Innocents Lost - Channel 4, Monday and Tuesday
No More Blooms - RTE 1, Wednesday
True Lives - RTE 1, Monday
Painted Lady - ITV, Sunday and Monday
The child's eyes had been gouged out and his tongue severed. It wasn't enough that they should kill him, his police murderers mutilated him too. During this season of manufactured Tellytubby mania and super-slick ads for Barbie, Lego and the rest, Innocents Lost, made by Brian Woods and Kate Blewett, provided reports of child hells on Earth. Although it faltered in seeking answers, it was the most momentous television documentary of 1997.
It was Woods and Blewett who revealed the horrors of Chinese orphanages in The Dying Rooms and Return To The Dying Rooms. For their latest revelations, they travelled to 21 countries to show how callously many governments have abandoned 100 million children to lives of unspeakable torment, torture and terror. The result, screened over two nights, was among the most grim programmes you are ever likely to see.
The opening episode reported from Latin America, Russia and Greece. About 40 million of the world's homeless children live - or rather, exist - in Latin America. Having fled from broken and/or abusive families, tiny kids spoke about sniffing glue, working as prostitutes (including being raped by policemen) and about their friends being murdered. Sometimes coppers kick kids to death, or shoot them, or electrocute them in barrels of water, or set fire to them. Sometimes too, they mutilate them by gouging out eyes, cutting off ears, tongues and who knows what else?
We saw a still photograph of the haggard face of one dead boy, aged perhaps nine, but maybe only six or seven, whose eyes had been gouged out. So ghastly was the picture that murderous anger seemed the only appropriate emotional response. We saw the "Resistoleros" (kids who sniff the dreadfully toxic glue, Resistol) of Guatemala City. Anaesthetising themselves to cope with one hell, they end up in another. Their central nervous systems, their kidneys, their lungs, their brains often suffer irreversible damage.
In Kirovgrad, a former Soviet gulag in The Urals, 14-year-old boys serve two- and three-year sentences for stealing even loose change. As Russian society crumbles, there is massive public pressure to be tough on child crime. The camp's commandant, a beefy bloke with an expression slung between resignation and bewilderment said: "Officially they are criminals. But in fact they are just children."
The commandant had allowed in the cameras in the naive hope that western countries might send money. Asked what he looked forward to, one broken boy pondered the question. "Nothing," he answered. "Nothing." At 14!
In Greece, children with disabilities can end up in "institutes for the unlucky ones". Tied to cots (in some cases, padlocked into single-bed-size cages) and starved of any stimulation, many grow to adulthood and die in these infernal places. Their existence, you see, can seriously damage the marriage prospects of siblings. Ms Blewett stroked one little girl on the head. The child smiled as though she had landed in heaven. A young woman, Anastasia, told how she has lived in the same bed for 15 years. None of her family ever comes to see her.
And so it went, clusters of harrowing scenes interspersed with little children poignantly reciting from the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The second programme showed us five-year-olds who had been kidnapped, aged three, in Bangladesh to train as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates; child prostitutes in Ghana; tiny domestic servants - slaves, really - in Togo. Even allowing for the luxury and easy (if terribly misplaced) moral indignation of our First World perspective, Innocents Lost showed humankind in a deeply shameful light . . . or darkness.
So enormous are the problems and so harrowing was much of the film, that alongside murderous anger, many viewers will have felt a hopeless sense of individual impotence. What can you do? Who is to blame? Woods and Blewett flailed around for villains but couldn't quite explain why the situation is so appalling. Instead, they used the frequently cloying music of Steve Cooke and Russell Taylor to prompt us towards "appropriate" feeling. This was a mistake. The starkness was so acute that it should not have been media-massaged in this way. Even more pointedly, the ruthlessness of international capital should have been more fully indicted.
