The Provos (BBC 1, Tuesday) Spotlight (BBC 1, Tuesday) An Dorn Ceilteach (TnaG, Sunday & Tuesday) The Blackbird And The Bell (RTE 1, Wednesday) True Lives (RTE 1, Monday) EastEnders (BBC 1, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday))
Watching Peter Taylor's The Provos, it was impossible not to think that this four-part series is tempting fate using the discourse of history rather than of current affairs. Is the war really over? Perhaps it is. But for those of us who have lived through the period of the North's troubles, it still lingers like a kind of interminable, continuous present. The second World War - that's history; the Vietnam war - that's history; the North - who knows?
Anyway, Taylor did well to convene a small army of former IRA activists and British military and political figures to talk on camera. The opening episode, Born Again, trawled the familiar chronicle of civil rights marches, the Battle of the Bogside, the Belfast pogroms of 1969, internment, Bloody Sunday, the prorogation of Stormont, Bloody Friday. It reported, too, on early meetings between the Provos and the British government, but really, it had little new for even moderately informed Irish people.
However, in a week in which EastEnders was painting almost a pig-in-the-parlour image of Ireland, The Provos was, despite one glaring omission of perspective, considered and analytical in a way which might help to dilute some of the appalling British ignorance about this country. Oliver Wright, a former "UK government representative", said of Stormont: "It was a minor form of tyranny, not a Stalinist form, but tyranny all the same." And so it was.
What was scarcely acknowledged, however, was the British establishment's support - active and passive - for unionist despotism. As usual on British TV (often on RTE too), the problem was presented as being essentially between the fighting Irish, with reasonable Britain the unfortunate piggy-in-themiddle. "Here (in Ireland) history and the present are one," said Taylor, falling headlong into cliche over pictures of Belfast republicans commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising.
Well, yes - though Ireland is not unique in this (there was an inherent contradiction in the remark anyway, considering that Taylor's approach pointedly distinguished between history and the present). But, more importantly, the British assertion which routinely insists that Ireland is singularly unable to let history sleep, is, considering that it comes from a society still bewitched by the medieval absurdity of monarchy, not only ironic, but crass. The lack of any analysis of Britain's historical role in creating the Northern nightmare was the programme's principal flaw.
This is a pity, really, for with the news peg of the Northern talks, The Provos is a series which can expect significant ratings. Seeing Martin Meehan, Billy McKee, Brendan Hughes and other prominent early Provos, reminisce about the height of the Troubles a quarter of a century ago, made it feel, in one sense, like history, but in another, like belatedly authentic current affairs. Joining the IRA in 1966, said Meehan, was for him "like getting into West Point".
McKee recalled "the defence of St Matthews" in the Short Strand in 1970 - the Provos' first serious engagement. A post-stroke Sean MacStiofain spoke about the IRA split after the summer of 1969. Taylor unearthed film which strongly suggested that neither Martin McGuinness nor Gerry Adams were always mere Sinn Feiners. He showed, too, the butchery of Bloody Sunday and the obscenity of Bloody Friday, in the case of the latter, horrific and repulsive images of the shovelling up of a charred corpse.
Provisional: doesn't it mean "temporary" or "adopted for the time being"? Certainly, the word suggests transience and impermanence. Anything described as "provisional" has, by definition, a built-in obsolescence. But, whether or not 27 years after its formation, the Provisional IRA has finally called it a day is another matter. Maybe Peter Taylor knows more than the rest of us or maybe the following three episodes will display a less historical - more of an ongoing - approach. We'll see.
So far, it's been thorough as reportage - all the greater pity then that it practically ignored the imperial and colonial contexts. Mind you, had Peter Taylor been watching Spotlight, screened directly before The Provos, his tone, which conveyed an attitude that the Troubles are, most likely, history, could not have been so confident. The Continuity IRA (how's that for a name to fuse history and the present?) and the LVF, the programme suggested, are not done yet. One outrage, one assassination is all it takes.
More history of the fighting Irish . . . and Welsh and Scots was screened in An Dorn Ceilteach, an engrossing TnaG/S4C/HTV/Grampian TV co-production. Telling the story of Celtic (invariably a loose description, that!) boxers, it mixed old footage - notably Pathe and Movietone newsreel - with contemporary interviews. There was a mildly nostalgic, cheerleading tone to it all. But, in its evocations of times long gone, it largely avoided excessive sentimentality.
Sunday's repeated episode - the third in the series - featured the careers of Glasgow's Benny Lynch, Co Cork's Jack Doyle and Wales's Tommy Farr. Lynch, an eight-stone flyweight, who drank himself to death by the age of 33, was the genuine tragedian of the trio. Before becoming world champion, he had boxed in a booth - earning £7 a week, at a time when the average miner was taking home a little over £2.
"Dylan Thomas, George Best, Jim Baxter, Benny Lynch - all pressed the self-destruct button," said one contributor. Indeed. But there's pressing and there's pressing. To decline and die as early as Lynch did, required a knockout punch. Back in the 20s and 30s, of course, alcoholism was virtually untreatable. But, dead at 33 - having been a world champion boxer only a few years earlier! That takes a fair sup.
Doyle, who boxed, sang, wrestled, womanised and drank his way through a scarcely deserved fame, was finally ko'd by the bottle too. "He had a thunderous right hand and nothing else - no defence, no boxing ability, he had nothing," said boxing writer Harry Mullen. He did, however, have legions of women at his fights and, after going to Hollywood, he married the Mexican movie actress, Movita. The union lasted two years before Movita moved on. Later she got hitched to Marlon Brando.
