TV Review Hilary Fannin"Now we are safe from disease," Richard happily explained to Anna before, sheathed banana consigned to the floor next to her abandoned teddy bear, they began to have sex.
'Have you got a banana, Anna?" Richard and Anna were in her childlike single bed, with its polka-dot pillowslips and bright yellow sheets. Richard produced a condom, Anna returned with a banana, then Richard carefully unrolled the condom over the banana, just the way he had been taught, the way his teachers had demonstrated.
In a week that breathed autumnal life into the corpse of summertime TV, three well-crafted films were intense paeans to the vulnerability and frailty of their subjects. The first of these, Richard Is My Boyfriend, a drama culled from various case histories, concerned the right of Anna, a 24-year-old woman with severe learning difficulties and a mental age of five, to have a sexual relationship with her Down syndrome boyfriend, Richard. Affectionate and mutually exclusive, the relationship clashed, however, with the deeply held fears of Anna's protective mother (the brilliant Lesley Manville), who feared that her daughter was engaged in non-consensual sex, a fear further compounded when she became pregnant.
"This is for your tummy bug, darling," Manville's character said when, legally constrained from consenting to a termination for her adult daughter, she administered a miscarriage-inducing pharmaceutical, an action resulting in emergency hospitalisation and in Anna's estranged father going to court to argue for his daughter to be sterilised so that she could continue her relationship with her boyfriend.
The story was simple, but the issues it raised were not: how do we view sexuality when it is not packaged in glossy norms? Just who do we allow to have sex? What right have we to deny a vibrant young woman - who delighted in the sensual twirling of her red dress, the gaiety of a paper windmill and her naked back against alleyway stone - the pleasure of an intimate relationship? The fictitious jigsaw that was Anna was representative of many; this child in a woman's body, who might not have been able to tie her shoelaces or read the clock, was nevertheless capable of fancying the postman.
As in other recent TV forays into ethical dilemmas, the health and legal professionals whose advice was sought by the protagonists were "real", including the judge who presided over Anna's mother's appeal against sterilisation and who decided to find for her, thus infantilising Anna and denying her sexual liberty.
Where other TV trials utilising both actors and professionals have largely failed due to their pugilistic, tendentious approach, Richard Is My Boyfriend was that rare delicacy, a sensitively acted, strongly-written piece that gracefully illuminated myriad shades of grey.
NEXT UP WAS Lauren Greenfield's documentary Thin, a gruelling exploration of six months in the lives of four women in Florida's Renfrew Center Foundation for eating disorders. A tough watch, which came in under the True Stories strand, Thin consigned every limply prurient look at the tyranny of skinnydom (and God, there is a whole TV industry out there delighting in the macabre spectacle of women whose kneecaps are bigger than their stomachs) to the toilet bowl.
Greenfield's low-key camera moved invisibly around the centre, alighting occasionally on a notice in the staffroom ("Shhh! Your conversation can be heard!") or on an emaciated patient wrapped in a blanket. Renfrew's residents, caught up in the obsessive nature of their illnesses and accustomed to Greenfield's unobtrusive presence, allowed her extraordinary access to their lives, so much so that one felt one was "there". There at the 5am weigh-ins; there at the body-checks for self-mutilation; there at the room searches for medication, cigarettes, blades. There for the doling out of the high- calorie drinks the women gagged on, there as they shook when faced with a birthday cupcake, there when they wept over a stray filigree of Parmesan cheese on a fragment of lettuce leaf. There when, splayed over their lavatories, they furtively and desperately regurgitated their food.
Brittany - who, at 15, was the youngest of Greenfield's subjects - remembered with affection her chew-and-spit sessions with her anorexic mother and a bag of candy. At 29, Polly's last attempted suicide was after eating two slices of pizza. Shelley, an identical twin bent on self-obliteration, was at 25 so dangerously thin that she was fed by a pump through her stomach - though she found a way to combat the device, syringing the food back out again. Alisa, a mother of two who was hospitalised five times in three months, joined the US air force during the height of Desert Storm - not out of patriotism, she explained, but to lose weight.
