TVReviewThis week Shane Hegarty reviews: The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy BBC2, Sunday, JFK: Breaking the News Network 2, Saturday, Hidden History: The Struggle RTÉ1, Tuesday Bachelors Walk Network 2, Monday, Bodysnatchers BBC1, Wednesday
The JFK conspiracy theory arrived with the final bullet. "My God, they killed him," screamed Jackie Kennedy. "They're going to kill us both," yelled Governor Connelly, confirming its virulence.
The 40th anniversary of the assassination brought a throng of related programmes across all the channels. BBC2's The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy concerned itself with a president's death and a conspiracy's birth. Many still find unconvincing the explanation that a self-obsessed, sharp-shooting ex-marine could kill a man elevated in a slow-moving, open-top car from 88 yards on a calm day without the Mafia, the Cubans, the Russians and the CIA being there to mop his brow.
Beyond Conspiracy decided to spell it out slowly, constructing its logic upwards from fact, rather than backwards from conjecture. The science bit came from a computer reconstruction by a gentleman called Dale Myers, who has recreated the event from every frame of film taken on the day so that it can now be viewed from any angle. No death has become so blasé. Outside of fiction, television mostly goes to great lengths to avoid the physical realities of violent death, but it treats the punching open of Kennedy's skull, the spray of brain matter, as it does a pivotal moment in a football match. Here is Kennedy grasping at his throat. Now here is his head exploding.
Now, let's watch that again. And again. Hold it there.
Few like to accept that someone so inconsequential as Oswald could kill the most important man on the planet. Oswald, whose motivation was to achieve great consequence, would have hated that. In killing Oswald, Jack Ruby wished to close the circle, but instead left the event loose-ended. Those who knew him explained that his connections didn't quite reach his brain in all the right places, never mind the Mafia.
Ruby, famously, had stepped forward from the throng to shoot Oswald in a police-station corridor on live television. He was, it seems, more likely to have been thwarted by the crush of the press than by any security measures.
For an era supposedly so paranoid, the access afforded was astounding. In JFK: Breaking The News they showed officers having to squeeze Oswald along the walls of the hallway as the cameras formed a canopy above him. We live in an age of unprecedented media coverage but not of extraordinary access.
Our live pictures come from the skies, from behind gates, from outside walls. The war in Iraq gave us only the illusion of access. The authorities have gradually learnt their lessons on how to manage the press, but the days surrounding November 22nd, 1963 were their first at school.
Breaking The News was a fascinating retrospective of how the story was covered. In Dallas, two women dressed in wallpaper-pattern suits were discussing the position of zip-up jacket sleeves when the newscaster interrupted; breaking the news after he apologised for being a little out of breath. From that point, television pictures became so intimate with the rapid-firing twists of history that it can be argued that it took almost 40 years and the attack on the Twin Towers for it to become so again. The images were extraordinary: bulky, studio cameras trundling across the station floor; Oswald answering questions on his journeys from room to room; the crisp black-and-white picture, crackling with significance; the steady transformation of observers into participants. After Oswald's murder, they turned the cameras on each other, as eyewitnesses. His funeral was so rushed that there were no pallbearers, so the journalists were asked to oblige.
They were reluctant. Then the man from United Press volunteered and suddenly they all did.
This was a thrilling documentary about a then unprecedented four days of continuous news coverage, marking the moment at which television news slipped into the American consciousness as briskly as it did the local buildings. In this digital age, for the 50th anniversary, it would wonderful to be offered an uninterrupted look at all four days.
The Struggle was the latest documentary in RTÉ's excellent Hidden History strand; a yarn from which several others spun. It told the tale of Manchán Magan's grandmother, Sighle Humphreys, who had raised her grandchildren on the tale of how she and IRA assistant chief of staff, Ernie O'Malley, had battled Free State soldiers on the manicured lawn of the family home on Aylesbury Road. O'Malley had hidden in a secret room, co-ordinating a rebel campaign in between concerts, meals and the odd game of tennis. When the soldiers finally turned up, Humphreys is reported to have fought alongside him as he made a dash for it. When the battle ended, her aunt had been shot in the mouth, Free State soldier Private Pete McCartney lay dead on the lawn and O'Malley's body housed 11 bullet wounds. He was spared execution because he was too ill to die.
It was an effervescent film, told through a mix of dramatic reconstruction and documentary. There was a delightful touch of reconstructing some of his grandmother's deeds in modern Dublin to a background of bemused locals. It was part of a broader and flimsy point made by Magan at either end of the programme that the memories of such deeds have been relinquished and that capitalism has softened the revolutionary spirit. It was a proposition left dangling at the end, in need of a little context to come along and give it some assistance. For a fellow not naturally sculpted for the screen, Magan has a fierce streak of vanity about him. He wallows in the camera's attention, is eager to pontificate and to preen. He could justify the detour from English into Irish, but when he called to the old family home, now the French Embassy, and announced his arrival en Français you knew he was just showing off.
Bachelors Walk has reached the mid-point of its third series, a notable achievement. Almost all previous RTÉ drama serials that have entered even a second series have done so while ailing and embarrassed until finally granted mercy. Bachelor's Walk, on the other hand, survives and flourishes.
It has settled into an insouciant rhythm. New father Barry (Keith McErlean) refuses to allow the pathos to overwhelm his buffoonery, while no one does a better drunk than Michael (Simon Delaney). Raymond's (Don Wycherley) boy-finds-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-girl-again antics with Alison (Marcella Plunkett) keeps the dramatic engine ticking over.
The second series had pushed the comedy perilously close to absurdity, but it has tempered that instinct. It has also continued its record of introducing memorable cameo characters. Michael's stalker and benefactor Derek the Taxi Driver (David Pearse) is creepy enough to make the hairs bristle on the sitting-room carpet. The women, meanwhile, remain little but attractive extras. Only Plunkett has been granted her very own storyline.
You sometimes feel that the other actresses are there simply because the writers grudgingly accept that it would be a strange world that had no women in it.
On Wednesday night, BBC1 followed one new series, Jungle, with another one, Bodysnatchers. It is as if the BBC feels that it goes against the natural order of things to broadcast a programme featuring the delicate ecology of the rainforests and not immediately follow it with pictures of worms crawling out of people's backsides. Television's natural history shows are increasingly geared only towards examining Mother Nature's teeth. The Earth's biosystem, we have learnt, is behind a conspiracy intent on killing us in the most horrible way possible. Stroll to the fridge and you might be jumped by a shark or snatched by a dingo. Nature is beautiful, but deadly; it is a Bond girl with added flesh-eating bacteria.
Bodysnatchers was television to send you to bed with a grimace. It confirmed thatas we watch for danger from the outside, agents infiltrate our insides.
Worms lodging in the rectum, fish feasting on the penis, leeches squatting in your nostrils, it was all here. For your infotainment, a biologist swallowed a tapeworm. Another covered himself with lice. We met a woman, recently returned from Costa Rica and reporting to her doctor with a lump on her head that had developed a personality of its own. Inside it was a maggot the size of your little toe. At one point it popped its head out, had a look around and retreated back into the flesh. Good thinking. It's far too dangerous out here.