TO mark last Wednesday as UN Human Rights Day, RTE screened three nights of programmes devoted to the subject of refugees. Few people were prepared to say it plainly: Ireland has been and is a racist little island, huffing and puffing its special pleading when it comes to emigration, but narrow, smug and resistant, or, at best indifferent, when people wish to come here.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, as contributors to Louis Lentin's fine dramatised documentary No More Blooms pointed out, Christian Ireland (Catholic and Protestant) did not want to take in Jews. Nowadays the refugees are not Jews and Ireland is not nearly so dominated by religion. But the Celtic Tiger (I'm sorry, but the vile phrase seemed appropriate here) has made money its religion and is every bit as xenophobic as the Christian Tiger was 50 or 60 years ago.
Of course, Ireland, like every other country, must operate some immigration controls. But the anti-immigration zeal displayed on Tuesday's Prime Time by Aine Ni Chonaill of Cork was, quite simply, appalling and shameful. So vehement was Ms Ni Chonaill, that you had to suspect (even hope) she was motivated by some bitter personal experience. At present, according to the programme, there are about 20 million refugees worldwide, of whom about 17,000 are in the Republic of Ireland.
RTE's refugee programming - whether primarily prompted by the subject itself or by Mary Robinson's new UN job (a crucial point) - began with the gentle, nostalgic True Lives: Operation Shamrock. This one told the story of how hundreds of German orphans were brought to this country after the second World War. Focusing on individuals grappling with their identities, it was ably and engagingly presented by Elizabeth O'Gorman, who settled here and is proud to be Irish. Hildegarde Jones, on the other hand, would still prefer to go back permanently to Germany.
However, after this mild introduction, the refugee series became - and rightly so - more contentious. In all, there were five programmes on the subject (two Prime Times and three documentaries: the two mentioned and a repeat one from Radharc). No More Blooms used muchseen footage of the Nazi era as background to its telling of the story of Irish anti-Semitism - though more characteristically, Irish people were anti-foreigner, when they weren't indifferent.
It was thorough, legitimately polemical in parts and generally well-balanced. Yes, the Holocaust is one of the worst, arguably (if people wish to argue such things) the worst crime in history. It did raise hell to the surface. But hopes that the principally victimised people, the Jews, might, as a result, never themselves oppress other peoples have been unfounded. Israel has not fomented a Holocaust but it is quite clearly not an especially moral state. Perhaps, in the way that the racism experienced by many Irish emigrants has not left us more tolerant, the awful lesson of history is that the abused are more likely to grow up to become abusers.
Anyway, RTE's experiment with themed programming was largely successful. But, as ethnic minorities constitute about 1 per cent (one in every hundred!) of the population of this state, the future looks likely to be troubled. Multi-cultural Ireland remains some way off in a country where interparish rivalry regularly provides not just affirming dynamism, but old and bitter bile to daily life. Racism, fuelled by fear among the poor, greed among the wealthy and potstirring in sections of the media is thriving. The cosmopolitan Young Europeans are provincial Young Micks when it suits them.
THE plush drama of the week was Painted Lady. A four-hour effort over two nights, it was written by Allan Cubitt and featured Helen Mirren. It was certainly dramatic - but unfortunately in the sense of being pompous, rather than being affecting. Mirren played a former 1960s blues singer, now recovering from heroin and living on an aristocrat's estate outside Dublin with her young lover. They play Hendrix on vinyl as they drink wine in a bath in the middle of the room. Perhaps the idea was cool but the sight was codology - simultaneously too obvious and too precious.
Anyway, a gang kills the old aristo as they steal his paintings. So, after her bath, Mirren slips into the (for her) more comfortable role of a Jane Tennison-ish creature. With a murder to solve, she has to pass herself off in the glossy world of international art dealing. No bother, if you've got what passes for style in such circles - and Ms Mirren can always do style - but it was tedious.
Suffused with clownishly demonstrative and unconvincing reverence for "high art", Painted Lady had an intricate plot which centred on the dead aristo having been in league with the villain in looting art in wartime Italy. But it was all too neat: over four decades, the villain would send appropriate paintings to his friend. Like some sort of billionaire's postcards, each painting echoed events in the old guy's life. But it all worked out too well. For all Ms Mirren's style and slo-mo soulfulness, this drama had little to do with art. It was really painting by numbers.