TV REVIEW:
'Pussycat, pussycat, where have
you been? I've been to London to visit the queen. Pussycat,
pussycat, what did you there? I frightened a little Maoist under
her chair.'
Hilary Faninreviews this
week's television highlights.
So riffed Cathal Ó Searcaigh, having inquired of a young Nepalese friend whether there were Maoists in his local village and having received the answer that there were, indeed, many "Maoists" of the little furry long-tailed variety, the kind that scuttle under chairs. Language is tricky, understanding other cultures is tricky, accepting mores and traditions that are not your own is tricky. The politics of desire are extremely tricky.
Fairytale of Kathmandu finally aired on RTÉ this week, allowing the viewing public to see what all the fuss on the airwaves and in the papers has been about these last few weeks. Just on the off-chance that you have had your head firmly lodged in your coal scuttle, let me fill you in on the story so far. Two years ago, film-maker Neasa Ní Chianáin accompanied her friend, Irish-language poet Ó Searcaigh, to Nepal, a place he considered to be his spiritual home, where he took up residence for three months each year in the Buddha Hotel to write his poems and cruise the streets for attractive young men to patronise.
Ní Chianáin's film (which, almost incidentally at this stage, is beautifully shot), follows Ó Searcaigh - along with a bunch of acolytes, his gang, young men he has befriended over the years - as he sojourns in that misty far-off land. Along the way, after trekking in the mountains with the poet and observing him peruse the dusty city streets for bicycles and clothes to gift to his young associates, Ní Chianáin's hitherto sentimentalised portrait of "the guru of the hills" sours into disillusionment. Witnessing the frequency with which Ó Searcaigh invites new "friends" to stay in his room for the night, she begins to suspect that the poet's beneficence comes at a price. Her romantic illusions about her Donegal neighbour are shattered as this idealised artist in his pill-box hat turns out, surprise surprise, to be a sexual being, a man using his power to gratify his own desires.
And bang, the fuse is lit: now, instead of a mellow paean to the poet, dripping with sensitivity and shod by the natural shoe shop, we have a stomping beast of a documentary featuring sexual tourism and exploitation and, in the leading role, an over-indulged, libidinous westerner tripping around the Himalayan foothills with his parasol under his arm, like an archetypal colonialist looking for a little something to sweeten his tea.
Fairytale of Kathmandu is a depressing film on many levels, but primarily because of Ó Searcaigh's desperate self-delusion. The man is incapable, it would seem, of understanding how his actions impinge on those around him and unable to recognise the inequality, the disparity of power, that make the sexual relationships he has with young Nepalese men (all, as the programme admitted, over Nepal's age of consent) so difficult to condone.
"I prefer to give money directly to the boys," he said, with no hint of irony.
A man lauded for his talent, courage and openness about his sexuality, Ó Searcaigh is clearly unable to resist the temptations of omnipotence ("He is like a god to us," smiled one of his friends) and behave with judicious restraint in an impoverished country among vulnerable young people.
But, however distasteful and exploitative Ó Searcaigh's conduct, these are relationships he honestly admitted in the paltry few minutes on film Ní Chianáin allowed him to defend himself, once they were back in Donegal. ("I wanted to talk, but I didn't know how," was Ní Chianáin's fey excuse for not confronting him during their time in Nepal, which goes to the heart of the film's weakness.)
It is also depressing that we are being asked to share in Ní Chianáin's naive shock and distress. Had she thought about it before she boarded the plane, clutching Ó Searcaigh's eloquently revealing volumes of poetry, it might have occurred to her to look at her friend's life (a depressive mother, a repressive society, a first love shattered when the man he loved left him for a woman) and conclude that his complex sexuality wasn't going to be contained by his fez.
I don't condone Ó Searcaigh's actions, and my instinct towards the man and his pompous egotism is not friendly, but I was made uneasy by the film's incautious emotional appeal, and its possible consequences both for Ó Searcaigh and the young men now tainted by his largesse.
In a film that questions the nature of consent, perhaps Ní Chianáin herself has questions to answer (some Nepalese friends of Ó Searcaigh's have expressed anger that their consent for inclusion in this film was never sought, and it has been suggested that others felt coerced into making condemnatory statements after Ó Searcaigh's departure from Nepal). "I searched their faces for answers," Ní Chianáin said of the young Nepalese men at one point in her film, attempting to unravel the complexity of the interactions she had witnessed.
