TV REVIEW: For a documentary one might have presumed would be about death, Crash was instead about life. The lives of those who survive, with broken bodies or minds, and the lives of the families left with only grief and memories where once there was a son or daughter.
Crash, RTÉ1, Tuesday
A House Divided, RTÉ1, Sunday
Prime Time, RTÉ1, Thursday
Big Brother, Channel 4 and E4, every day
It was about the lives of the medical crews who treat the injured, of the pathologists who tend the dead. It was about the pointless, avoidable waste of life. Of our misplaced sense of invincibility and how it can be dispelled in a chastening instant.
Crash was haunted not just by those who have died but also by those who will follow. Of course, Adrian McCarthy's documentary should be shown to every one of us before we are issued our licence, and every time we get that licence renewed, and maybe every time we put the keys in the door of the car. But as the press photographer, Fran Caffrey, pointed out, we have long since stopped being shocked by pictures of the scenes, of cars crumpled like paper tossed in a bin. What good does it do to take them, he asked. People do not learn.
"Accidents do happen," said one man who had been in a crash that had left his friend in a wheelchair.
"The term accident is a little misplaced," refuted a paramedic. "It is usually somebody's fault."
Spinal injuries surgeon John O'Byrne talked about planning Monday's surgery list: "There are people who will be on that list, undergoing surgery, who at this point in time are just going about their normal lives. They have their preoccupations, their anxieties, their concerns about what they're going to do next week. Then suddenly, everything changes."
Likewise, Crash will have been watched by people whose names you will read in Monday's newspaper.
As a journalist in Stormont, Eamon Mallie admits that he has "witnessed the endless quagmire of inertia that has been the history of the place". In A House Divided, we saw him attempting to capture a moment of movement. Last year, Mallie persuaded Lord John Alderdice that the 108 members of the Assembly should be immortalised in a portrait. The result was Noel Murphy's The House Will Divide, a painting that depicted progress even as its subjects returned to their natural state of inertia.
Directed by John T. Davis and edited by Sé Merry Doyle, A House Divided moved at a stately pace, not wishing to rush the artist, even when the viewer might have wished to rush the film on a little. It consisted mainly of a parade of people sitting for Murphy - "the rogues gallery", as more than one sitter put it.
Murphy's studio wall was adorned with sketches and photographs and clippings of the North's leading figures. A lost policeman might get the wrong impression.
Murphy wanted as many of them to sit for him as was possible, "to see if they're human or not; how they get into a chair, how they get out of a chair".
Hume was the perfect model. Perfectly still, quiet, a man who looked like he'd said all he needed to say. Martin McGuinness didn't flinch for 40 minutes. "Why do you think that is?" he asked Mallie. A few years of visiting Castlerea interrogation centre, apparently, could provide a great training-ground, even if it couldn't prevent McGuinness from nodding off during his sitting.
They didn't know much about art, but the sitters knew what they liked. Adams wasn't sure if this painting was worth the tax-payers' money ("It's probably because I'm stingy"). Trimble, it turned out, has been to Tate Modern a couple of times, but he won't be going back. Monica McWilliams liked the atmosphere of the painting, the bustle, the civility. "I wish it were like this. I get a sense that this is a place I would like to be," she said.
Paisley agreed with Murphy that, yes, he too would put himself in the front corner, large as life. It would not do to be shoved to the back, to posterity's posterior. When it was finished and unveiled in Stormont, the politicians gathered around and identified themselves: "I think that's me. Is it me?"
Mallie closed with the fine point that there has to be cause for optimism if these people could display the "tolerance to be seen for posterity in the frame together". Getting them in the same room is another day's work.
Donald Rumsfeld turned up in Prime Time on Thursday night. He was in Afghanistan, and RTÉ's Margaret Ward was asking him if he believed that the upsurge in violence meant that the country had deteriorated in recent weeks.
"When activity increases, that offers the opportunity to go and deal with it," Rumsfeld reflected. That man really should take a job writing Chinese fortune cookies.
Now that Iraq is vanquished, the US looks forward at Iran while Europe is looking back towards Afghanistan. Margaret Ward's report preceded another on the same subject which screeens tonight on Channel 4. These days Afghans know that when they go along to Kabul stadium it is to see a football match, not an execution. The burka is no longer compulsory, even if many women wear it anyway. After three decades of war, there is a type of calm, but also much unease. Aid workers have been targeted and do not leave their compounds.
Mine-clearing operations have been suspended because the dangers in the ground were being matched by the threat of getting shot. Kandahar is governed by a warlord who has taken his opportunity to come out of retirement and run a mini-empire built on drug trafficking, smuggling, tax fraud and the support of the US government.
Meanwhile, the poppy crop is in full bloom. The flowers that reach for the sun are the primary colour against a dusty landscape. Afghanistan is the world's leading exporter of heroin; a weapon of mass destruction, as if you need to be told, which touches thousands upon thousands of lives. The crops are not hard to find; they are on open display. Ward found one easily. She reported from its fringe, interviewed the farmer.
Meanwhile, in a land not so far away, US soldiers turn the place upside down looking for weapons that may not even be there. Rumsfeld probably has a cute epigram to explain away the bias.
Big Brother is back on the air. No, please, come back.
Four series in and there is little debate about it any more. Whatever it is that Big Brother says about us has been said. It is now entertainment rather than a moral dilemma. It pushed the boundaries of television, and they did not bounce back. The series is part of the fabric of television, no longer the young upstart but a wily veteran. It came along in the late 1990s, during a rush of novelties, when the advent of reality television and the reinvention of the quiz show gave light entertainment a serious shake-up. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, though, now languishes in the departure lounge that is mid-afternoon television, surviving thanks to scandal rather than its own ingenuity. Its format proved too rigid, and when novelty wore off there was nothing to fall back on.
Big Brother, on the other hand, has proved malleable even within the apparent limitations of its formula. Its incessant presence on E4 - all day, all night - has brought us a digital future rather more banal than the one we might have anticipated. It brings things forward in small steps, using minor adjustments rather than wholesale change: a snap eviction here, a cruel task there. The producers have their own little world in which to play god, and a wider media that evangelises on their behalf.
As ever, the first week has brought only a jabber of voices, a blur of faces. The contestants settled in to the house, while the world outside scrabbled for every titbit about them, every one-night stand, every runaway father. Nobodies have become instant tabloid stars, based on nothing but anticipation. This week gave us 12 instant, virginal, disposable celebrities to play with. For a society eager for celebrity, this is Christmas morning.
