Endgame in Ireland BBC2, RT╔1, Sunday
Beneath the Veil Channel 4, Tuesday
The Brandon Teena Story Channel 4, Wednesday ╔ire ag Athr· TG4, Tuesday
As a television ratings rule, documentaries on Northern Ireland tend to attract much the same viewing figures in Britain as your average National Geographic TV special on the life of the wildebeest. One might assume, then, that the opening chapter of Endgame in Ireland, the BBC's four-part history of the peace process, didn't fare much better than its forerunners when it was aired last Sunday night.
Perhaps the corporation needs to market its product a little better. In the preview trailers for the series, clips of Bill Clinton, John Major and Albert Reynolds were shown, advertising the fact that most of the big players in the story would be making an appearance and giving their version of events.
A coup, indeed, but it might have been a better idea to alert potential viewers to the fact that the story of the working relations between Margaret Thatcher, Sir Robert Armstrong and David Goodall would bear an uncannily entertaining similarity to those of three of the most popular characters ever to appear on British television - Jim Hacker, Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley (stars of the 1980s BBC comedy Yes Minister).
True, there was much more to the first hour of Endgame in Ireland than the tales of the efforts of Armstrong (Cabinet Secretary) and Goodall (Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office) to respectfully and diplomatically suggest to their leader that some of her ideas about Ireland were, quite simply, stark raving barmy. They were, though, so sublime they nigh on eclipsed the remainder of what was an absorbing programme.
In 1984, Garret FitzGerald, by then despairing of Thatcher's failure to acknowledge the sense of alienation felt by the Catholic community in Northern Ireland (" 'I will not have the word alienation used about my people'," Dermot Nally, the Irish Cabinet Secretary, recalled her saying, "she said alienation was a Marxist word") decided to try to appeal to her own sense of patriotism to help her understand the Irish.
In light of the anecdote related by Goodall this appeared to be a triumph of optimism over realism on FitzGerald's part.
After the Irish delegation had left Chequers, venue for the November 1983 Anglo-Irish summit, Thatcher called in her advisers to have a whiskey and a "knock-about", as Goodall put it. "Her way of teasing out a problem was to throw out various outrageous suggestions. She said the Irish were quite used to movements of population so..." So? If the Irish in the North wanted to be part of the South why didn't they just move South? "There were big movements of population in Ireland, weren't there?" she asked her advisers. The silence was broken by Goodall. "Are you talking about Cromwell, Prime Minister?" "That's right! Cromwell!" Goodall did not elaborate but one assumes that he gently advised her, with all the stoicism he could muster (α la Sir Humphrey) that apeing Oliver's handling of "the Irish problem" might not go down enormously well with her less than loyal Irish subjects. It was a glorious gem of "you couldn't make it up" proportions.
There were more, not least a revelation by Charles Powell, Thatcher's Private Secretary. "She said 'couldn't we re-draw the Border to make it more defensible?' She thought if we had a straight line border, not one with all those kinks and wiggles in it, it would be easier to defend." Whether the Republic would have to cede the kinks or the wiggles we weren't told, but it was a proposal that Armstrong pointed out "didn't seem very attractive" because, he delicately explained, "it wasn't as simple as that because the nationalist communities weren't all in one place".
Indeed, one was left with the feeling that if it wasn't for the wisdom and common sense of advisers on all sides of the process, and their success in persuading their leaders to abandon their more perilous notions and demands, there wouldn't have been a "process" in the first place. Douglas Hurd, then Northern Ireland Secretary, for example, displayed his own lack of understanding of Unionist sensibilities when he admitted to being baffled by their outrage at the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. One assumes his advisers directed him towards the entry "betrayal" in his Oxford Concise dictionary.
In part one, at least, only fleeting contextual information on the period was provided, with the microphone very much in the hands of the politicians and diplomats and little voice given to the people "on the ground". But, presumably, the aim of the series is to create a historical record of the peace process, with the politicians and diplomats doing the recording. That, inevitably, will lead to an abundance of self-congratulatory chat through the next three episodes and zealous defending of personal records, but that's unavoidable. So far, though, it's been fascinating.
