Vicious Circle (BBC 1, 10 p.m., Tuesday)
Michael Hartnett (TnaG, 10.30 p.m., Sunday)
O'Gorman's People (RTE 1, 8 p.m., Wednesday)
love.co.uk (C4, 10.30 p.m., Wednesday)
`I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," goes the old Hollywood quip (made by a Tinseltown worthy whose name escapes me). Well, now we can add an Irish corollary: and before she became the favourite easy listening of Dublin's leading criminal. Vicious Circle, a featurelength thriller about the late Martin Cahill - The General - portrayed Ireland's best-known anorak (sorry, Bertie, high office has clearly dumbed-up your wardrobe) as an avid fan of the virginal Ms Day's version of Che Sara Sara, the anthem of bubblegum fatalism.
As a detail of characterisation, the irony of linking a top criminal and a top virgin was pertinent. The greater irony, however, is that the glaring weakness of this otherwise strong drama was the lack of meaningful characterisation of its central figure. There were no indications as to how Martin Cahill came to be as he was. Little motivation - other than wanting to be top hood and taking the mick out of coppers - was ascribed to him. In fact, this General was so patchily drawn that even particulars, such as his liking for Doris Day and pigeons, increased, rather than explained his enigma.
Still, as a thriller (a legitimate description even though we knew the outcome from the start), Vicious Circle was impressive. Written by Kieran Prendiville and directed by David Blair, it starred Ken Stott in the central role. Stott, whose recent portrayal of a cop in ITV's The Vice was the series's highlight, made a recognisable General - but largely because most of us know the major elements of the story/myth. The result was that Stott's General, part cute and part boorish, made a believable documentary figure. However, for viewers unfamiliar with the story/myth of Martin Cahill, his character must have appeared unfinished if not unbelievable.
The standard thriller elements of car chases, dramatic tension and a fast pace were well done. One scene set in Dublin's docklands involved stunts between cars and an Iarnrod Eireann train. If it wasn't quite Speed, it was nonetheless exciting. Dublin, too, looked the part with expansive views from the Bailey lighthouse, the Dublin mountains and the sweep of sea off Clontarf atmospherically, as well as geographically, framing the city scenes of local authority estates, inner city flats and derelict warehouses.
It was in one such warehouse that we saw Cahill nail an accomplice, whom he mistakenly believes has double-crossed him, to the floor. The episode, whether apocryphal or not, has become a part of Dublin legend. For the most part, though, the violence in this drama was neither excessive nor gratuitous. Certainly, it wasn't a slasher movie (even though the criminals and the coppers enjoyed taking blades to tyres). It was therefore a greater pity that so much of its characterisation was as shallow as that
genre.
Primarily it was Cahill's character which perplexed. But John Kavanagh, as an IRA leader, was similarly two-dimensional. Wearing a cold stare and a Gestapo-style leather coat, he appeared menacing but strangely unreal: a Provo playing at being a Bond super villain. After he had arranged for Cahill to be murdered, we saw him alone in his home, staring at a 1916 Proclamation while savouring a glass of whiskey: Patrick "The Jackal" Pearse! Yaboyya! Cahill had given the IRA, as well as the Garda, i, the runaround. But (in this depiction of Cahill's life) it was the IRA who killed him - even though the film didn't eliminate the possibility that the coppers had facilitated the ambush.
Perhaps too much time was devoted to the Russborough House art robbery. Sure, Cahill, determined to be Ireland's all-time top robber (remember, this was in innocent, pre-Tribunal days), planned and executed the crime splendidly. But then he couldn't sell the too-famous paintings. When he made contact with the UVF to fence his pictures, the IRA was never going to be best pleased. Beside the dark IRA and the bumbling coppers, this General was not an unsympathetic figure. He was, in fact, something of a ruthless Robin Hood, an image which is becoming canonised as the on-screen Cahill legend.
Centrally, there was also the ludicrous idea, pushed by certain media with an eye to sales, of Dublin as a bandit capital of the universe. "When are you going to realise that Dublin is turning into Dodge City about your ears . . . ?" one detective demands of another. It was the sort of media-driven, populist distortion which was responsible for crime becoming, after personal taxation, the most "important issue" during the last general election. Vicious Circle (although "Vicious Triangle" would have been more accurate) was ultimately a similar fiction.
Its central character was a former Irish criminal given elements of an old, rob-the-rich-to-help-the-poor English folk hero. The plot, which was centrally about the theft of European high art, was given a standard, American popular thriller treatment. When we saw jacketless Dublin detectives wearing shoulder holsters and heard their guff, we were into "Store Street Blues" territory. In making use of tried-and-tested techniques, it was entertaining alright. Ultimately though, it was as planned "with military precision" as any of Cahill's escapades. The General would have enjoyed it. It adds to his myth and it confirms that globalisation (i.e. American methods) continues to drive TV drama.