Tommy Farr, forever remembered for going the distance with Joe Louis at New York's Yankee Stadium, seemed ultra gentlemanly compared with most contemporary sportsmen. He and so many of the other ghosts who flitted across the screen, reminded us that a loss of civility has been one of the prices of material progress. Certainly, the prefight Farr/Louis verbal confrontations were as respectful and courteous as a typical Collins/Eubank clash is rancorous and spiteful.
An Dorn Ceilteach is subtitled (and many of its interviews are in English anyway) so it is accessible even to viewers with no Irish. TnaG needs such viewers and it does deserve them. In the field of sport, its reshowing of old All-Ireland GAA finals, its Spanish soccer and this series of boxing documentaries, deserve credit. For a featherweight in a crowded ring which includes the likes of RTE, BBC, ITV and Sky (News and Sport) it's certainly punching its weight.
The verbals on The Blackbird And The Bell are always more Farr/Louis than Collins/Eubank. However, even decency, good intentions and honesty don't always amount to coherence. On Wednesday, for the first episode in a second series, Cian Ferriter was a kind of discussion-facilitator for Kathleen O'Neill of Ballyfermot, Cathy Jordan of Sligo, Pat McCormack of Clare and Gary White Deer, of the Choctaw tribe of native Americans.
Sitting around a particularly crackling fire (so crackling at times that it sounded like it was using microphones for firelighters, which made it difficult to hear the speakers) in Drimnagh Castle, the five discussed "Rearing the Next Generation". As a topic, this was ideal and the contributions were, for the most part, thoughtful and intelligent. But a midweek night did not seem like a natural time for such deliberative, fireside guff. After midnight on a Friday or Saturday night - like Channel 4's After Dark - would be better.
Anyway, in distinguishing between education and learning, the speakers made a worthwhile point. Most of them appeared to subscribe to a holistic approach to assessment and betterment and that's fine, so far as it goes. Aesthetically then, a plausible case could be made for the programme's attempt to make the inclusion of singing and bodhran-playing as seamless as possible. But the viewing experience is not synonymous with the participatory one.
And that is a problem for this kind of discussion show. For the group talking, the experience is most satisfactory if individuals become immersed - if, in other words, the group clicks. By contrast, satisfaction for the necessarily passive viewer is more likely to come about through dramatic conflict. Quite simply, it's easier to become engaged by a row than by a pow-wow. There was also the irony of some speakers decrying TV while appearing on it. In fairness, some of the intimacies of the discussion transferred unusually well - but watching talk and talking talk can never be synonymous.
Watching EastEnders get Ireland so wrong this week was astonishing. Bypassing the modernity of the Celtic Tiger, the Beeb's main soap opera opted almost for a pig-in-the-parlour image. Yes, it was offensive, even though it is also true that we in Ireland are often unhealthily thin-skinned about British portrayals of us.
It was offensive, not because the soap's kind of oafish stereotypes cannot be found here. They can - but they can be found in any country and are no more representative of Ireland than of England's Home Counties. Anyway, portraying the local people as a surly, sinister peasantry - the sort of dark yokels beloved of Hammer Horror movies - is standard metropolitan bias and ignorance.
"They think that T.S. Eliot writes musicals and that Jane Austen made cars," one Irish character says about the rest of her family. OK, but The Wasteland or Alfred J. Prufrock or Northanger Abbey don't usually feature very prominently at a Cockney knees-up - a type of event at which My Old Man's A Dustman is defining. Certainly, I've never been aware of the Albert Square School of Literary Criticism and I think we can take it that Eliot and Austen are not among the top 10 discussion topics in the Queen Vic.
Still, it is British ignorance which has been shown up by this gaffe. If we are genuinely as confident as we are supposed to be, then such blindness ought to elicit our pity as much as our anger. Ironies abound in relation to this incident anyway. The downtrodden, martyred Irish mother contrasts bizarrely with the fact that four women are contesting the country's highest office. And, with Glenroe's Miley Byrne at present in a London nick, we must, in fairness, study that soap's British characters.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all, however, is this: in The Provos, despite some excellent reporting, there is a typical British ignoring or denying of its role in the North's conflict; in EastEnders, there is a typical British assumption that Ireland should be treated like a provincial region of Britain. You know, the natives should subscribe to an imperial London notion of hierarchy and worth. How such misperceptions are made and maintained could make a lively discussion programme because British ignorance about Ireland is monstrous.
Finally, True Lives screened A Change Of Heart, a remarkably brave, if strangely self-absorbed video diary made by the writer and broadcaster Bill Long. It detailed the major stages in the process of Bill's having a heart transplant. The debilitating "before" made grim viewing, the joyous "after" was, appropriately, heartening. But, for me, at any rate, the extended film of the operation itself was unwatchable.
The fact that surgeons like Maurice Neligan can do these operations is good enough for me. Indeed, Mr Neligan, with his matter-of-fact approach and lack of medical consultant pomposity, seemed not only inspirational, but a television natural. For his part, Bill Long, quoting from Henry Miller, Robert Browning and Havelock Ellis, added a light, poetic touch to this most invasive of procedures. This made it, in its way, a kind of Blackbird And Bell in the operating theatre. As a story, it was uplifting; as a TV documentary, it was bloody graphic . . very bloody graphic.