TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: On Saturday night, TG4 broadcast "Gerry Adams: The Corporate Video". "Hi, I'm Gerry Adams," Gerry Adams might well have said, while walking slowly towards the camera, then perching his bottom on the corner of a strategically-placed desk. "You might know me from such armed struggles as . . ."
Gerry Adams TG4, Saturday
Kidneys for Jesus Channel 4, Saturday
Marion and Geoff BBC2, Wednesday
The camera loved him. It gazed at him wistfully. It caressed the black and white pictures of him. Sometimes it would pan slowly through the image, revealing only a grainy section at a time. First an audience, then a pipe, then the beard, then fat-rimmed glasses, until finally the feathers were removed and the image was revealed in full. It would take one long, longing look, and then start the striptease all over again with another photograph.
Gerry Adams was an exercise in superficiality, a hopscotch through history. "Many a tear was shed from the 1969 riots to the 1990s peace process," it said, in a gross distillation of 25 years of horror. After the Belfast Agreement, "there were many obstacles along the way, but Adams and the republican movement are still on the road to peace". Obstacles you would believe had been hurdled with aplomb, given how briefly they were dealt with here.
It skipped through Adams's past. He has always denied IRA membership, but it included an assertion that he was indeed active. "I'd love to know when he's going to come clean," said one contributor. Not now, not here, was the answer. The documentary thought it best not to ask the question, or if it did, it didn't show us. It gave us none of the rhetorical acrobatics for which Adams is famed, and no sense of character, either. For some reason, he spoke Irish during some passages, and English during others. Two languages through which we learned nothing.
The few bright moments came from his unionist opponents. They were subverted versions of those moments in This Is Your Life when someone appears on the screen from LA and says a few nice words about the subject. David Ervine, for instance, quipped darkly about his view of Gerry Adams not being a close enough one at certain times in the past. The interviewer laughed. Ervine, impeccably deadpan, told him he wasn't joking. The interviewer stopped laughing.
It was Chris McGimpsey who knew that sticks and stones don't always do the trick. He gave a long list of Adams's deficiencies as a person and politician, and made the last cut the deepest. " . . . and I don't think he's a particularly good writer". How dare he, retorted the documentary. Adams's books have been "very popular. If he could retire from full time politics he would probably be a very successful writer." Hush, those of you eager to suggest that if he had never got into politics, he probably wouldn't be a "very popular" writer in the first place.
Only a third of the way in, the programme offered, "The question remains: Who is Gerry Adams?" It could not give us an answer. There is a Gerry Adams who represented an organisation whose victims were being scooped off the streets during most of his watch, a man who has survived assassination attempts, who stood between murderers and world statesmen. A man who must have struggled with his conscience, who has profound regrets. A man with ego and personality. But we didn't meet him. We were instead introduced to grey, middle-management Gerry Adams.
This documentary wanted to give us the man behind the man, but was so star-struck by meeting the man in front of the man that it forgot to ask the questions it really wanted to ask. It might have walked away clutching his autograph, but that does not mean that it had a meaningful encounter.
In Kidneys For Jesus, Jon Ronson met the Jesus Christians, people so generous that, should you require it, they'll give to you their spare kidneys.
They are a scattered bunch, subsisting on donations in exchange for the leaflets. If they don't get enough loose change from the public, they forage through bins for food. It occurs to me when I hear about these cults that it would be interesting to see their faces in the split second before death, if they suddenly realise that there is nothing beyond; no spaceship, no eternal life, no division of souls between those who ate from bins in God's name and those who had a Chinese takeaway every night and be damned with it.
They post their spare kidneys on the Internet and wait for calls. The calls come, and the transplants do take place; in the US, where there is a question of whether hospitals are taking advantage of this spiritual compulsion.
These people are either extreme but sincere Samaritans, or self-mutilation fetishists or a little of both. In their leader Dave McKay, though, they have someone who leaves little room for doubt. Appearing manipulative, paranoid and nasty, his chief flaw as a charismatic leader is his lack of charisma. Only 40 saved souls in 20 years is too low a yield to satisfy him, so we saw him writing to British tabloids under a pseudonym, complaining of the cult in the hope of gaining a bit of publicity. They caused quite a stir in local paper, The Catford Newshopper.
When Ronson wrote a critical piece on the cult, it led to months of angry e-mails and video messages that began, he said, to "chip away at my sanity". McKay even threatened to scupper a transplant, to let a woman die just to make his point. "I'll let her blood be on your head," he told Ronson of a woman who, to his relief, wasn't quite so ill after all.
Throughout, the programme was buoyed by Ronson's schtick, which is to gain his subject's trust, to offer up his credulity to see how far it stretches.
He is Louis Theroux, but with added earnestness. It can strain a little, as his angst is laid on thick as he attempts to divine his subject's true motive, but he knows under what rocks he will find these people, and what scuttles out is never less than fascinating.
Marion and Geoff returned this week, with Keith (Rob Brydon) once again cosseted in his car, relaying the details of his world while the real one passes by on the dual carriageway outside. He is a chauffeur now, complete with grey suit and hat. "I suppose the ideal would be that I looked like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. I think the reality is a bit more Johnny Morris." He is driving a rich American kid, Fisher, back and forward to school, doing the boy's maths homework in between. "If I had sons that I could see, I'd like them to be like Fisher." There was a time when the great comedy characters were men scared of their wives, who were henpecked within an inch of their sanity, who complained about them constantly, but who were utterly submissive in their presence.
Now, these characters are the estranged fathers in McDonalds or at the cinema on a Sunday, sitting in silence with the two kids. Their wives have left them for a man with a bigger car, bigger muscles, who is better in bed. A man who is a better father. Exactly the type of man, in fact, these characters want to be. It happened to Alan Partridge and it has happened to Keith.
It is, incidentally, men who write these sitcoms.
It's been two years since Keith has been allowed contact with his two "smashers", and has been given the ground rules for the meeting by Melanie, the social services woman. No sudden movements. No concealed weapons. He calls his old home to see what presents he should buy the boys. "It's lovely to hear your voice," he sighs to Geoff, the man who stole his wife.
With its first series, Rob Bryden and writer Hugo Blick gave us 10 perfectly formed minutes, and there is relief that, although now half an hour long, it doesn't slacken in its exquisite melancholy. Also, after an unwelcome special episode in which the camera left the car and we were given glimpses of people we didn't need to see, it has returned to its devastating simplicity. The fixed camera in the car. Characters that exist only through Keith's descriptions of them.
It remains more bitter than sweet. Keith's relentless optimism, his blind devotion to his wife, his lack of self-awareness, all make him relentlessly likeable, his disappointments affecting. He had his meeting with the boys, and all went well until he realised that he had forgotten to give them their gifts. The final scenes of the children's paintings fluttering out the open window as he raced along the road to track them down was as poignant as any you will see this week. Maybe we should stop labelling these series as comedy. Or maybe we should just stop men from writing these things. Just put the pen down. That's it, nice and slowly. Before anybody else gets hurt.