather on Fifth Avenue on glittering March days in our kiss-me-quick hats, but a fellowship stitched into the historic patchwork of an expectant America nonetheless.

NOT TO BE outdone by Obama's great undertaking, RTÉ newsman Charlie Bird (shrouded in a romper suit reminiscent of scarlet bubble-wrap) has set off on an expedition of his own in Charlie Bird's Arctic Journey, beginning his eight-day tour across the Arctic in Canada's Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island, with an Inuit guide and half a dozen ravenous huskies.

The Arctic makes for good television: midnight sun, iridescent snow, icebergs glowering in rippling shadow, and pale yellow polar bears galloping across the ice like great big furry aunties jogging through the winter park. Despite this tumultuous, awe-inspiring palette, however, Bird was on this occasion a surprisingly taciturn host.

Whipping through the tundra in his swaddling, borne by howling, seal-munching, icy-eyed dogs, Bird seemed as overwhelmed by the climatic changes, the melting polar ice-caps, the unprecedentedly high temperatures that are wreaking havoc on this continent, as he was by the stark beauty of the landscape.

The scientists who have been sitting on their itching fingers, waiting for Bush and his creationist, fossil-fuel-burning cronies to vacate the White House, were saying on the box this week that, in their estimation, we have about a four-year window to start saving the planet. I hope, for the sake of those great shaggy bears that the depressed Bird hopes to find (and for the rest of us), that Mr Obama has remembered to pack his Superman suit.

BEER GOGGLES: DEMONS AND DRINKS

Back on home turf and under the accommodating skirts of Project Ha Ha, which sees RTÉ screening four experimental comedy pilots, comedian David McSavage, his big, sculpted noggin frothing with vaguely endearing madness, was illustrating why we, as a nation, drink so much: to forget 800 years of British oppression, for the sanctifying purification of the hangover, to disguise our sexual timidity, to wipe out remembrance of an education peppered with the lash, and, of course, because it's raining.

McSavage's humour may be tossed with anarchy and basted in psychosis, but it's sealed with smoky truth. Populating his malevolent thesis were impersonations of a terrifying, throbbing, harp-mauling Mary Robinson and a diligently gross Russell Brand in sticky leather. There was also a trio of bumbling, balding, painfully recognisable ministers (the Minister for the Awareness of Problems, the Minister for Using Three Similar Words in A Sentence and the Minister for Breathlessness to Convey Sincerity) suppurating banality. I liked McSavage's bleak vision, his barbed honesty. From enervating archive of teenage table tennis tournaments (a sport that involves "smacking the freckles off Emer") to cruel parodies of cardinals in three-cornered hats whipping pretty toddlers from their parents' arms, McSavage's mordant imagination enhanced by the work of a couple of well-known actors and fellow comedians, paints a portrait of a ragged island society that is as relentless and depressing as the sleet. Apparently, this promising pilot was made "for nothing"; hopefully, it's a harbinger of recessionary humour to come.