`HE'S not like anybody else," said Seamus Heaney of fellow poet Michael Hartnett. It was the sort of sentiment which the makers of Vicious Circle wanted audiences to believe about Martin Cahill. In the case of Hartnett however, it appears to be true. "He has the inheritance of Irish traditions in him - a combination of the avant-garde and the folk touch," added Heaney. Certainly the picture painted on Michael Hartnett: Necklace of Wrens was that its subject was primarily a poets' poet.
Not as well known as some of his contemporaries, Hartnett nonetheless was heavily praised. It may be, of course, that because he is not quite as well known as some other practising poets, Harnett was spared the bitchiness often heard in poets-on-other-poets discourse. But the contributors appeared genuine in their warmth and praise. For his part, Hartnett confirmed their judgments. "I'm very much a loner," he said, often a pregnant type of self-assessment, which can say as much about the ego as about poetic introspection. In Hartnett's case however, the remark was strikingly devoid of any affectation.
It's just the way he is and he knows it, reminding us that humility is not, at heart, about self-mortification but about being at one with the facts. Hartnett, insisting that he'd be "a Gael", gave up writing in English for a long period. "His turn back to Irish had nothing to do with cultural nationalism but with his own gift, with his sense of his own calling," said Heaney. In this age of propaganda through soundbite culture (in which polemicists and vacuous, pseudo-liberals have conspired to accord even the Irish language the whiff of terrorism), Heaney's distinction matters.
Prone to periodic benders, Michael Hartnett has his own way of drying out. Gradually reducing his intake of drink, he really dries down instead of out. He also has reclusive periods during which he leaves the phone off the hook and won't open mail. In a world of mobile phones, pagers, faxes and email, Hartnett's example may become a blueprint for sanity. In a world, too, in which Paul Durcan, aggrandisingly ascribing sacramental reverence and mysticism to poetry, said that Hartnett "is steeped in the holy books of the world", we should be grateful for Hartnett's down-to-earthness. And anyway, any man who can come up with a title like Inchicore Haiku knows the score.
BACK in the real, un-Robin Hood world of Dublin's poor, O'Gorman's People visited Ballymun. With Bono belting out his lines about the "seven towers", we saw some aerial shots of the flats. On the ground, Paddy O'Gorman was talking to unmarried mothers and deserted wives. The accounts he heard revealed tough lives often lived with extraordinary bravery and optimism. Against the odds of circumstances and bureaucracy (just think about Tribunal revelations!), many of the women interviewed seemed genuinely heroic.
Crucially, O'Gorman, though sometimes blunt, was never patronising in bleeding-heart, liberal mode. But for all its bravery and optimism, the story had a sad ending. One of the principal interviewees, Antoinette King, a former heroin addict, was almost bloated on hope for the future. She was off smack, getting her life together and reading Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell. She used to think, she said, that she wouldn't be able to understand such stuff. But she had found out that her lack of self-belief was merely founded on misguided beliefs, not facts.
Since the programme was made, Antoinette King, a separated mother of two, died in a fall from one of Ballymun's tower blocks. After the credits had scrolled through the top of the screen, Antoinette's picture and a note on her death appeared. It was moving, reminding us too that Darwinism is about the survival of the fittest or the best-adapted, not the most deserving. To give up heroin and start rebuilding a life against serious odds . . . it seemed too sad and too cruel really. Such tragedies are more representative of Dublin's poor than thrillers about enigmatic criminals.
FINALLY, in lighter vein, given the weekend that's in it, love.co.uk looked at cyber-romance for Valentine's Day. The mobile phones, pagers, faxes and email which Michael Hartnett (and other sane people) shut out from time to time, are now, it seems, the main transmission systems for messages of love and lust. The big, sloppy card festooned with suggestive, adolescent verses is on the way out as more and more people turn on to love in the information age.
Mind you, some of the punters in this programme used their laptops as though they were merely electronic versions of the traditional, sloppy cards. So, if you see swish, young(ish) things this weekend carrying laptops and mobiles, chances are they have even more smut than usual on their minds. Certainly, on the evidence of this programme, a plain, hard, call-a-spade-a-spade style seems to be nudging out the gentler, more suggestive style previously characteristic of love guff at a distance.
Indeed, we saw one bloke - laptop (laptop computer!) out in the middle of a shopping centre - go online for a session of cyber-sex. After a few initial pleasantries, he and his cyber-companion were down to business. And business it was: the language was closer to that of gynaecology and urology than that of traditional romance. Whether or not the new bluntness is any worse than the hypocrisy and pretence of the Doris Day era is another matter. Log on and spew out seems to be the gig these times, as the modem joins the condom as a love accessory.