TV Review: Some 562,000 of us watched Disclosure, the final episode of Haughey, the four-part series on the life and times of CJ, which was the highest rating ever achieved for an Irish television documentary. Haughey made great television - nostalgic, titillating, absurd and sentimental.
His dewy-eyed former PA told us that when a wounded Haughey was clearing his desk in the Dáil (having finally resigned in 1992), his colleagues skulking in the corridors and bars, the cleaning staff arrived and presented him with a Mass bouquet (a Mass for each of his remaining days) - and he finally broke down and wept.
That the cleaning staff would have to re-mortgage their homes to buy a handful of his shirts, that he was lunching in Le Coq Hardi on Ben Dunne's bank drafts and Dermot Desmond's loose change while pensioners shivered and teenagers fled by the boatload, that he continued to be deified by the ordinary Joe Soap despite being at the helm "of the most corrupt environment in the history of the State" (Geraldine Kennedy), were the great absurdities central to this fascinating but somewhat toothless biography.
Haughey himself, after (apparently) some prevarication, did not participate in the programme. His former colleagues - among them Bertie Ahern (attempting some wry avuncularity), a clinically distant PJ Mara, and a gleefully warped-looking Padraig Flynn (who looked like he had just plugged himself into the toaster) - painted a portrait of a dynamic and maverick leader whose mistakes were ultimately forgivable. And his children, faced with discussing their father's staggering financial impropriety and the lavishly indiscreet ways of his former mistress, Terry Keane, were dignified and warm.
Eimear Mulhern, Haughey's daughter, said she'd always felt that history would be kind to her father, "but now I'm not so sure".
Throughout, there were stories of Haughey's ruthlessness and determination to stay in power, such as the one involving the over-enthusiastic helicopter crew Haughey dispatched to drag a recalcitrant Brian Lenihan back across the Shannon during Lenihan's botched presidential campaign (they apparently wanted to nab Lenihan and pull him out of his bedroom window).
"It's like bloody Vietnam," roared Lenihan, according to his son, Conor.
Haughey's cronyism and extravagance eventually began to take on a cartoonish quality, but if we'd all known the desperate inside story at the time it would have made things a lot less palatable and amusing.
Eimear Mulhern is a smart woman: she and the rest of the family, and indeed her father, must have known that the warm glow of nostalgia permeating Haughey would help the process of bringing the tenacious old man in from the cold. It is hard not to see this series as the start of his rehabilitation.
ALEX HIGGINS SHOULD have taken a leaf out of Haughey's book and not turned up for his bio-doc - it does wonders for the reputation. True Lives: The Alex Higgins Story was, as stories go, pretty short and sketchy - a stylistically flat examination of an ego with a snooker cue. We know nothing more now about what drove the Shankill Road wizard than we did before.
Higgins started playing snooker as a teenager in a club called the Jam Pot and won the world championship at his first attempt. Attractive, flamboyant and dapper, he was the hell-raising, blonde-chasing, Rolls Royce-driving, vodka-drinking people's champion, a George Best of the green baize. He was - unelectrically - described by fellow snooker players as "electric"; the applause when he entered the arena apparently "took the roof off". He was a consummate showman, an elegant dancer around the table whose inability to keep still should really have prevented him from ever making a pot, let alone winning two world titles, and his unique style was largely responsible for popularising snooker as a television sport.
But Higgins was always in trouble: he drank too much, smoked too much, his marriages broke up, and he fell out with his fellow players. When his game began to fall apart he took off his fedora and headbutted a tournament director, thus provoking a series of fines and bans from which his career and finances never really recovered - unlike his shrewder contemporaries, he was to face poverty and exclusion. His story is not entirely unfamiliar - from Belfast to the Kings Road, from excess and entourage to a grimy caravan on a Liverpool council estate, playing guys in bars for a fiver - but what seems to mark him out is his unquenchable competitive drive. Even a life-threatening bout of throat cancer, which required 43 sessions of radiotherapy, stoked his appetite for a fight, resulting in an ultimately unsuccessful court action against the tobacco companies that had sponsored his sport.
