TV REVIEW: US election coverageTuesday and Wednesday; BertieRTÉ1, Monday; Prince Charles's Other MistressChannel 4, Tuesday
YES WE CAN, and yes they did. God, the emotion, the exhaustion. I know you must be up to your oxters in Obamania, but hell's bells, what a week. My eyes, yellowing and crumpled, are like a couple of unspeakably nasty dots in the snow (and the only campaigning I've done has been nodding at the telly from the depths of the sofa). Like the candidates, I've hardly seen the inside of my pit for a while, but as I write (in a fetching purple dressing-gown which nicely accentuates my greying skin tone), two little girls should be asleep in their Chicago beds, secure in the knowledge that they have (as their father told the entire world) earned the puppy that is going to be moving with them into the White House. Excuse the schmaltz, but there really wasn't a dry eye in the house.
Expectation was running high as Obama: The Movie, which had played out all night across the channels, reached the point when this compelling, composed man walked on stage in Chicago's Grant Park with his wife and two mesmerised daughters, to speak to the quarter of a million people who had gathered there to witness the triumph of America's first black president-elect. Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Barack Obama stood behind two discreet panels of bulletproof glass and said, to his supporters and to the world: "The true genius of America is that America can change." Well, alle-bloody-luia.
In the Grant Park assembly, Jesse Jackson wept, Oprah wept, young men and old ladies wept, intellectual-looking women with doctorates and discreet make-up wept, Latinos wept, gays with asymmetrical haircuts wept, gays without asymmetrical haircuts wept, Muslims wept, Christians wept, Chinese ladies with plastic bags wept, young black women with hooped earrings, their faces alight with hope, wept. Obama, measured and unfaltering, said that he, and America, would proceed with humility and a determination to heal.
Watching history is so damn poignant: you just know it is never going to be this simple again.
Overall, RTÉ's election-night coverage was superb. John Bowman, sporting a suitably jazzy tie, hosted a lively and informative Primetime special which went on through the night. Charlie Bird, in Chicago, captured the momentous mood early on in the evening, when he interviewed an 85-year-old woman who had queued patiently outside a polling booth for more than two hours. A third-generation descendant of slaves, she said simply: "I hope we can make history today, our people have suffered." Images of enthusiasm continued all night, and it seemed like everybody in this media-savvy age had their soundbites ready. "There is no dream you cannot achieve," said one woman; "There is only one race, the human race," said another; yet another simply dressed her two poodles in Obama T-shirts.
By 1.03am Irish time on Wednesday, as Pennsylvania popped and Ohio teetered and projections from the eastern seaboard began trickling through to the disorganised BBC studio in London, a cranky-looking David Dimbleby was somehow failing to capture the tension, a task not helped when one of his studio guests, journalist Christopher Hitchens (looking increasingly smug and disgruntled), rather pooped on the party by declaring that the contest was over. He was right, of course - end of era, ran the consensus from Sky to Bloomberg and back again. McCain was gracious in defeat, his taciturn wife graceful (and maybe a little relieved) in yellow silk. And weeks of punditry are ahead to examine where it all went wrong for the Republicans.
In a sea of words, the contribution of New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd, in conversation with a bubbly Jeremy Paxman on Tuesday's Newsnight (which had decamped to the US for the festivities), was memorable. "The first 16 presidents of the United States could have owned Obama," she said, before adding her own take on how Dubya had scuppered his party's popularity: "W drove the family station-wagon into the globe, then backed it up and drove it into the economy." Pithy, those New York hacks.
GIVEN THAT THE global glitterball was twirling over the US with such vigour this week, it may possibly have been an inopportune time for RTÉ to begin broadcasting its weighty new four-part series, Bertie, which, despite being solid, well-made history, somehow seeped through the cracks of the seismic political events taking place across the Atlantic. Spliced throughout this Mint Productions examination of the former taoiseach's life and work is an extensive interview with its subject (unlike Mint's previous effort, Haughey), which apparently does not shy away from asking the tough questions about his finances.
Part one, which covered Ahern's childhood and early years in politics, did not appear to over-tax a largely genial Bertie. Amusing archive showed the young sportsman and politico shuffling around Leinster House with, seemingly, more hair than ambition while, back at his home base in Drumcondra, his old footballing
mates were fashioning themselves into a
political mafia and charting a career path to the very top of Fianna Fáil for their man. Somewhere around the middle of the programme, Alan Dukes remarked that Bertie had "no political passion other than being there" - not a wholly fair comment, maybe, but one which hung over the rest of the proceedings like a question mark. Despite extensive examination of the man's past, and the efforts of various pundits to explain why Ahern is so consumed by politics and the exercise of power, he still appears, so far, an elusive, somewhat anodyne, character.
He is also a mass of contradictions: a republican who was there on the night the British embassy was torched after Bloody Sunday, it was Ahern who negotiated the Belfast Agreement; a man with, apparently, deeply held religious convictions, he left his wife for his office manager, Celia Larkin, notable in this documentary for her absence (in fact, there was a distinct lack of affection for the woman among Ahern's gang).
"He had lovely eyes," offered Miriam Ahern, Bertie's estranged wife, adding in a dignified and honest interview that "there was a time I was very disappointed in him - he seemed to withdraw from family life and from me".
The series may liven up when it gets more meaty times to chew on: the peace process, the tribunals, the election victories, and the end of the affair. It's odd, though: Bertie really should be fascinating, but that veil of obfuscation remains stubbornly drawn around the man of the people.
APPARENTLY, THERE IS an antediluvian rule among the British aristocracy that ladies stay faithful to their spouses until they have provided their husbands with a son and heir. After that, one is free to party with whomsoever one chooses, especially if whomsoever one chooses happens to be the heir to the throne. Oh be still, my beating heart.
On election night, Channel 4 eschewed all American coverage, choosing instead to air a vile, self-satisfied conceit masquerading as a documentary, a thoroughly horrible little programme concerning old tree-huggin', Camilla-luvvin' Charlie, the man destined never to be king as long as he is still capable of cutting up his own meat. Prince Charles's Other Mistress did, however, serve one useful purpose on the night that was in it, reminding us all why we should value the concept of a republic.
All the main players in this sordid little tale were despicable. Once upon a time, this blue-blooded bit of tabloidism alleged, Prince Charles ("the Alpha male of the 1970s", according to the jocular voiceover) was sleeping with a dippy Australian called Kanga ("the chemistry was instant!") while also pursuing a tryst with one Camilla Parker-Bowles. Kanga, a vacant-looking girl with a big head of peroxide, was apparently a thumping good laugh, married to some polo pony or other. She signed her cheques Lady Dale Tryon (an apt monicker), and her husband - much like Camilla's, apparently - dutifully made himself scarce when the royal sire, on the way back from a bit of huntin', shootin' and fishin', dropped in. There was an odious quote from some wet-lipped, spooky-looking royal correspondent - hang on, I wrote it down somewhere . . . "When one got particularly pregnant, he went to the other." Oh, who gives a highland fling? Anyway, Kanga (who had a nasty habit of phoning the tabloids every time Chas's royal loins stirred in her flowery-dressed direction) got a bit cheesed off when her beau married Diana, resumed relations with Camilla and left Kanga with nothing to tell the gossip columnists about.
The aftermath? Poor old Kanga got cancer, lost her marbles and was sectioned, before allegedly throwing herself out of a hospital window and eventually dying, aged 48, of infected bed sores. Charles didn't go to the funeral.
"She was the best sort of Sheila," said one of her stringy-necked mates. And a lot of good it did her. The antics of these musty English aristos can be damn depressing. Thankfully, the American revolution was about to start on the other channels.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
