TV REVIEW / SHANE HEGARTY: Wit BBC2, Tuesday; Countdown to Christmas RTÉ1, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; Rás Go Toin Poill (Race to the Bottom) TG4, Thursday; 40 Years of News RTÉ1, Thursday.
I'm sure that HBO must make its fair share of mediocre television. The US cable channel must produce corny comedies, garish quizzes, throwaway murder mysteries that end in freeze-framed laughter. It must do, but we don't see any of it. Instead, we get The Sopranos, Oz, Sex and the City and Six Feet Under. Somewhere at Dublin Airport there must be a big bin filled with all the tapes stopped at immigration. Sorry, you can't come in. Not enough touches of genius.
This week's offering was Wit, Margaret Edson's play as adapted by Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson. The latter played Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th-century poetry - specialising in John Donne - and suffering from stage four metastatic ovarian cancer - "There is no stage five". Under heavy pounding from the full dose of an experimental chemotherapy, she found that a life of high theory is no preparation for the base reality of illness, that an unequalled intimacy with the fractals and paradoxes of Donne's obsession with death is no preparation for death itself.
Thompson's performance was bravura. She played Bearing with a characteristically caustic edge, withering in her observations, yet fragile under the humiliations that come with the treatment. Junior doctors prodded her like she was a melon on the turn. She slowly realised that her courses would not save her, but add only to researchers' knowledge. She became "somewhat of a celebrity" for surviving longer than any previous patient. "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. It's easy for me, I just lie here and look cancerous." She became the words on a page, dissected and discussed with academic coldness.
Bearing's final scenes proved to be an emotional ambush without any of the usual attendant schmaltz. There was the touch of a nurse as she moisturised Bearing's hands, as she lay unconscious and unaware under morphine. Her old mentor became her single, belated visitor. "Would you like me to read you something? Perhaps something from Donne," she asked, provoking Bearing's wail of disapproval, her last line of script. Instead, she was read a children's book, The Runaway Bunny. Her old professor's pretentious observations as she read ("A parable of the soul - how nice") somehow only added to the pathos.
The exposure under the glaring strip-lighting of the ultra-modern hospital made you shiver. For a soundtrack, it borrowed taut, plaintive pieces by Arvo Pärt and Henryk Gorecki. The nagging dissonance of Ives's The Unanswered Question heralded the creeping inevitability of Bearing's death. Philosophy at prime time? God bless America.
40 Years of News was a corporate video punctuated with anecdotes, an extended "and finally . . ." in which the news was the story. Like much of RTÉ's news reporting, it was functional but unspectacular. It has been that way for all of RTÉ's anniversary programmes - the station has given itself a slightly stale cake topped with damp candles. It has been a party with the music turned off and the balloons half-inflated, as if it was an organisation that's happy to have survived to this point, and doesn't want to give itself a coronary by celebrating too wildly.
The political milestones of the era were discussed with less gusto than the internal politics that always followed. Self- justification among interviewees was rife, over rows about government interference, coverage of the Troubles and Section 31. However, 40 Years of News was most interesting when it focused on those who just went ahead and shot the pictures. The quality of RTÉ's work during the early years of the Troubles is such that it remains the spyglass through which we now view the period.Grimy black-and-white pictures that seemed polluted by the environment in which they were shot. The camera ducking behind walls, hiding around corners. Over the shoulders of the British troops one moment, at the centre of the stone-lobbing rioters the next.
One cameraman equipped himself with a small ladder, which he would take to the centre of a riot, from where he would film his elevated pictures. Another was shot twice. After his first wound, RTÉ issued its cameramen with Kevlar vests. The second time the cameraman was wounded, he thought he had been hit in the chest by a brick, only to find a bullet embedded in the vest. With the vest weighing 30lb and the camera 60lb, he would hulk into the battles. "I remember I fell over once and they couldn't pick me up," he said. And through it all, it was the sound men you felt sorry for. Their booms were attached to the cameras by a short lead. They had to scurry through the mayhem, at the mercy of another man's courage.
Countdown to Christmas was a three-part cookery and interiors show illustrating how best to prepare for Christmas. It did so by showing you people who do it with far more class than you. Not for them the bringing down of the local electricity grid when wiring a seven-foot Santa to the roof. Instead, there is not a needle out of place on the tree. Not a bow is loose. Not a toilet roll that is not garnished with rosemary.
It was presented by Helen Dillon, a woman whose jacket gave the unfortunate impression that she had found a post-Christmas use for the turkey other than a mild curry. Feathers hugged her neck like a trophy.
The practicalities of Christmas were delivered to us in the most impractical ways. We were constantly shown things being done, but never quite how to do it. The camera stepped back as if it feared we were about to learn something. Dillon watched a chef, Seamus, prepare Christmas dishes. Food came together with an infuriating "voilà!"
All the while, it was shot through with a dull, syrupy glow. The sound was all mumble.
Helen: "Yourdoingsomethingpeculiahheahthatsmakingabubblingnoise."
Seamus: "Yesisntitalovelyshmell."
It was too often interrupted by the presenter's sophomoric musings on winter: "the stark beauty of the skeleton of the teasel"; "the bare branches against the winter sky"; "the flowers in slumber". And the impatient fingers thrumming over the remote control.
Much of the opening 20 minutes of Rás Go Toin Poill (Race To The Bottom) comprised a litany of statistics about the garment industry in Bangladesh that would cause a rash to rise on your skin. It is a model of what globalisation can do to a country. It brought jobs, but too often only in the sense that slaves could claim to be employed.
Its 75 per cent female workforce toil for as little as 8 cent an hour, for up to 20 hours a day. They come from rural villages and know little of labour law. Which means they don't act on the myriad breaches committed. On the low pay that comes irregularly. Or the lack of toilet facilities that mean many prefer not to drink water even on the hottest days. The sacking of pregnant women. The locking of factory gates to ensure nobody leaves until orders are completed; a practice which has caused hundreds of deaths from fire within only the past two years.
Sometimes they work around the clock, sleeping by their machines if a deadline must be met. The deadlines are imposed by the western buyers who are well aware of the working conditions. Heavy fines are imposed if those deadlines aren't met. The demands are such that, because four children cost the equivalent in wages of one woman, if a mother goes for a job it will instead be offered to her children. There are children as young as four years old working in factories. One witness described seeing two four-year-olds hammering rivets into jeans, their hands bruised and bleeding.
Anne Daly and Ronan Tynan's film used our own people's experience as a prism. The factories of Bangladesh are only a generation removed from those of Northern Ireland. In many cases, an eyeto public opinion has meant that retailers have demanded an improvement in conditions, yet at the same time they use the economic slowdown as an excuse to demand that the clothes be made for less. When a jacket that will eventually retail at $45 is already being made for as little as $1.25 there's not too much more of the lifeblood you can squeeze out of a people. When costs rise - as they inevitably do - they go somewhere cheaper. They left Derry for places like Bangladesh. Now they're moving on again. China is proving a popular choice this year.
Little of this has not been filmed, written or spoken of elsewhere. It deserves repeating, however, and could just as easily have focused on Pakistan or Burma or Sri Lanka or Mexico or any of the Third World nations that have become indentured slaves to capitalism.
If you watched this documentary it will mean that every time you finger the seam of a jacket or the rivets on a pair of jeans while Christmas shopping, it will be impossible to feel anything other than the sweat of the people who most probably put it together.