TV REVIEW: SurvivorsBBC Sunday and Tuesday, CatastropheChannel 4 Monday, Death or CanadaRTÉ1 Tuesday, Faoi Lán CheoilTG4 Wednesday
THERE HAS always been a taste for apocalyptic fiction - Noah's Ark is an early favourite, but the Book of Revelation is a little OTT, in my view - but it seems to be a frequently recurring theme in this increasingly odd post-millennial decade of ours. Perhaps the global threat posed by terrorists and investment bankers is more tolerable when we compare ourselves favourably to poor Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later, or doomed Will Smith in I Am Legend, or, above all, anybody in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yes indeed, the End of Days has found its time at last.
Or at least it had, until the BBC's creaky reimagining of Terry Nation's fondly remembered 1970s TV series, Survivors, surfaced last weekend, updating the original's tale of a group of strangers who have survived a devastating plague. The first episode began with exactly the sort of clumsy exposition and starkly obvious foreboding that Shaun of the Dead so expertly lampooned - do you think that flatmate with the sniffles will make it to Act II? Will the Muslim kid be the only one to walk out of the mosque? Will the sneering prisoner be locked in his cell forever? But the programme's real problems became apparent when the flu had taken its toll and just a handful of people were left to fend for themselves - it is safe to say this was far and away the least convincing post-apocalyptic world committed to screen, as if the end of the world had been written into EastEnders.
Now this was Auntie Beeb, so nobody was expecting Mad Max comes to Manchester, but at least we could have been treated to Desperate Damien. Instead, this was more Inconvenienced Ian or Perturbed Peter - the motley crew of survivors seemed only slightly put out at the fact that 90 per cent of the world's population had died, overnight mind, from a particularly virulent flu. But their phlegmatic reaction to the end of civilisation was one thing, the immaculately clean state of the deserted streets quite another - did all the garbage men survive due to their presumably battle-hardened immune systems? Did some industrious parking vigilante resist death long enough to tow away all the cars? Where, pray tell, had the millions of corpses gotten to? Small mercy, I thought to myself, that at least the writers hadn't gone down the zombie route that is apparently compulsory in post-apocalyptic stories these days. Sure, those actors appeared listless and far from lifelike, and the screenwriters' critical faculties seemed impaired, but no actual on-screen zombies, at the very least. But gradually, I found myself unable to stop watching, desperate to find out what unintentionally hilarious incident will crop up next, hungry for another contrived stand-off, thirsty for more deranged dialogue. Only then - too late - did I realise that Survivors involved zombies, all right, millions of them, transfixed by a strange light in the living room . . .
IT TOOK Tony Robinson, of all people, to bring a bit of decent apocalypse to our screens last week, and in terms of magnitude, Catastrophe put the sniffly colds and raised temperatures of Survivors right back in their box. "We're only here by chance," said the artist formerly known as Baldrick as an introduction. "We survived, but 99 per cent of all the species that ever existed didn't. They were wiped out in a series of global catastrophes, disasters that brought life to the verge of extinction." Now that's what I'm talking about - take that, global pandemic.
Except this new five-part science series displayed admirable cheeriness in celebrating disaster on an interplanetary scale. Where was the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the ominous warning that this could all happen again? There was none of that here. Instead, this series seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the planet-wide catastrophe, to make us understand that some global disasters were necessary, that without them, we wouldn't be here, suffering through Survivors - what looked like apocalypse, then, was actually genesis. The first episode started near the very beginning, 4½ billion years ago, when Earth was just a young planet, without a care in the world, when boom, another reckless young planet came careering along and crashed into it. This is one of those massive events that stretches the limits of our imagination, so luckily Catastrophe had some jaw-dropping computer graphics to show us what it would have looked like. It was, to reclaim an overused word, awesome, and the massive amounts of debris that were flung into orbit around Earth soon coalesced into the moon.
Had Robinson left the story there, Catastrophe would have been quite an informative and visually arresting piece of television, but this series has ambitions beyond simply answering "Where did the moon come from?" No, as it walked us through the repercussions of the collision and the presence of the new moon, from the short days, high winds and massive tides to the development of photosynthesising bacteria, Catastrophe clearly explained how evolution isn't just a gradual progression, but was prompted and speeded up by cataclysmic events.
Next up is the Ice Age - at last, climate change we can look forward to.
OUR OWN DEFINING moment of crisis was dealt with in Death or Canada, a new two-part docudrama from Tile Films, the makers of Cromwell in Ireland, about the flight of tens of thousands of Irish famine victims to Canada in 1847, focusing in particular on the plight of the Protestant Willis family, who flee their west of Ireland home with their five children. These events, at a time when Canada was still a fledgling colony, and the population of Toronto a mere 20,000 people, certainly deserve a high-profile treatment - our storied and oft-told adventures in the US have understandably received more attention, with the effect that our rich relationship with Canada has been neglected in the popular imagination.
This production, then, was a step in the right direction, featuring some solid contributions from talking heads such as John Waters, Canadian-Irish philanthropist Robert Kearns, archaeologist Ronald Williamson and historian Christine Kinealy. But the programme was compromised by trying to appeal to both the Irish and Canadian markets - it will also be screened on the History Channel Canada and it bore a lot of that network's signature tics. Within seconds of the beginning, we had some vocal keening so beloved of directors trying to evoke historical profundity. Every shot of recreated famine-era Ireland was accompanied by the sound of a tin whistle, every cut and edit accompanied by a Sky Sports-style whooshing sound or, occasionally, a crack of thunder. These were terrible times, all right - the soundtrack alone could tell us that much.
But beyond the stylistic quirks, the compromises meant much of the potential power of the story was missed. The facts of the famine are ingrained in all of us, so the concentration on the tragic story of the Willis family, who lost four of their five children after leaving home and whose plight was mentioned in a piece in the Toronto Globe newspaper in 1847, should have served as a humanising narrative. But the contributions from Waters, in particular, gave emotional voice to the victims that was far more affecting than anything conjured up by the recreated scenes involving scruffed-up and well-fed actors. It hinted that this programme would have ultimately been better off concentrating on the "doc" rather than the "drama".
ONE DOCUMENTARY THAT was most at ease in its chosen format was this week's Faoi Lán Cheoil, the engaging series that follows various "celebrities" from all walks of life as they try to learn a traditional instrument. Normally, we would expect the personalities in an Irish programme like this to be about as familiar to us as a taxi driver in Marrakech, and there are some people in this series whose claim to notability is tenuous, at best, but this week featured the very familiar, very notable Jeremy Irons. Irons, of course, has an Irish wife in Sinéad Cusack, and lives in a castle in west Cork, but in this programme he was brave enough to attempt that most Irish of activities - no, not begrudgery, the fiddle.
Irons has a real and evident appreciation for traditional music, and had learned the violin as a child, but was taking on a significant challenge in trying to play trad music with string and bow - "I can barely walk, and these people are trapeze artists," he said at one point. He was helped in his task by the funny and impish Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, with whom he developed a nice camaraderie, and the film fell into an easygoing pace as they practised together in Cork and on a film set in New Mexico, attended the Willie Clancy Summer School and visited Bantry House to play with Martin Hayes. Irons eventually performed with Ó Raghallaigh, Hayes, Breanndán Ó Beaglaíoch and others at the Fiddle Fair near his home in Baltimore, Co Cork, but if ever a film was about the journey and not the destination, this was it - it had a charming, languorous rhythm that befitted both Irons, always rakish, wry and self-possessed, and the music he was learning. It was, all told, yet another minor triumph for TG4.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
Hilary Fannin is on leave