Amongst Women - (RTE 1, Sunday)
The Human Body - (BBC 1, Wednesday)
Secret History - (Channel 4, Monday)
Questions And Answers - (RTE 1, Monday)
Praying aloud around their mother's death-bed, the Moran children, it was evident, viewed the world through the rosary-tinted spectacles of 1950s Ireland. This opening scene of the TV version of John McGahern's novel, Amongst Women set an austere mood. Immediately we were in McGahern territory, where layers of claustrophobia - family, community, country - relentlessly threaten to stifle personal identity.
Drama set in 1950s Ireland runs the risk nowadays that its imagery might be so charged that it, in itself, might not escape the claustrophobia of cliche. With this production, however, we needn't have worried. Although four decades on, there is a prevalent perspective which, self-satisfied, smug and boorish, is not merely condescending towards, but contemptuous of, the 1950s, McGahern's story is not bound by time and place. Still, attitudes towards the closed, rural Ireland of 40 years ago are such that only artful characterisation can prevent tales from the period being stereotyped and strangled by today's tiger propaganda.
As a character formed by Catholicism and nationalism, Michael Moran (Tony Doyle), the widower patriarch of Amongst Women, is no bag of laughs. He beats his eldest son Luke, emotionally tyrannises his daughters and is generally scornful towards the local community. He is, however, neither as flinty nor as brutish in this TV drama as he is in the novel. It's not that he has ever been a thug like, say, Charlo from Roddy Doyle's Family. Moran is, after all, a moral man of sorts, even if he characteristically confuses selfish righteousness with altruism.
Typically, his actions are "for the good of this family". Never mind that the members of the family might have healthy and legitimate ambitions of their own - Moran is an individual who allows individuality only to himself. His family is a microcosm of Irish society of the time, hemmed in by authoritarian forces and kept subservient by easily summoned guilt. Into this milieu comes Rose (Ger Ryan), a local woman who has returned home, single, from working in Glasgow.
She brings with her a slice of the larger, outside world. She can understand the intended, albeit harsh decency, of Moran's attitudes. But she can understand too that it is not a noble but a cruel sacrifice of another's life to make Maggie (Moran's eldest daughter) bear the role of surrogate mother and housekeeper. Anyway, in spite of her own family's reservations, Rose marries the considerably older Moran. He, of course, selfless to the core, only weds again "in the best interest of the family".
The grunts, groans and creaking bedspring noises which his daughters hear from the newlyweds' bedroom are, presumably, the sounds of duty, not pleasure, in Moran's universe. His is a world informed (or misinformed) by unyielding notions of mission, deference and obedience and by a conviction that the outside world is generally slack and slovenly. When the post-independence generation set out to fashion the insular Free State as the greatest little Catholic country on Earth, men like Moran were an inevitable result.
While Tony Doyle's screen Moran is not as brutish as the original, literary character, neither is he as dominant within the story. Oh, he remains the central character but his children, though still cowed and seeking escape, are less subservient to his role in the screenplay than in the novel. There is claustrophobia here but Adrian Hodges's screenplay has punched just a few more airholes for the children to breathe. The result is a lessening of dramatic tension and an expansion of focus. Moran was never quite a monster but perhaps he ought to be a little more monstrous than depicted here.
But in terms of pace and tone, this Amongst Women is first rate. It does evoke the feel of its period without depending upon platitudes. It is slow and meaningful among schedules of programmes - including much TV drama - which are increasingly hectic and vacuous. It doesn't skimp on the detail either. When we hear Michael O'Hehir commentating on the radio, it is a commentary from the 1950s. Interviewed for a linked edition of RTE's Undercover on Sunday, McGahern was quick to agree that Ireland has changed hugely since the 1950s. But he was equally adamant that human nature hasn't. This drama understands the point.
BBC's first deal with the Discovery Channel has given birth to The Human Body, a mega-expensive, multi-media trawl through evolution. Presenter Robert Winston sports a Groucho Marx moustache, a detail which leaves you in no doubt that evolution has a cruel, even sadistic, sense of humour. Winston reminded us at every opportunity that the human body (like human nature) evolves incredibly slowly, almost imperceptibly, even though each individual human body changes dramatically through the course of its average 75 years.
The character of this week's opening episode was established by dodgy gimmicks; invasive, inside-the-body camerawork; childlike analogies; exotic locations and litanies of facts. We heard, for instance, that over the course of an average 79-year lifetime (females live longer, you see) newborn Charlotte will watch more than 12 years of television, spend six months in the loo, talk on the phone for two and a half years, grow two metres of hair up her nose, work for eight years, kiss for two and half weeks, have 150 friends, five lovers and sex 2,580 times. (So there - how average are you?)