But maybe there is no such thing as an answer in this intricate web of motives and needs, and possibly more care should have been taken before the life and career of this delusional man was thrown on to the smouldering coals of our collective outrage.
"COME ON THEN, let's be having you!" implored a tetchy and windswept Delia Smith to the bedraggled supporters of Norwich Football Club. Standing foursquare in the middle of the soggy pitch, a loudhailer in her chopping hand, the woman who has spent the past 37 years teaching the world to casserole vented her frustration on a stadium-load of comfortably despondent fans. A major shareholder in the rather unglamorous club, the unlikely football-lover then stalked off the pitch, having failed to infuse the grudging crowd with her ardour.
"I am a passionate woman!" Delia insisted during her eponymous new cookery programme, recklessly scattering medallions of frozen mash all over the pre-packed salmon darns and brutally castrating the cornichons. Delia, one was tempted to infer, had suddenly wearied of being sensible.
Back on the box and attempting to muscle in on the overstocked market of TV cheffery, Delia has, mildly surprisingly, embraced convenience cooking, with "quality ready-made ingredients". Comfortable rather than cutting edge, with a style that has always been more reliable than ravishing, Delia is a store-cupboard staple who claims to have no time for "theatre on a plate". The filigreed creations of her more pretentious, usually French, contemporaries and the "first-shoot-your-duck" school of bearded billycan cooks, is just not Delia; nor indeed is the "soak-your-breasts-in-fine-Chablis" blather of a panting Nigella.
What's an ageing girl to do in order to get a bit of attention on the Beeb these days, other than lob the contents of the average freezer into an ovenproof tin and smother the result in a tub of cottage cheese and a handful of ready-grated Parmesan? "I've typed up all Delia's recipes over the years," said her devoted husband, Michael. "Pity you can't follow them," retorted Delia, once again emitting the fiery rumblings of a woman who has spent a culinary lifetime basted in prudence.
"It's like getting permission from the headmistress; it's all quite naughty, what Delia is doing," said her mild, angora-jumpered fellow chef, Nigel Slater, after tucking into a piece of her chocolate mashed-potato cake (I'm not joking) and shuddering with excitement like a frosted bun as she slit open another box of frozen spuds to dig her itching fingers into. Ooh, sock it to me, Delia.
THE EXPLORATION OF white, working-class, "chav" Britons, who feel displaced and under siege by immigrants and abandoned by an indifferent society, formed the spine of the provocative White season of documentaries and dramas which started on BBC this week.
Abi Morgan's White Girl was a tender story about an intelligent, emotional, impoverished 11-year-old girl, Leah (Holly Kenny), who finds herself living in an entirely Muslim community in Bradford with her chaotic young mother, Debbie (Anna Maxwell Martin), and two vulnerable half-siblings. Despite the drama's flirtation with sentimentality, and a certain discarding of subtlety, this was a moving film which gently, gratifyingly unfurled to reveal an unexpected source of optimism.
"Osama bin Laden made our pizza," said Debbie's violent, erratic husband, Stevie (Daniel Mays, an actor whose innate sensitivity is, paradoxically, making him the casting agents' favourite hard chaw), and it was that inherently racist blanket dismissal of a whole community of Muslims as would-be terrorists, with woolly beards and dresses, that Morgan so adroitly collapsed.
Befriended by a young Asian neighbour after finding herself the only white student at the local school, Leah's hostility towards Islam was gradually replaced by a need for the psychological peace the religion could offer her and, on a more concrete level, for the consistency, hospitality and order experienced in her Muslim friend's home. An antidote to the stereotyping and splash journalism that often attends appalling tales of Islamic extremism and misogyny, Morgan's careful research illuminated a temperate life in the home and mosque which we rarely encounter on western screens.
Leah, whose hope resides in the stray magic she attributes to her rosary beads or prayer beads, depending on which come to hand, and whose startlingly delicate face views her damaged world from within her Virgin Mary-blue hijab, eventually comes to appreciate the Muslim belief that "paradise is at the foot of the mother", and her story ends with her fragile family reunited. This was memorable, occasionally beautiful and sharply crafted fare.
Goodness, what a week.