From one troubled history to another, this time the story of Afghanistan as featured in Channel 4's Beneath The Veil, an inexpressibly disturbing documentary on life under the Taliban.
Saira Shah, the British-born daughter of Afghan scholar Idries Shah, travelled through Afghanistan with a hidden camera and left with harrowing film of executions of men and women in the football stadium in Kabul, pictures of victims of atrocities and massacres committed by the Taliban in the north-east of the country, where they are at war with the Tajiks, and images of starving children whose mothers cannot feed them because they are no longer allowed to work.
Shah's journey was an extraordinarily courageous one, paling only next to the bravery of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, whom she filmed defiantly and secretly educating their daughters, who are no longer allowed to attend school past the age of 12. Their punishment if caught? They are driven to the football stadium on a Friday afternoon by the Taliban, paraded around the ground in front of a large crowd, made to kneel down in the penalty area and shot. Meanwhile, the world loses sleep over the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhist monuments.
It was a week for unbearable documentaries on Channel 4, with Beneath The Veil followed on Wednesday night by The Brandon Teena Story (on which the film Boys Don't Cry was based). If you've ever been unfortunate enough to tune in to the Jerry Springer Show and doubted if the guests were for real (and desperately hoped they weren't) then The Brandon Teena Show will have confirmed your worst fears - they're out there alright.
Teena started out life as a girl, moved to Falls City, Nebraska, changed her name from Teena Brandon to Brandon Teena and began a new life posing as a boy. When her secret was discovered by two of her beer buddies, they raped her and, after discovered she had reported them to the police (who pretty much told her she'd got what she deserved), murdered her and her two friends - one in front of her baby.
ONE is in jail for life, the other is sitting on death row - but such is the depth of his feeling that he did his community a favour because Brandon Teena was a 'freak' he doesn't quite understand why he's there. If he's spared the death penalty and gets released some day, expect to see him turn up on The Jerry Springer Show.
Our parents' teenage years might have been blighted by a sprinkling of intolerance, austerity, dodgy haircuts and strange music, but at least they didn't live in Falls City, Nebraska. Mind you, having seen TG4's Eire ag Athru on Tuesday, form this 21st century vantage point it's difficult to identify exactly what planet they lived on, never mind in which town.
Using wonderful archive footage, the programme, which examined the changes that took place in Ireland between 1956 and 1964, taught some of us a few things we never knew about our mothers - for example, they didn't stand a chance of nabbing our fathers unless they had "conical breasts with separation uplift", ones that "conformed to an American ideal of the body as promoted in magazine and films". And all without the Wonderbra, too.
Nor did some of us know that Bernadette Gormley was the first Irish woman parachutist ("here she's coming down as well as any man, God bless the women," said the zany narrator as she landed in a field) or that women weightlifted in those days ("it gives them a good figure to keep the boys looking at them") and liked a bit of fencing too ("today's women are up to everything - -this is a healthy sport and useful to control your husband").
Or that the main attraction in becoming an air hostess was "you never knew what eligible man you might meet on a plane".
Stupendous.
And next time you hear your mother complain about rowdy young people, ask her if she was in the Top Hat in Dun Laoghaire the night the crowd spilled on to the stage and Adam Faith had to appeal for calm. Or if she was among the rioters the night the Beatles came to Dublin ("Dublin in turmoil. People injured, windows broken and cars destroyed. It'll cost thousands," said the voice on the newsreel).
And if she's still saying nothing, ask her was she one of the contestants in the "Lovely Legs Competition", especially the woman whose appearance on the screen prompted the commentator to observe that "girls not built that way [conical breasts with separation and uplift, tiny waist and hourglass figure] had to squeeze in a bit in places and pad themselves out in others". Most of all, though, when they next say "you lot have it easy theses days", just nod and say "we do".
tvreview@irish-times.ie
Shane Hegarty is on leave