True Lives (RTE 1, Monday)
Elizabeth Bowen - Death Of The Heart (RTE 1, Tuesday)
The Vice (ITV, Monday)
Holiday Guide To. . . (BBC 1, Sunday)
Wish You Were Here. . . ? (ITV, Monday)
IT'S got to be the ultimate bilingual Freudian slip: "Right lads, take out your `Mici Mor An tSaoils'." Even decades later, the explosion of smutty laughter among a class of spotty 17-year-olds remains lodged in memory. Along with the likes of Peig, Bullai Mhartain and Dialann Deorai, Mici MacGowan's Rotha Mor an tSaoil (The Big Wheel of Life) used to be a staple text in secondary schools. One teacher, however, regularly referred to it as "Mici Mor An tSaoil". Funny how the crude stuff is always more memorable, isn't it?
Looking back the irony, of course, is that MacGowan's adventure memoir is about as unFreudian as it is possible to imagine. In an age of public confessions, when publishers' ideal memoir writers ought (before finding salvation) to have been sexually-abused, bank-robbing, former junkie transsexuals with a history of groupiedom, prostitution and football hooliganism, Michael McGowan's Rotha Mor an tSaoil is a simple, old-fashioned adventure yarn about an ordinary man in an extraordinary place. True Lives: The Hard Road to Klondike, directed by Desmond Bell and narrated by Stephen Rea, is the TV documentary of MacGowan's story.
It was impressive, following MacGowan's trail from his native Donegal through Scotland, America and the Yukon. One of 12 children, MacGowan recalled the rent-a-slave system of the hiring fairs. Aged 12, he was hired out to work for a Lagan Valley farmer. At 15, he walked 50 miles to Derry, where he boarded a ship to Glasgow. In Scotland, he worked in the potato fields but, like many other Irish labourers, had to bed down in stables with livestock. At the time, many Scots treated Irish migrant workers like many Irish treat Romanians today. After frequent violent skirmishes, MacGowan headed for America "where the castles are made of gold".
There, he marvelled at New York City before moving on to Pennsylvania to become an ironworker. Seven years later, aged 27, MacGowan headed for Montana's silver mines, where he stayed a further seven years before the Klondike goldrush drew him up the Yukon. Certainly, it is a story with a large canvas - a composite of memoir, travel/adventure and oral history. It is also a deeply conservative tale: MacGowan, fleeing colonialism, became part of the white oppression of native Americans and, small fortune made, returned to Donegal, where he bought a house and farm which had belonged to a landlord's agent.
So there's none of your PC or Freudian nonsense in this one. Indeed, unlike contemporary memoir, there is little in the way of an inner life revealed at all. There are, though, occasional telling episodes, notably MacGowan's choosing of pragmatism over romance and his reaction to being left by his fellow Donegal travellers to die of frostbite on the Yukon trail. The latter experience left him cold in every way. As an illustration of the ruthlessness and greed which underpins the American Dream, this episode was revealing. But, for the most part, MacGowan's story, though it sometimes recognises contradictions and larger truths, avoids emotion.
Still, whatever this documentary lacked in explicit feeling was compensated for with atmosphere. The music of Iarla O Lionaird, Christine Tobin and Lillis O Laoire, accompanying images selected to retell MacGowan's story, brought alive ways of life now long gone and hardly remembered. Seeing, for instance, footage of defeated native Americans being "ministered to" by white, Christian clerics reminded you of just how the American west was won with a coalition of white forces. Choosing early cinema clips to accompany the narrative was appealing too, although in TV there's always a danger of writing to available pictures, even when accuracy demands that the pairing-off be done the other way around.
Despite the acknowledged fact that few faculties can be more unreliable than memory, memoir is probably the hippest genre of our times. Frank McCourt, Blake Morrison and Nuala O'Faolain have achieved notable success in the 1990s. Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (about her incestuous relationship with her da) caused a storm in the US. Against such confessional writing, Michael MacGowan does seem hopelessly dated. But that, in ways, is the point. Formed by poverty in the years after the Famine, MacGowan, like the rest of his peasant contemporaries, felt it necessary to suppress his emotional life.
Introspection becomes a luxury under such circumstances. His goal was survival and, if possible, some savings. The primary value of this story is therefore as a historical, not a psychological, record. The life led by MacGowan was quite typical of the lives of many Irish migrant workers at the end of the last century. A century on, it seems incredibly harsh. But watching it, you'd be tempted to wonder if nowadays too many memoir writers excessively stress feelings over facts in pursuit of dramatic effects. This was not a sophisticated story - but in spite of its lack of overt emotion, it was moving. It also reminded you how big, until relatively recently, the world used to be.
