Aside from the baby bit, my maternity-hospital memories include my new runners being stolen from under the bed and the Grand National being on the TV in an already noisy ward while one new mother’s visitors sat under it with a few cans and a curry.
Unsurprisingly, I wasn't in the only private maternity hospital in Britain, the fascinating-in-its-excess subject of Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital (BBC Two, Wednesday).
The first shot is of champagne being delivered while a liveried porter pushes another suitcase-laden trolley towards a room. The hospital's chief executive, Janene Madden, a pragmatic-sounding Australian, says, "We are a hotel, but primarily we have to remember we are a hospital."
There’s a lot of talk about the “business end”. (Most labour-ward stories concentrate on a very different business end.) The basic package costs about £8,000, or €10,000, but the bill rockets with the addition of room service and other extras; an epidural costs £1,000. Madden recalls a bill of £250,000. Not that it bothers the mothers: having a “Portland baby” is like being a in a club, one of them gushes.
Fly-on-the-wall documentaries stand and fall on the director's ability to find engaging, screen-filling characters we can focus on, and here three women fit that bill. There's Penelope Law, a consultant obstetrician who is also a countess, and whose nickname is Too Posh to Pull. Like each of the doctors and nurses interviewed (all women), she is reassuringly calm and sensible, and not blinded by the bling.
Then there’s Pat, a straight-talking Glaswegian grandmother who looks after the nursery. Babies are taken there overnight to let the new mothers sleep; it’s one of the hospital’s biggest selling points, the narrator purrs, in a voice that carries a hint of the arched eyebrow.
And, because she really is a window into a different world, there is Lu Hui, the arrestingly beautiful, filthy-rich London-based Chinese “It girl” who runs up a bill of €40,000 and is a bundle of fears and insecurities. Lu not only ignores the business end – all of it – but also asks for her baby to be given to her after the Caesarean only when he has been cleaned and has a nappy on. Which is one way to do it.
It’s a two-parter, so more next week; celebrities and royalty, or so we’re promised.
In his own songs the singer-songwriter Christy Moore describes himself as a "bogman" or an "ordinary man". But the man we meet in the two-part biographical documentary Christy Moore: Journey (RTÉ One, Sunday and Monday) is a serious man. Moore is an activist whose weapon is a guitar; a conviction musician. That, and the song-by-song structure of Journey, make for intense viewing.
The opening moments are classic musician biopic. A camera follows Moore as he wends his way through backstage corridors before arriving on stage before a hall filled with 3,000 fans. And there are further glimpses of his working world. Journey was filmed over a five-month touring period, with a reminder that Moore has been on the road for 50 years.
But viewers tuning in for more than snippets of Moore's legendary concerts will be disappointed: Journey is all about the songs, focusing on some of his best-known ones and exploring why he wrote them, mostly through close-up interviews in Moore's home studio.
So, for example, “don’t forget your shovel when you want to go to work” is a catchy line and sure-fire belter when delivered by the audience at his concerts. Here it gains poignancy and a return to its original meaning when played beneath archive footage of the reluctant army of Irish emigrants, the overworked, underpaid, socially unmoored Irish navvies in London in the 1960s.
It goes on in similar style, and feels relentless: song, archive, explanation. Moore gives the backstories to his H-block songs, his song about the Stardust tragedy, the dire circumstances of Ann Lovett's death, his Carnsore protest ballad, and the song in support of the Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strikers, among many, many others.
With this approach there is never any way that Journey, directed by the political documentarymaker Mark McLoughlin, could, for anyone other than dedicated Moore fans, be an easy-going Sunday- or Monday-night watch.
Moore reminds us that some of his songs have been banned by RTÉ, that he received hate mail over the Lovett song, and that he endured negative media commentary for his fundraising support for the republican movement at the height of the Troubles. (He believes a united Ireland will happen.) Still, it is probably true to say that Moore is now more national treasure than thorn in the side of the political establishment.
Sober now for 25 years, Moore talks with searing frankness about his alcoholism and how embarrassed he is now listening back on those recordings when he was drunk or stoned. In part two he talks about the breakdown that made performing impossible for nearly two years.
Moore, you may gather, doesn't do moon-in-June silly love songs – and in this self-consciously earnest songbook exploration there is not much light relief. Except towards the end. At the magnificent Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow Moore belts out a joyous I'll Tell Me Ma/ Lisdoonvarna mash-up. There's quite a wait for it, though.
TV3 is calling the Dublin woman Louise Quinn Ireland's Fittest Mum (Monday). Having watched episode one of the six-part documentary series, it's not such an outlandish claim. What I like about this film is that, like many of TV3's lifestyle documentaries, it explores an aspect of life I had no clue about. Mother to a 16-year-old daughter, the 35-year-old former hairdresser competes in World Beauty Fitness & Fashion shows, which mix modelling with bodybuilding.
Eight years ago Quinn’s five-week-old son, Ashton, died. She sank into a deep depression until she discovered fitness training. “People underestimate the power of exercise as a treatment for depression,” she says, having been there and done that.
Quinn looks amazing, her body toned and sculpted. And it’s hard won: she trains three times a day, seven days a week. She came fifth in her first amateur competition in London and wants to go further.
The glamazonian is not, Quinn says, “shredded yet”, as she is only at the start of her training for the next competition, in Las Vegas, where she hopes to turn professional.
We follow her on a visit to London to see her trainer and then for sessions on posing with her stage coach. It’s big business. “It’s all about your hoop,” Quinn says.
The off-camera interviewer must have looked mystified. “Your glutes. Your bum.”
You don’t hear that at the Portland.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