It was a line of guff principally designed to evoke wonder. We hear variations on this quantitative barrage of facts every time the World Cup or the Olympic Games take place. You know the stuff: enough electric cable to go to the moon and back; enough burgers to dwarf the pyramids; enough Coca-Cola to float the Spanish Armada and so on. But enough is enough and this type of Guinness Book Of Records reductionism - typical of the Discovery Channel, which admits that it aims to fascinate 12year-olds - can skew reality more than explain it.
The programme opened and closed with a camera panning along a line of nudes from infants to geriatrics. Boys and girls, men and women - they stood there in the buff in the middle of a forest, each one a year older than the preceding person. You could see why most of average Charlotte's 2,580 acts of rumpo will be concentrated in the early middle part of her life. I know there's biology involved in this, but there are aesthetic considerations too. Still, evolution has built-in compensations: the nose hair really comes into its own as the final whistle approaches.
There was, of course, both tragedy and comedy to be seen in this peculiarly representative nudist colony. But that only served to lessen the value of Winston's factual "scientific" perspective. In fairness, he recognised the limitations of his approach at times. Filling buckets with Thames water, he showed us the volume of tears that the average person cries in a lifetime. (For the record, it's almost 65 litres or 1,850,000 drops.) He did admit that the reasons why so many tears should be shed was an altogether more imporant question.
But he didn't really have satisfactory answers, preferring instead to show us a micro camera showing us how the eyes produce tears "which flow down a capillary about the width of a human hair". Emotional history, it would seem, is better dealt with by art than by science. Still, Winston, with Magnus Pike enthusiasm, careered onwards. "It surely is the greatest story ever told," he said in summing up this opening episode. And, yes, he could argue his case.
But stories, as, for instance, Amongst Women demonstrates, are as much in the telling as in the content. Less manufactured awe - or more measure and less measurement - would improve it. Those of us over 12 have only limited buckets of amazement left.
`In the 1960s in London, women's bodies became for some men the way of making money," began Secret History: The Porn King, The Stripper And The Bent Coppers. Clearly, amongst men and amongst women too, the human body has not just biological and aesthetic values, but a commercial one. (Can't you hear the tiger purring?). Anyway, this was a story of how, in Swinging London, nobody swung more than Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad. Truly, their corruption was obscene.
Interviewing former porn supremo, Jim Humphreys and his wife, Rusty Gaynor, the queen of strippers in 1960s Soho, this documentary showed how simple bribing the coppers actually was. The sliding scale for the size of bribes was a little more complicated - a tenner here and there to beat coppers; £2,000 a month (£20,000 in today's value) to Wally Virgo, commander of Scotland Yard's serious crime branch; in-between amounts, depending upon the number of stripes on your sleeve.
It's reasonable to expect the pimps, prostitutes and pornographers to be corrupt. That's part of the gig, isn't it? But the level of police corruption was more awesome than any of Robert Winston's facts. When the scam was finally broken, a dozen coppers were jailed and 478 forced to resign. When Robert Mark arrived as Metropolitan Police commissioner in the early 1970s, his pledge was to arrest more criminals than he employed. Perhaps it's all ultra-ethical nowadays but this week's TV themes and lessons about unchanging human nature should strip away any complacency.
Finally, Questions And Answers. There has been some rough stuff in the last two weeks in the run up to yesterday's referendums. Ken Maginnis's document which crushed Robert McCartney was pure TV drama. McCartney's supporters sniggering at Maginnis and jeering him as "an old fool" was pure TV ignorance. Less offensive, but questionable nonetheless, was John Bowman's hectoring this week of Bernadette McAliskey.
There were strong arguments for voting "No", although, on balance, these are probably slightly outweighed by the arguments for voting "Yes" (not that anyone can predict the future). Nonetheless, the media have been suspiciously unbalanced in their push to have the agreement passed. We can agree with their sentiments and still complain about their degree of fairness. Certainly John Bowman, so measured and aware of context in his recent series about John Charles McQuaid (the man who had John McGahern sacked as a schoolteacher!), did not appear like an unbiased referee this week.
The layers of claustrophobia have changed since John McGahern's time. Ironically, it was television more than anything else which dismantled the old order. Now, however, new methods of telling you how to think have evolved. Oh, it's all "liberal" and "open" and less authoritarian - but, in so many ways, it's just a slick version of the old methods. The times change alright but human nature doesn't - that's why whatever way the vote goes (pushed by the politicians' compliant media) political evolution in the North will remain almost as slow as Robert Winston's biological model.