TV REVIEW: The Importance of Being IrishRTÉ1, Tuesday Eden RTÉ1, Monday; In The Name of the FadaRTÉ1, Thursday Rua TG4, Wednesday
WELL, IT'S THAT TIME of the year again when we dust off the green-and-gold synthetic top hats and crowd on to the bruised streets of our cities and towns to wet the shamrock.
Yippee and begorrah, what fun, what larks. As casualty departments bathe in the afterglow of indolent violence and mindless pyrotechnics, as taxi drivers mop the spilled national vomit from their back seats and our sated elected representatives climb back aboard their eager jets, clutching their dutiful wives and the Alka-Seltzer tin, we are, once again, invited to turn our eyes inward and reflect on the state of the State, asking ourselves: What does it mean to be Irish?
Where have we come from, where are we going and, crucially, who have we become, asks prodigious film-maker Alan Gilsenan in his new four-part investigation, The Importance of Being Irish. The series began this week with an examination of the post-war years, featuring archive footage of an intractable Dev, looking like an old black swan, preening over our neutrality in his sombre overcoat, and finishing in 1973 with the country electing to join the Common Market and a young, anxious and tremendously curly-headed Garret FitzGerald proselytising outside a nostalgia-inducing diminutive supermarket.
Gilsenan's film, despite having to get its clever head around this hugely elusive subject, was a startling portrait of a country that has stepped from the shadow of poverty and colonalism into the heady footlights of the world stage. It served as a reminder of how easy it is to forget our recent past. In 1952, the film told us, this country was averaging $400 per capita, with many families subsidising their incomes with a regular stipend from their emigré sons and daughters. At a time when we had few resources, it was education, the various contributors concluded, that bred the new global Irish (often, as Mary Robinson, one of five children, recalled, at a great cost to parents), the men and women now building China, medicating America and continuing a tradition of aid whose foundations were laid by the work of Irish missionaries.
Loosening ourselves from an internecine dependency on Britain, according to Prof Richard Kearney, allowed "the sea to become not a cordon sanitaire but a waterway of connection", ultimately heralding, one is tempted to conclude, this era of Abercrombie sweatpants, underpaid Romanian cleaning ladies and the swarm of SUVs.
With its extraordinary archive footage featuring muscular young seminarians at play in a swimming pool, like baby seals before a cull, and young nuns simmering under starched wimples, this is a series well worth watching if one is trying to make sense of the uneasy present.
"YOUTH CLUB DISCO, up the schoolyard, into the shed - and bingo!" As the frost settled over the littered streets and overworked barmen elbowed the slops, love, Irish-style, came under the scrutiny of writer Eugene O'Brien. Having previously penned the superb Pure Mule, a bleak précis of small-town midlands life seen through a prism of alcohol and yearning, and continuing his working relationship with director Declan Recks, O'Brien wilfully punctured our national holiday with an interesting adaptation of his successful stage play, Eden.
Traversing familiar territory - small midlands town, Saturday night Mass, Sunday morning hangover - Eden resonated with the intensity prevalent in O'Brien's work, and having seen and loved the stage play (a similar story told through monologues), the piece worked for me, although I did feel at times that the emotional intensity was strained by a certain archness.
Central to the piece were two forceful performances in the leading roles, Aidan Kelly (as Billy) and Eileen Walsh (as Breda), a couple facing into their 10th wedding anniversary celebrations freighted with difficulties: Billy's restless, anaesthetising drinking, veiled impotence and cauterizing inability to express his feelings, and Breda's resultant precision-loneliness and isolation from the man she loves.
Kelly and Walsh are serious actors, both harnessing a powerhouse of talent, and their restraint within O'Brien's sparse script, coupled with Recks's visual sophistication, lifted this film out of the ordinary. Recks has a delicate eye: there was a moment when Billy tenderly lifted his young son from the bath, and the camera focused in on the child's small, still-muddied knees and feet channelling the water back into the bath as the father, in the privacy and safety of his son's admiration, allowed himself a baptism of paternal peace.
Anti-climactic but authentic, this stylised film ended with the married childhood sweethearts persevering in their efforts, in their nondescript bungalow, to find love or redemption in a world that O'Brien sculpts from bog-heavy, drink-soaked clay.
NOTHING QUITE DEFINES an Irish adolescence like Irish college. My own memories of a 1970s summer in Gortahork are of floating on a sea of incomprehension, missing the dog, and blowing cigarette smoke out the window of a mock-hacienda with two blue-eye-shadowed Derry girls in their stockinged feet who were well-versed in subterfuge.
Comedian Des Bishop continued his assault on the Connemara Gaeltacht this week with the second episode of his warm and uplifting series, In The Name of the Fada.
Bishop is an interesting bloke; arrogant and occasionally bombastic, he has, however, an appealing courage, curiosity and openness which make his adventures in comedy and reality highly watchable. Electing to spend a year immersed in the language, living, studying, and playing for the local football club, Bishop's aim is to become fluent enough in the language to perform on stage as Gaeilge at the end of the series.
"You get older and become everything you thought you would never be," Bishop said, digging his concentration into his leabhar and desperately attempting to comprehend the violently passionate inducements of his football coach.
"Tá sé sin moment mór," the comedian mused as, bathed in the dying rays of a summer day, he bobbed about in a little boat, metallic-coloured wavelets opening up to reveal another silver fish on the end of his line. "Best day of my life," he later concluded, having horsed around on the seashore with a bunch of energetic bastúns and slept on the neck of a sweetly passive donkey, whose gentle acceptance of the American leaning against her warm mane made one smile. Bishop, one feels, is gaining more than language from his year out, and maybe he is right about age and becoming everything you thought you would never be.
Despite the sheltering sun (where did they find that in 2007?) and the hazy loveliness of the west of Ireland, there was something about Bishop's adventure that made me quite sad. As his confidence with Irish grew, his competence deepened and his vocabulary blossomed, one realised that this was the way to engender a love of language, not the sleepy, hot classroom and the fearful múinteoir that so many of us monolinguals endured in the name of national glory.
APPARENTLY, RED-HEADED women feel more pain than their bottle-blonde or mouse-brown sisters. They also bleed more, need 19 per cent more anaesthetic and can singlehandedly ground a fleet of fishing boats, not to mention turn heads in Italy and have Croatian men spitting and swivelling at their feet. Rua, another fine documentary from TG4, explored the world of the redhead, a much-maligned minority, we were told (you know, suffering from the distinction of having glorious tresses - I'm overcome with sympathy here).
Devastatingly, however, the documentary revealed that these myth-spawning, hot-headed, passionate, sexy, exotic heads of hair will be all but extinct in 100 years' time. Our gene pool is expanding (thank God), but even though future generations of shamrock chicks can look forward to long Polish legs or sultry Nigerian eyes, they ain't going to be carrot-tops.
I used to mix instant-coffee granules into the henna paste to try and convince the young men of my neighbourhood, in their flares and cheesecloth shirts, that I was that fiery Titian, and doubtless in the next century some bright spark will kick-start the recessive genes necessary for the real thing.