THE world of Elizabeth Bowen was, geographically at least, less exotic than that of Michael MacGowan. As an Anglo-Irish woman, split not just between the Anglos and the Irish, but, as a child, farmed out to various aunts, we can understand why her life appears so hyphenated. Indeed Sean O Mordha's Elizabeth Bowen - Death Of The Heart framed the writer as a compendium of contradictions. She was happily married but had numerous affairs; she was attracted - and attractive - to both men and women; she claimed to love Ireland but spied here for the British.
One hundred years after her birth it is easy to see how Bowen connects to the larger history of Ireland. Her caste - she came from a family settled by Cromwell - was in decline as history began to favour the Mici MacGowans of the world. Not surprisingly, her writings often cast the destroyed big house as a symbol for an emotional life gone awry. But perhaps the most intriguing fault line which was explored by O Mordha was that between the Anglo-Irish and their British class equivalents. "England made me a writer," said Bowen. Fair enough, but it was difficult to believe that, had she been born there, the process would have been similar.
Her milieu comprised of wittering nobs, lefty intellectuals and wealthy bohemians. Her friends included Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot. Typically, it was the sort of set-up in which it could be difficult to distinguish people from buildings: her big house was called Bowen's Court; one of her big lovers was known as Humphrey House. Still, despite such shades of Bertie Wooster, Bowen's writing examined grand themes, not trivia. The theme of betrayal is characteristic of her work. "Life with the lid on," she would say, "can be maintained only for so long."
Near the end of her life, Elizabeth Bowen took to the lecture circuit in the United States. In need of money, she was well paid. But the lid came off life while she was there and she suffered a nervous breakdown. It's tempting to think that her life was a microcosm of the dying days of the Anglo-Irish set. But it's seldom that simple. Bowen, whatever about the contradictions in her circumstances - indeed, most likely because of them - remained an individual throughout. She stammered, and hearing her on archive TV footage was like hearing a last, dying voice from a dying breed.
Because Bowen has never been accorded the status of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, this latest Sean O Mordha literary biography attracted less attention. But the characteristic, mood-building techniques were all there. Atmosphere is crucial in Bowen's writing and atmosphere is crucial in O Mordha documentaries. Along with various talking heads - Hermione Lee, Victoria Glendinning, Roy Foster, among them - period music recalled a faded world. At times, it veered between legitimately wistful and dangerously sentimental. But O Mordha's sense of proportion let the lid off this story without undue sensationalism.
IN contrast, The Vice turned out to be a sleazefest. Cop opera has been getting more blue in recent seasons and this one is near the front of the charge. Porn videos, internet porn, an escort agency, drugs and an audition which included the Clinton/ Lewinsky position were all featured. Mici Mor An tSaoil would hardly be in it. The plot centred on a drug importer who is a member of Britain's House of Lords. Young vice detective Doug has to go undercover at an escort agency but finds that he becomes obsessed with getting the £250-a-trick women to uncover themselves.
This was the opening episode in a two-parter subtitled Dabbling. It's an appropriate word for it seems as if the makers are intent on cramming in as many different kinds of sleaze as possible. There was nothing outrageous in Dabbling - just a constant diet of measured sleaze, enough to keep punters hooked without causing complaints. As a prime time cop show, The Vice is a reasonable barometer for the state of mainstream television these times. That state is `blue with the lid on'. . . but it's loosening.
FINALLY, travel programmes: Holiday Guide To. . . which looked at cruising and Wish You Were Here. . . ? which visited Palma, the Dolomites, Cuba and Mount Kilimanjaro. The first cruise was along the coast of Alaska - Mici MacGowan country - and what a difference a century has made. Now people go to such remote places on floating holiday camps - Butlins on the sea, not just by it. Certainly it all makes for a different order of "wilderness experience" than that experienced by the goldrush miners. Oh, the views were spectacular - but it was all lamentably tame.
The wildest turns on most of these holiday programmes appear to be the reporters. Vivacious, funloving extroverts, they certainly know how to project. Cleo Rocco, one of the Wish You Were Here. . . ? reporters, shouted, preened and constantly jiggled her chest and behind at the camera. She was in Cuba, but projecting so much that her head was in Hollywood. There's got to be a balance between the sobriety needed to establish viewers' confidence in a consumer programme and the desire to reflect a holiday mood. But when people blot out places with wild performances of extroversion, that balance is sunk.
And there you have it. The measured accounts of the Mici MacGowan school of memoir/travel/adventure have been supplanted not only by writers stressing real emotion but, even in humble consumer programmes, by hacks and hackettes indulging in false emotional exhibitionism. Personality is one thing but even the hard road to Klondike would seem preferable to having to spend a holiday with most holiday programme reporters. There were compensations as well as hardships when the world was bigger.