`All stories are love stories," reads the pre-title credit which unspools across the night sky of Belfast in Eureka Street, the four-part adaptation of Robert McLiam Wilson's satirical novel beginning next week on RTE. It's a proclamation lifted directly from the first line of McLiam Wilson's book, but in this context it reads as well as a pre-emptive strike against any definition of Eureka Street as a "Troubles drama", a genre which tends to cause viewers to reach for their zappers in droves.
Every film or television drama set in Northern Ireland is about the Troubles, even if it tries to ignore them. The late, great Alan Clarke, the finest television drama director of the 1980s, recognised this when he made his 1989 TV film, Elephant, which stripped away all the trappings of genre storytelling and cliche with which writers usually cloak the grim business of sectarian conflict. In Elephant (the title comes from the expression that "living with the troubles is like ignoring an elephant in your sitting room"), there are no love-across-the-divide stories, no loving mammies, no cold-hearted paramilitary godfathers; just a sequence of re-enacted murders, shot in long, continuous takes without music or dialogue. It's a raw, ruthless, brilliant piece of film-making, but it doesn't offer much succour to hard-nosed television executives looking for popular drama in an increasingly commercial and competitive era.
BBC Northern Ireland is the single most important drama producer by far on this island, and in recent years has been a highly successful exporter of Irish television series to the UK. Under the BBC's current structures, regional departments develop ideas which are then pitched to the decision-makers in London, and under its head of drama, Robert Cooper, BBC NI has had an excellent strike rate with popular dramas like Amongst Women, Falling for a Dancer, Ballykissangel and The Ambassador. But the channel has had some difficulty in dealing with the elephant in its own sitting room.
With the exception of Graham Reid's TV films, there was a long period in which the BBC seemed to be making most of its drama in the Republic, to the chagrin of some commentators in the North. BBC administrators freely admit that factors like tax incentives had some part to play, but that the key motivating factor was the metropolitan network's preference for stories set in the nice, non-violent South rather than the murderous, confusing North. As a major drama series filmed on location in Belfast and explicitly focused on the conflict, Eureka Street marks a new step for the channel (the series is notionally produced "in association" with RTE, which claims to have had a "considerable involvement", although, as with Amongst Women and Falling for a Dancer, its creative and financial input is distinctly subordinate).
Described by its screenwriter, Donna Franceschild, as "an antiwar novel in the tradition of books like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five", Eureka Street takes no prisoners in depicting a Belfast populated by fools, cynics and psychopaths. Told in the words of Jake, a "debt counsellor" (actually a repo man, who takes people's tellies and furniture away when they fall behind on their payments), it focuses on the exploits of one Chuckie Lurgan (Mark Benton), an unemployed, overweight, 30-year-old Belfast Prod who sets out to re-invent himself as a thrusting young entrepreneur, courtesy of a £1 million grant from the always-willing-to-help "Ulster Development Board". Meanwhile, thugs roam the streets and a cryptic new message is recurring on the city's graffiti-sprayed walls.
Eureka Street is not without its flaws. The novel's sprawling canvas and multiple plotlines don't lend themselves easily to the requirements of serial TV drama. If you haven't read the book, you may find yourself occasionally at sea. Like another Northern satirist, Colin Bateman, McLiam Wilson is overly fond of telling his stories through the eyes of cynical, quasi-existential, anti-heroes who happen to be irresistible to women (which may tell us something about the self-image of the current generation of Northern male writers).
A strong female cast, including Dervla Kirwan, Sorcha Cusack and Elisabeth Rohm, doesn't really have much to do beyond disapprovingly watching the misdemeanours of their male counterparts and occasionally falling into bed with them. But it's definitely worth catching for its mordant sense of humour, and there's a perfectly-judged comic performance from Mark Benton as the unlikely businessman, Chuckie.
Best of all, there's an edge to the whole thing, and a willingness to take risks, which is rare enough in Irish drama, North or South. McLiam Wilson has a genuine anger about the sleazy equivocations over paramilitary violence, as his documentary about punishment beatings, The Baseball Bat in Irish History, showed a couple of years ago. A scene in next Thursday's opening episode hilariously parodies the self-serving sentimentality of Provos-turned-writers with a depiction of a public reading at which an ex-prisoner reads his poem: From a Sniper to a British Soldier Who is About to Die. Jake's loyalist boss recounts how the only cure for his insomnia is to dream of a neutron bomb which only kills Taigs. There's a recurring gag, parodying a certain Nobel Prizewinning poet, whose lines are paraphrased as: "The blah blah under the brown blah of the blah blah hedges/I blahhed her blah with the heft of my spade."
If the transition from page to screen is sometimes heavy-handed (and it is), it's outweighed by the pleasure of seeing some genuine black comedy in a culture which badly needs more vigorous satire.
Eureka Street starts next Thursday at 10.10 p.m. on RTE1