There are an estimated five million women in the US with eating disorders, and, we were told, one in seven of them will die from their illnesses. From bingeing on junk (30 doughnuts with ice-cream, whipped cream and marshmallow) to compulsive diet plans (two peanuts, one bite of chicken), food is the enemy and women are literally dying to be thin. Alisa described being thin thus: "This is the one thing I want; if it takes dying to get there, at least I'll get there."
Greenfield's claustrophobic film echoed the neurotic, self-obsessed quality of the disorder. Despite the centre's atmosphere, reminiscent of a correctional facility, the women dreaded the moment when, regardless of their progress, their medical insurance ran out and they were shown the door. Brittany was the first to face a premature discharge: the staff, rendered impotent by the system, could only watch as, filled with terror of the outside world, she wept and caterwauled, begging to be allowed to die, so repulsed was she by her body.
"I want to be thin, I want to be thin, I want to be thin," she roared from the depths of her tiny, white, skeletal body. Greenfield offered no solutions, and maybe there are none in Renfrew. At least, by the end of the film, her four subjects were still living.
WHICH IS MORE than could be said of the second and final part of Paul Watson's documentary Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, charting the decline of Alzheimer's patient Malcolm Pointon in the care of his wife, Barbara. The film, which has (unfairly, I believe) been mired in controversy over its final images, was a testament to the deep attachment, love, and sense of duty that Barbara felt for her husband, a musician and academic who, at the shockingly young age of 51, was diagnosed with this rapid and as yet incurable illness.
This unsparingly realistic account of an insistent journey towards death was, unsurprisingly, bleak. Maybe I'm wrong, but I found it difficult to find hope or redemption in the desperate self-sacrifice that Barbara made to her beloved husband.
Allowing Watson to chart the full horrors of the disease, presumably to highlight the plight of the thousands of voluntary carers who, Barbara claims, are saving Britain's National Health Service more than £57 billion (€84 billion) per annum, was a brave decision, but one that afforded Malcolm little or no dignity, and it is to be hoped Barbara's magnanimity will not make those unable to care for family at home feel inadequate.
That said, however, the quality of her devotion was staggering, and the depth of her patience and loyalty beyond the ordinary. It took 11 years for the disease - which gradually erodes the brain, leaving pockets of damage, voids that fill with fluid - to do its work.
"Do you want to film the bitter end, Paul?" Barbara asked the film-maker. "I think Malcolm would agree, because you've become a friend of the family's." The final scenes, shot in the days immediately preceding Malcolm's death, were the most peaceful and certainly the most moving in the film. Whether or not it was originally marketed as showing Malcolm's death - as it was accused of doing; in fact the pictures show him slipping into a coma - is irrelevant to its quality. Watson's film is a memorable achievement.
WELL, IF THE strain of thought- provoking TV was beginning to tell, it was soon exorcised by a dodgy drama that came to us courtesy of TV3, announcing itself like a burning stake in the heart with the spooky title Revelations. Oh gee, I'm scared. Guess what, the end of the world is nigh, again. Let me avail you of the highlights of this hoary old tale.
There's a Satanist in an isolation cell who can chop off his fingers without bleeding, who ate the heart of a pretty kid (sorry, I didn't write it) whose father is an agnostic physicist (say that with a mouthful of organ), and there's another child with spooky hair who got hit by lightning and is apparently brain-dead on life-support but who can speak Latin when the weather is lousy (I'm not making this up), and who becomes a conduit for the dead daughter. Spooky child arouses interest of sexy phenomena-researching nun who finds agnostic physicist mouldering away in cloistered academe and persuades him to hotfoot it around the globe with her to halt impending Armageddon.
Okay? Got that? There are so many people running around TV studios in LA saving the world from catastrophe that there's nobody left to dust the casting couch. Revelations is as bad as it gets - don't go there. If there's one thing this week's viewing has taught me, it's this: life is too short.
tvreview@irish-times.ie