Nuremberg Channel 4, Sunday and Monday
Cold Turkey Channel 4, Monday
People Like Us BBC2, Sunday
Agenda TV3, Sunday
Sometimes television puts its right hand out to greet you, only to punch you round the head with its left. The US-produced Nuremberg was that kind of jabbing television, a drama that seemed so worthy and welcome at first, only to turn out to be infuriating, and not a little insulting.
It was impossible to watch this lush dramatisation of the trials of 22 Nazi war criminals without presuming that somewhere along the line in this project the writer was brought in and a couple of cigar-chomping, we-eat-writers-for-breakfast executives told him, "We love this, we really do. It's a very powerful bit of work and the baddies get canned at the end. It's great. But you know what it needs, the one little thing that would make it real art?" At this point the writer will be hoping the answer is more words, or a downbeat ending..."It needs romance."
This was history as American television wanted it. History with a broad. Alec Baldwin played US Chief Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, with one eye on revealing the truth about the concentration camps and another on his sexy secretary, Elsie Douglas (Jill Hennessy). She drops her papers, he gets down to help her pick them up, they glance at each other and bingo! ClichΘ hits them straight between the eyes.
There is no great historical moment that can't be seen through the eyes of either happy lovers or doomed lovers. Is the most important trial of the 20th century not drama enough? Don't be an idiot.
Channel 4 was very quiet about Nuremberg in the run-up, considering that it was a four-hour epic spread over two nights, featuring lavish sets and a genuine movie star. It didn't take long to figure out why.
Yes, it was a worthy subject, and the concentration camp footage shown towards the end of the first episode was as shocking as anything you are ever likely to see. The sets were impressive too, the courtroom clinically reconstructed and the city itself nothing but heaped, defeated rubble. And yet, it was so difficult to connect with the whole thing. Apart from the yawnsome love affair, there was the usual lop-sided American bias. And because British actors tend to make the most expedient foreign baddies these days, with Brian Cox leading the way as Herman Goering, it didn't help the tone that each time a Nazi opened his mouth it had a touch of Dad's Army about it.
Worse, it was filled with retrospective wisdom and smart-arsed post-modern irony. "I wonder how many ripples we'll see from this trial," one character said while grasping the newspaper announcing that the Jews wanted their own state. With that, the actors paused for a moment and stared into space, so that the people at home could take a moment to nod sagely. Christopher Plummer got the most cloying line of all, though. Remember, Plummer once yodelled his way to freedom in The Sound of Music. Here, as a British diplomat, he discussed the absurd sight of Goering frolicking at Hitler's Alpine retreat, "dressed like a Tyrolean chorus boy out of some grotesque operetta". It was history reduced to an in-joke.
It was equally hard not feel utterly frustrated with Cold Turkey, Irish documentary-maker Leo Regan's filming of his friend Lanre Fehintola as he attempted to get off heroin, which he had become hooked on after trying it while researching a book on addicts. Regan had filmed Fehintola before, and confessed that he felt he may have contributed to his friend's continued decline with the last film, but said he was reluctantly going through it again because Fehintola believed that the gaze of the camera would force him to go through with the process. Fehintola also believed that small creatures were living under his skin and could only be flushed out through cocaine use, so he may not have been the best judge of this situation.
Like Nuremberg, this should have been a film that hit you in the gut with the honesty of its subject, locked in a room for seven days in order to kick a 10-year habit, but instead it found its aim blocked by a personality on the periphery. At the beginning, Regan described how Fehintola, in becoming addicted to the drug for the sake of his book, had become a character in his own story. He seemed to take it as a cue rather than a warning. Although he was only ever heard, and never seen, Regan's presence was questionable, certainly not in terms of his motives as someone who obviously cared for a friend, but in terms of his own judgment. Why did he think things would be any different to the last time, when the film led to Fehintola becoming a sort of cult figure with fellow junkies and did nothing to help him break the habit? When, after three days of detox, Fehintola is, inevitably, found to have been taking heroin secretly, Regan says: "I suddenly felt like I had been na∩ve. Part of the reason for filming Lanre was to make him see the awfulness of his situation. Now I felt like I had been participating in a big lie." He doesn't, however, stop filming.
Eventually, Lanre decides to jump out of the window to escape and find a dealer. Regan, who has been haranguing Fehintola for not trying hard enough and has been insisting he "didn't come all this way to be dicked about", doesn't put the camera down to stop him.
The only part of Ray, the interviewer in People Like Us, you saw was his arm as he reached in for more biscuits or his leg when, at one point, a dog took a great shine to it. Spoof documentaries are so prevalent now that you have to watch at least 20 minutes of anything before you can finally judge whether it's a set-up or the real thing. Sometimes you get to the end and still don't know. People Like Us is very definitely a spoof, but it's at its funniest when the wit is slyly deposited in twists of language and intentional malapropisms. It's filled with jokes that you only get after doing a double take.
The first in this series was a supposed fly-on-the-wall, with Ray following a rural vicar, Andrew, as he tended to his less-than- focused flock and their randy pets. We met Margaret, the vicar's faithful assistant in the church, who had found that as she journeyed into middle-age she became increasingly distant from those closest to her. They included her husband, who had left her. "Since then," narrated Ray, "she has had time to devote herself to an institution that has become like a religion to her." She knew how to throw a party too. The parish hall had a disco, the loaves and fish-paste spread was inspired.
The collection of village idiots in the parish, Margaret's repressed love for her vicar and the frustrations of Andrew's bored wife were nothing new, but the excellent script meant that even the most obvious ideas came out looking fresh. "How did you react when Andrew first announced his intention to go off to theological college?" Ray asked Sarah, the vicar's wife.
"Well, I was pregnant when he told me..."
"God, that's quite a reaction."
There is no spoof about Agenda, the TV3 current affairs programme, which is the brightest light of the station's factual programming, even if most of the schedule runs on a 10-watt bulb. There is no screaming showmanship from presenter David McWilliams, no deliberate sub-Paxman baiting of guests. McWilliams is a very intelligent journalist, but he lets people speak, so that discussions tend to flow rather than turn into circus. This week's special report on the transport system ended the series with typical authority, getting to the point with an accuracy that has become happily predictable. For whatever reason, Agenda is now on a break until October and without it, only 20:20 is left by way of current affairs on TV3, outside of the news bulletins, and its in-house investigations tend to be overshadowed by the tabloid reports bought in from the US version of the show.
Earlier this year, a booming, portentous 20:20 asked: "Do you know where your children are tonight?" It was enough to have you bolting the doors to the kids' bedroom. In the end, it turned out that unless they were in Chicago breaking into cars, you didn't have much to worry about. That alone is reason enough for Agenda to return as quickly as possible
tvreview@irish-times.ie
