TV Review:'Hidden in plain sight" was how Ross Hamilton, the wryly articulate son of the late Fr Michael Cleary, described the circumstances of his family life in Alison Millar's riveting documentary, At Home With the Clearys.
Christmas 1991: Ireland's "singing priest", a charismatic performer and savvy pundit who had become the Catholic Church's unofficial media spokesman on issues of morality, allowed young film-maker Millar unprecedented access to his private life when she moved in with Cleary and his unacknowledged family to make a film about his busy career. Footage from this film (plus clips from the archive) showed the priest - confident, lanky, nicotine-soaked - broadcasting on his radio talk-show; swinging his mike at live cabarets; defending priestly celibacy (and advocating the same for wannabe fornicators) on The Late Late Show; whipping up the rapturous Galway crowds for Pope John Paul II's 1979 youth Mass; and relaxing - fag permanently glowing between his garrulous lips - at the races, at the football and at home with his partner, Phyllis, their dancing dog and their teenage son, Ross.
During Millar's filming of this time, nobody knew, or nobody wanted to know, that this "star", this man whom his niece described as being "destined for the priesthood since birth", had a lover and a son. Phyllis, a vulnerable character and a victim of sexual abuse, met Cleary when she was just 17 and training to be a nurse. She soon moved in with him as his "housekeeper", and subsequently gave birth to two of his children (her first son was adopted). When Ross arrived, she fought to have him remain at home with his parents, which the boy eventually did, despite an uncertain infancy.
At Home With the Clearys movingly revisited the scenes of Millar's original film, with Ross Hamilton, now adult, filling Millar in on the rest of the story after her student camera had been turned off in the early 1990s. He told her of life in the turbulent household following the revelations about his father's friend and confidant, the former bishop of Galway, Dr Eamonn Casey, who also had a son (a fact which Casey never revealed to Cleary), and of Cleary's subsequent death from throat cancer in 1993. When the story of Cleary's quasi-marriage broke, Phyllis and Ross, unsupported by both Cleary's church and his extended family, published a book about their lives. A few years later, still mired in prurient interest and hostility, Phyllis died from ovarian cancer.
A man with the inherent charisma of his father and poignant traces of his mother's fragility, Ross had had to resort to DNA testing to prove that Cleary was his father. Ross's identity having been negotiated between the tight sheets of hypocrisy and humanity, his father went to his grave without ever publicly acknowledging his son.
This was a film of surprisingly stirring images: windswept Ballyfermot shivering in the cold winds of the 1970s, footballers on their knees before bishops, Cleary talking to giggling gaggles of blushing schoolgirls about the dangers of young men and their unexpected emissions. The film was a dark hucklebuck of parsimonious decades, when many relieved the tedium of a poor, cold country by throwing stones in glasshouses, condemning the boatloads of lonely girls crossing the Irish Sea while turning a blind eye to the misdemeanours of the frocked religious. But it also generously revealed the desperate frailty and humanity of a character frozen in the aspic of his time; ultimately, it allowed us feel for Cleary, a man whom everybody, not least his son, called "father".
SO WHAT'S WITH the scheduling, guys? For crying out loud, there was NOTHING on RTÉ for months, then an important new drama, Prosperity, comes along - a drama with serious credentials, made by the team behind the successful Irish film Adam and Paul (writer Mark O'Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson) - and what happens? It gets stuck on RTÉ2 slap-bang in the middle of At Home with the Clearys! Just who makes these decisions about our viewing tastes? Is it assumed that Prosperity will only be watched by weary young thangs who can just about stomach a watery latte and a night in front of the box after a riveting weekend, while the rest of us crumpled old yokes (that's anyone who was breathing independently in 1979) will have no interest in a "hard-hitting" drama with young people in it. It is a nonsense, and one suspects that the first film in this cogent and weighty new series was missed by many due to sloppy planning.
Prosperity is made up of interlinking stories set in and around Dublin on the same day, each part focusing on a character that the boom seems to have left behind. Part one featured Stacy (Siobhán Shanahan) a teenage mother living in a hostel on the North Circular Road. Reminiscent of (and perhaps overly influenced by) Ken Loach's groundbreaking Cathy Come Home, the film was low-key, naturalistic and constantly on the move, as were the homeless Stacy and her infant daughter wrapped in her pram.
Stacy's tedious but personally momentous day was set against the background of our chrome-plated capital: she woke, she walked, she sat by architectural windows in busy shopping malls, her baby cried, her boyfriend humiliated her, a lonely security guard befriended her, she drank a beer by the canal, a man approached, the canal water rippled, he drank, he left. Stacy's impassive features barely registered the intrusion. Nothing earth-shaking, just layer after gently crafted layer of her despondence and terrifying vulnerability.
This was a story driven not by events but by the long, slow, pale, relentless drain of poverty and loss, and strangely, held echoes of the Cleary documentary - Stacy's world seeming as restricted by lack of opportunity as it might have been 30 years before. Diligently written, gently humorous and beautifully shot, the series' journey through the disparate, almost absurdly inequitable city that Dublin has become continues over the next three weeks. It would be useful if the national broadcaster refrained from further sabotaging the event; crisply good drama is a rare enough sighting on the home screen.
FANCY A TRIP to "a summit of pan-European institutions based on humanitarian principles", anyone? No? You could wear your doublet and hose. Thomas Wolsey (along with his temporary ally, Thomas More) was a man ahead of his time and should have stuck around for the introduction of the single currency. Goodness me, The Tudors are here. Well, some of the Tudors are here anyway - the big new American drama (which has just made it to this side of the pond) decided to cut straight to the chase and kick off with Henry VIII, dispensing with the boring bit about his father, Henry VII, who failed to have six wives and die of syphilis. And why not, given that Henry jnr was all sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll (well, wives 'n' wenches 'n' mead 'n' jousting to be precise, but you know what I mean).
There is more sex in The Tudors than there are horses, there's more sex in The Tudors than there are beheadings, there's even more sex in The Tudors than there are Irish actors, which is saying something. The 10-part drama was partially shot in Ireland and stars the startlingly chiselled Jonathan Rhys Meyers as horrid Henry alongside a bevy of local actors, including Maria Doyle Kennedy as his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Good news for thesps - these fat, rich, lavish productions subsidise the theatre industry here; a couple of weeks on a gig like this and they can afford to take a stage job.
Anyway, back to the sex. It's all terribly, roguishly manly and involves much jaw acting and eyebrow-arching and pomegranate-munching before young actresses and their expensive tresses get turfed on to antique beds without their dresses. It's a big laugh; "swallow your treason down like poison" and watch it.
"YOU WON'T GET away with a cha-cha-cha without your hip action." Thomas More might have fancied this one if he hadn't been disembowelled or eaten by his hairshirt or whatever happened the poor internationalist. It's the "inaugural pan-European dance championship", aka The Eurovision Dance Contest - I kid you not.
"Raymond has been dancing since birth, which is quite an achievement," said a merrily irreverent Marty Whelan. "And here are Brendan and Camilla - well-known for her leg action." Bren and Cam were representing the UK, and their smiles could shatter glass. Although the couple had recently split up because he was sleeping with a newsreader, they rumba'd on anyway to the wailing anthem of Barbra Streisand's The Way We Were, unsuccessfully attempting to rip each other's costumes off - but (unlike the Velcro) they came undone.
We (I can say "we" having never worn a pair of Irish-dancing shoes in my life) did awfully well, coming click-clack third with a kind of Celtic fandango.
But for the sake of my mental health, I might just "pasa doble" on round two of this "lawless realm of dance".
