Second Sight BBC1, Monday/Tuesday
Rebel Heart RTE 1, Monday
Complex Problems: Prime Time RTE 1, Thursday
Challenger: Go For Launch BBC2, Tuesday
Some day we're going to get a TV detective with no quirks, no dark secrets, no anguish; just a healthy home life and a positive work ethic. Even that nice Magnum PI, I discovered while watching I Love 1981 last Saturday night, had regular Vietnam flashbacks over the cocktails. And there was me thinking that his only worries were keeping his Hawaiian shirts fresh and that hairy Mars bar over his lip under control. Anyway, poor old DCI Ross Tanner (played by oh-so-stoic Clive Owen) in Second Sight bears the afflictions of all the TV detectives before him. He's sleeping with his deputy. He smokes a lot. He's separate from his colleagues. He lives on take-away food. He has no life away from his job.
His boss thinks he has an attitude problem. He really does have an attitude problem. (He is actually described as a "maverick", which suggests the scriptwriter learned her trade reading the boxes down at her local Xtravision.) He has split from his wife, and she's moving in with her new boyfriend. He is estranged from his son. Oh, and he's going blind. Why he is going blind is never fully explained beyond hinting at vague psychic powers, but it might have something to do with the fact that a detective who is not going blind but who just goes about solving cases with the minimum of fuss is less likely to be of interest to a commissioning editor.
You can guess the pitch: "It's Cracker, only darker." The plot itself continued to rifle through the cliches. We had a dead celebrity, her "bit of rough" boyfriend, a dodgy doctor, a jealous wife, obsessive fans and a kid who had seen the murder but was too traumatised to speak about it. That, it turned out, was because he did it. Smart kid. All the players took things with the utmost earnestness. This was serious stuff, and it required serious brooding. We could have had a conclusion by the end of the first episode if. Everyone. Didn't. Insist. On. Talking. Like. This. Thanks to his illness, everything DCI Tanner did was accompanied by a flash of light, a spinning room and the kind of big swooshy noise that followed Bruce Willis through The Sixth Sense. Shwooosh. DCI Tanner stood up. Shwooosh. He shook hands with someone. Shwooosh. He felt a bit dizzy and needed a lie down.
Fifteen minutes after Second Sight finished on BBC1, I was waiting patiently to see what The Echo, a drama scheduled for RTE1, was all about. "Now," announced the continuity woman, "Clive Owen stars as . . ." Shwooosh. I flicked over to something else. Rebel Heart finished up this week, although you wouldn't be alone if your own heart had rebelled once the technically impressive whizz-bangery of the opening episode gave way to Ernie Coyne's turgid rise from all-round wet paper bag to ruthless revolutionary and red-hot lover who doesn't go to mass on a Sunday. In the opening episode you wouldn't have trusted him to post a letter in the GPO, never mind defend it, but the series ended with him hunted to his death, having switched sides half-way through the opening battle of the Civil War. It was a plot development consistent with a script that tried desperately not to take sides but only ended up looking spineless, if not downright duplicitous. In between, Ernie (a blank James D'Arcy) travelled Zelig-like through every major event of the day, phonetically spelling out the history for us ("They're going to set up our own parliament here in Dublin. Dail Eireann !") and engaged in a very unengaging love affair with the feisty Ita and her "Fred, we've no bread" Northern accent.
To be fair, it might have been easier to take things seriously if Jeremy from Paths To Freedom hadn't stepped up as Michael Collins with Rats standing by his side as Cathal Brugha. Fate is a cruel practical joker. Maybe the real question, though, is why at the beginning of a new century we had to look back at the old. Surely there must be something contemporary which could be fashioned into a drama of substance, and which wouldn't cost so much in slow motion explosions, replica costumes and big sets showing how Dublin used to be. If RTE must do history, they could do worse than follow We Are History (BBC2, Monday). The impressively titled David Oxley BA Hons (aka comedian Marcus Brigstocke) mocks the exuberance of TV historians who prowl about muddy fields, reconstructing ancient battles through gesticulation and spittle. This week, he marched through the aisles of an Asda supermarket describing Boadicea's battle with the Romans.
"The two sides met here," he gestured with such passion. "By the dips." Complex Problems, Prime Time's special report on the flats in Dublin's St Teresa's Gardens, gave us a look at the lives of people dispossessed of everything: jobs, belongings, hope, dignity, function. There are no facilities and few visits from the social workers. Generations of unemployment are turning into generations of addiction. One interviewee, Wendy Malone, was dead two weeks after filming. Another was asked what he saw ahead for himself. "What do you mean ahead for meself?" Even the kids are denied a football pitch. In 1998, the council estimated that it would cost £100,000 to put one in the complex. That cost is now reckoned to be £560,000.
St Teresa's is "gardens" in name only. Keelin Shanley's report was interspersed with various statistics - heroin use, social welfare, housing lists - but statistics have too often been the problem. It's easy to digest mere figures if we don't have to see the individuals who go together to make up those numbers. The only note of optimism had come with Bill Kelly, who had finally found work after decades without. But that encouragement lasted only as long as it took for him to give us a tour of the flat the council had given to him. It was filthy, peeling, stripped bare, and Bill couldn't move in yet because it was regularly used by addicts. He pointed at the spattered wallpaper. "That's blood on the wall."
Nothing was revelatory. There was little here we don't already know. Complex Problems was simply matter of fact, pointing the camera and allowing people to talk who are otherwise never given a chance. Television is still the only way in which most of us will ever look these people straight in the eye.
THERE is something forever humbling about that famous footage of the space shuttle Challenger disintegrating in such a spectacular instant, as if the gods had given mankind a kick in the hubris to remind us of who's really in charge. If only it could be anything so grand.
As Challenger: Go For Launch showed, the explosion was caused by a faulty seal, the O-Ring, which was there to prevent hot gas leaking from the booster rockets. The temperature on the day of the launch was a full 20 degrees lower than recommended by the people who made the rubber seal, and while the world gasped at what had just occurred, there were some who expected it. Only hours before, engineer Roger Boisjoly had begged NASA not to launch. His managers went in backing him but buckled under questioning and gave the go ahead. Boisjoly arrived home from the meeting. "What's wrong?" asked his wife. "Oh nothing, honey. It was a great day. We had just had a meeting and tomorrow they're going to launch and kill the astronauts. But apart from that it was a great day."
All over Florida people stood outside their homes, got out of their cars, hung out of office windows to see the launch. It went out live on television. Teacher Christa Mc Auliffe was to be the first civilian in space, and the kids of her school gathered in front of the giant screens to watch. Her parents were in the gallery by the launch site.
Boisjoly and fellow engineer Bob Eberling, who had also tried to stop the launch, held hands as the countdown climaxed, fully expecting the ship to blow up on the ground, but it launched as planned. The kids threw streamers, the gallery whooped, Boisjoly and Eberling exhaled. "I turned to Bob and said: `We've just dodged a bullet'." Seventy-three seconds later, the bullet hit its target. There is film of the passenger module plummeting from the sky. It took two-and-a-half minutes to fall seven miles and hit the sea at 200 miles per hour. NASA believes that some of the astronauts were still conscious as they fell, and is certain that they were all still alive. There are some deaths - whether among the stars or in the gutter - that are easier not to think about.