In an interview with Des Cahill, interspersed with archive footage of his triumphs and disasters, the Hurricane understandably appeared spent. "I've had glimpses of happiness," he said wanly. He still, however, refuses to be beaten, and his complex personality deserves a more insightful treatment than this.
GIVING CHILDREN CAMERAS to record their lives is not an original idea, but with parenting programmes supernannying us into rigorous exhaustion, a series made purely from a child's perspective is refreshing and disarmingly moving. My Life as a Child began with three digital cameras and three children who live apart from their fathers.
"It's a mum's life to be angry with children; that's what mums do best," said eight-year-old Ellen, who lives with her mum and stepfather Chris.
Ellen doesn't understand why Chris, who has only known her mum for a year, is always right when she's always wrong. She doesn't understand why Chris shouts at her and why her mum takes his side. She desperately misses her dad, who lives in Tokyo with his origami-making Japanese girlfriend, who has hair to her waist. Ellen communicates with him once a week over the internet, and she brought her video camera when she went on her first visit to him.
Mary is nine, and lives with her mum and two older brothers. Her dad lives in Portugal with a girl called Anna-Marie and a lot of chickens. Mary loves her mum, sleeps in her bed, hugs her, consoles her when she is swamped by depression.
"My mum is a little girl trapped in a woman's body," said Mary. "And I am a woman trapped in a little girl's body, but it's not fair because I just want to be a little girl."
Kris is also nine. He is half-Turkish and half-Scottish, and lives with his mum, stepfather and half-sister Antonia. With his Scottish mum's encouragement, he is learning Turkish. The family and the camera travelled to Istanbul to visit Kris's father, "Baba". It was a difficult visit from Kris's perspective, involving a distant natural father who failed to turn up for their second meeting. Kris is lucky he has a loving home: there was poignant footage of Kris and his stepfather having a lark with the adoption papers they both had to sign.
My Life As A Child is a revealing and painfully sad series that knocks the socks off every other reality/parenting series going. The children's understanding of loss, and their battles to reconfigure themselves given the casual cruelties of adult life, is heart-rending.
THERE IS A visceral lunacy to daytime television this summer. ITV is offering not one but two fresh slices of televisual dross this week. Nigella Lawson and a breast-hugging pink cardie are presenting a lunchtime smorgasbord of chat and recipes for cumin-laced hamburgers.
There is a particularly worrying section in Nigella called "Diva To Diva" where, on a book-lined set with well-worn volumes as copious as Lawson's shiny locks tumbling on to the studio floor, she interrogates her subjects (who this week included a sleepy-looking Charlotte Church) about handbags and soulmates. It is really awful. Before the ad break, Lawson purred, with her tongue peeping out at the camera: "I'll be in the kitchen with a lazy and luscious summer pudding. Come back to me." That's one scary domestic goddess.
LAWSON'S STRANGE BRAND of chat-show,with its "plinky-plonk" signature tune and Paisley print dresses, is a bracing breath of sanity compared to the week's most disturbing and nauseating offering, Baby House. This is a pre-natal Big Brother posing as some kind of educational video.
It's a horrific idea that hasn't the rattle to admit to itself what it is - an exercise in prurience and a terrible invasion of privacy. I hope one of the mewling infants sues. In order to justify us gawping at other people's contractions and shoving a camera into a labour ward, a host of professionals sit around and give advice to the ever-telephoning public about breastfeeding and cot deaths. Why not leave it at that? Why do you have to move women and their partners and their mothers and their stitches and their sore nipples and their exhaustion and their trepidation and their depression into a "luxurious" house in Surrey for a couple of weeks until we get bored of them and send them back to their lives as army wives and students?
And what of the infants themselves - surely they would be more secure in their own homes than as part of a reality-TV experiment.
Kelly went into labour in the middle of the night, and we got those muzzy 2am shots familiar to Big Brother aficionados of her partner, Phil, who was in a state of high anxiety - he couldn't find his hair gel. Can reality TV get more depressing than this?