Football Stories - (Channel 4, Tuesday)
The Bob Marley Story - (Channel 4, Saturday)
Townlands - (RTE 1, Wednesday; repeated Thursday)
Tinsel Town - (BBC 2, Monday)
His yawning right nostril, seen through a camera looking upwards, told the story. It wasn't as hideous as former EastEnder Daniella Westbrook's collapsed septum which has left a single, sci-fi-like, cavernous orifice in place of two normal nostrils. But it was reminiscent of Janis Joplin's cocaine-sculpted nose. Diego Maradona, who, once upon a time, could exploit nostril-sized defensive gaps, has clearly snorted a fortune. He'll be lucky to live much longer.
Football Stories: Maradona - Kicking The Habit, made by Belfast's Double Band Films, met the ailing star in Havana. Once the world's greatest football player - arguably the world's greatest-ever player - Maradona bolted to Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro after a terrifying heart attack. In bed in his native Argentina, he had, he said, "felt enormous pressure" on his chest. Unable to sleep, he managed to get up, looked in the mirror and saw his face hugely distorted and swollen. Tests revealed that only 38 per cent of his heart tissue was functioning.
Maradona's story is well-known. A squat, almost dwarf-like kid from Villa Fiorito, a lawless shanty suburb of Buenos Aires, his gift was recognised when he was seven or eight. To build him up, he was brought to a dubious doctor, "Cacho" Paladino, who used a mixture of drugs and vitamins. Paladino's concoctions did the trick and the child prodigy became a pocket bull of sinew and muscle so that he could compete physically. It was a disastrously early affirmation of drugs.
After that came recognition throughout South America, transfers to Barcelona and Napoli, his brilliant 1986 World Cup performance and subsequent decline into monumental boorishness and irresponsibility and the nether world of cocaine addiction. The rags-to-riches cliche seems scarcely adequate for Maradona. As a child, he had almost drowned in a cesspit of human sewage and as a metaphor for the trajectory of his life, nothing could be more appropriate. In truth, he was human livestock - for his family, his country, even for the Naples mafia.
Not surprisingly, he came to believe his own dope, acting and behaving like the untouchable deity he was told he was. Double Band pulled off an intrepid coup, worthy of any Latin American junta, in gaining access to Maradona. Really though, this was sad stuff. With his waist expanded to complement his expanded nostril, Maradona, as his friend, Argentine journalist Adrian Paenza said, continues to miss the attention and the limelight. We saw him exercising, clowning and fanatically watching a derby match between historic rivals, River Plate and his own former club, Boca Juniors, worshipped by the working-class of Buenos Aires.
"This is my addiction. Football is my addiction," he roared, looking almost as pop-eyed as when he's been fully coked-up. But it sounded more like wishful thinking than total truth. Cocaine and being celebrated are his lethal addictions. Later he said that he dreams of coaching "Manchester United or Barcelona or Real Madrid or Boca or Argentina". Dream on, Diego. In today's multi-billion pound game, where players not fit to lace his coke, never mind his boots, are commanding immoral fees, Maradona wouldn't be left in charge of a side struggling in the Beezer Homes League.
It was this inability to reconcile his own myth with his current reality which bodes ill for the great Maradona. He was right to point out that, compared with Argentina's "disappeared", the Falklands War and the robber politicians (a globalised entity now, of course) of his homeland, he is no disgrace. Fair enough, but that sort of thinking is not going to stop him snorting. Neither is his continued, albeit largely genuine, defence of the underprivileged from whom he sprang.
Aside from the commendable coup of getting Maradona talking straight to camera, there was little new in this documentary. Still, it would be cavilling to complain that issues such as the star's fathering of a son in Italy and his connections with the Naples mafia went unaddressed. Throughout, there was a sense of walking on eggshells, that at any moment Maradona might freak and have the film crew thrown out. As with his football, there is a volatile quality to his conversation.
"People are waiting for him to die to complete the myth properly," said Paenza. You could understand what he meant. From slum kid to sporting god, the story has been enthralling, almost other-worldly. It has the quality of both a fairytale and a morality play - a contemporary fable. But the focus now is not on Maradona's magical left foot but on his gaping right nostril. His relationship with a ball may have been divine but his relationship with drugs is unquestionably diabolic.
Double Band showed that they have a nose for a fascinating story. Maradona, who will be 40 in October, could yet force it into extra time but, ironically, if he doesn't stop scoring, the final whistle can't be too far away.
Another Latin American icon was the focus of The Bob Marley Story. Like Maradona, Marley came from abject poverty, was part-European, keen on drugs, a messiah to the underprivileged, liberal in his sexual favours, shamelessly used by politicians seeking popular credibility and, of course, brilliant. Part of Channel 4's Caribbean Summer, Marley's story, subtitled Rebel Music, was perhaps the highlight of an uneven series, which has been as hit-and-miss as the West Indies's cricketers down the years.
Marley could and did explain much to the illiterate, ghetto people of Jamaica. "He was like a verbal newspaper for those who couldn't read or write," said one contributor. "If I had had education I would be a damn fool," he said himself. It was one of those penetrating overstatements, daft in itself, but astute in recognising the undiluted purity of his own vision. Having scavenged on rubbish tips as a child, Marley appeared to tap into a kind of primal truth about power relationships, especially political power, in the world.
Still, in the wealthy Western world, where he sold 300 million recordings, it's primarily his reggae beat, not the lyrics which he naively believed could change political systems, that is celebrated. On a personal level, though, he could pull a fair scam himself. Both his wife, Rita, and his simultaneous girlfriend, Jamaica's Miss World 1976, Cindy Breakspeare, were lavish in their praise for him. Considering that he left behind at least 14 children by almost as many women, he clearly had a way with "de queens", as he called them.
Indeed, getting his wife to perform as usual in his backing group while singing the chorus to a song written for his Miss World lover required a pretty adept manoeuvre in diplomacy. There's laid-back and, fair enough, there's ganga-induced, super-laid back. But it requires more than a Rasta spliff to manage that degree of savoir-faire. Anyway, rude-boy, rebel and Rasta, Marley, it was clear, remained loved by his queens. Politicians in Jamaica and in apartheid South Africa had a strikingly different attitude towards him.
He survived a politically-motivated assassination attempt in his own country and his albums were censored in South Africa. One track, Africa Unite, was considered so incendiary by Pretoria's head honchos that it was obliterated on records arriving in the country. In Britain, where Marley lived from 1976 to 1978, Island Records decided to present him and his group, The Wailers, as "a black rock group". The political content of his music was not censored but it certainly wasn't foregrounded.
The Bob Marley Story screened much illuminating new footage. The star's childhood home in the Trenchtown slum of Kingston, Jamaica's capital, like Buenos Aires's Villa Fiorito, looked like a forbidding place. When Marley died, aged 36, in New York in 1981 of melanoma, a cancer which very seldom affects black people, many speculated that genes from his white British father (whom he never knew) had left him susceptible. Colonialism never ends with a colony's independence.
Amusingly, we had seen Marley play football (excellent touches too!) and Maradona sing (enough said!). More importantly though, in both films, we had glimpsed the poison of post-colonial politicians appropriating popular national icons. But the thrilling tango of Maradona's football and the lilting beat of Marley's reggae had the duende, the soul, that is increasingly vanishing from the wealthy world. Peasant boys both, they showed that the only true aristocracy is the aristocracy of talent.
The Marley and Maradona stories of success in the face of adversity had echoes in Townlands. This week's edition, titled Alive And Kicking, focused on the Black Panther Kickboxing Club in Brookfield, west Tallaght. Founded in 1993, the club caters to 40 young kickboxers, trained by Norman Kelly and Joe Condron. The programme followed Kelly and eight fighters to the kickboxing world championships in Greece in June, 1999.
With huge enthusiasm, little experience and even less funding, the mixed gender Black Panthers returned with three medals - a silver and two bronze. Nineteen-year-old Teresa McEvoy, slim, blonde and graceful as a panther, won the silver. Even Bob Marley would be slow to pull one of his queen routines with Teresa. Given that the amateur Irish competitors were fighting experienced professionals, it was a commendable achievement. Funds to send the party to Greece were collected door-to-door and through pub quizzes. The Tiger economy, with its plush and expensive golf clubs, didn't give the Panthers a penny.
Kickboxing is not, it must be said, the most genteel of sports. Few would combine it with, say, croquet or bridge. But the dedication of the team and trainers and their visible pride in representing Ireland was heartwarming. From a community blighted by economic and social difficulties - unemployment, drugs, lack of facilities - the success of the Panthers underlined the fact that the toughness of kickboxing is nothing compared to the savagery of contemporary Irish inequality. The killer blow was delivered by the documentary's final line: lack of financial support prevented the Panthers travelling to Greece this year.
Finally, Tinsel Town. Following the week's tales of cocaine and ganga, Ecstasy was the drug of choice in this latest BBC drama, which is principally of interest to teens and twentysomethings. Set in Glasgow, the title refers to the dance club which acts as a hub for a diverse set of characters. Fast-paced and with driving music, it's really a drama of sex 'n' drugs 'n' techno. A male character sums up his ideal weekend - a kind of Scottish nirvana - as one involving voluminous amounts of "drink, women and curry".
Crooks, married women on the prowl and libidinous gay blokes are all "up for it". The characters are hard-bitten and, at least as yet, without any depth. Some of them copulate in toilets and swear all the time. They are ravers, which I gather means that they are dancing exhibitionists claiming to feel love vibes in an atmosphere throbbing with the threat of violence. Good luck to them. The opening episode centred around a plotline of dud Ecstasy tablets. "The drugs don't work," said a ripped-off punter. That Maradona should have been so lucky.