TVReview: It was just sad. It wasn't revelatory, it wasn't shocking, it wasn't controversial. The much-hyped documentary, I Killed John Lennon - with its Mark Chapman lookalike actor, moody music, anxiously waffling voice-over and obligatory footage of crashing waves and spooky convertibles - was little more than prurient nostalgia.
Twenty-five years ago John Lennon stepped out of a limousine with his wife, Yoko Ono, and was shot five times by the narcissistic, psychologically fragile Mark Chapman. The documentary was based on nine months of taped interviews given by Chapman to veteran journalist Jack Jones. Jones seemed like an equitable, non-sensationalist kind of hack, and it was Chapman who approached him, not the other way round. Having transposed hundreds of hours of Chapman's verbiage, Jones boiled it all down to a simple conclusion: "I don't think Mark can fully grasp the absolute enormity of what he did."
Ultimately, the programme, despite the endless preamble ("this man has baffled psychologists and psychiatrists"), offered little that we didn't think we knew already. Chapman was a loner who suffered from chronic depression and low self-esteem; grandiose, flawed, alienated, enraged, lacking emotional depth - take your pick, the programme offered a rifle and a barrel of fish.
Since boyhood, Chapman had admired and attempted to emulate Lennon. He followed the band into hippiedom but later became disillusioned and experienced a religious conversion. Ten years and one suicide attempt later, Chapman was obsessed with Holden Caulfield, the archetypal alienated adolescent of JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and had recast Lennon as a "phoney". The "nobody", as he described himself, formulated a plan that would bring him the fame, notoriety and identity he craved. When he shot his former hero in the back, severing all the major arteries around Lennon's heart and ripping through his vocal cords, Chapman, in his own mind, became "somebody".
"I'm sorry I killed John Lennon" - these were the words Chapman wrote down and handed to Jack Jones on their first meeting in the penitentiary where he is serving a life sentence. On the basis of this documentary, the statement is hard to believe. There is no guilt contained in Chapman's story, no empathy, just endless self-justification. It was vaguely distasteful to participate in his continued quest for recognition, and it was also difficult to care what drove this lonely man to kill.
The emergency doctor who attempted to resuscitate Lennon told of placing his hand protectively under Yoko as she lay face down on a concrete floor banging her head against it in grief and shock. She asked the doctor to postpone telling the assembled media that John was dead, as she was terrified that their young son Sean would hear of his father's fate from the TV.
It was all very sad. If the documentary achieved anything, it was a reminder of the fragility of our heroes and the painful sturdiness of our memories; 25 years ago feels like yesterday.
MEIRLIGH, A SIX-PART series about Ireland's best-known fugitives, kicked off with a jaw-dropping account of the activities of the "Border Fox", Dessie O'Hare, and his gang and the blundering attempts to capture them after they had kidnapped and maimed dentist John O'Grady in 1987. TG4's dramatised documentary highlighted the mind-boggling ineptitude of the Garda, who managed not to catch the gang and their victim as they fled from a big purple container in the middle of a field in Carraigtwohill. This, despite the fact that the kidnappers (who were flagging down getaway cars, as gardaí had failed to cordon off the surrounding roads) were outnumbered by six policemen and 10 soldiers.
But it didn't end there. Journalist Gene Kerrigan went on to describe how O'Grady was driven undetected all the way back to Dublin, where O'Hare eventually cut off two of the dentist's fingers, cauterising the wound with a red-hot knife. O'Hare's gang then left the fingers and a ransom note for £1.5 million under a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a cathedral. The subsequent capture of two of the gang and their further escape made an already ragged force look like the Keystone Cops on acid. This time, one gang member (not handcuffed) made a run for it when the police car pulled up outside the station and the other took flight from inside the station as he was being charged, the chasing policemen falling over each other as they tried to get through the doorway.
Finally, after much bloodshed, the wounded O'Hare was captured and O'Grady was released. O'Hare and his cohorts called themselves soldiers and justified their activities as a legitimate means of funding their war, and in this stance, as Kerrigan pointed out, they were not alone. Coming up soon in this riveting strand is the story of "Mad Dog" Dominic McGlinchey, if you can face it.
IN THE WEEK that saw David Cameron peddling his Blairite compassionate conservatism (and his bicycle) all the way to the dizzying heights of the Tory party leadership, a smiling Cherie Blair pirouetted across our screens in Married to the Prime Minister. Cherie has, many believe, tarnished Tony's armour since he took office eight years ago; in the programme, she was deemed variously to be avaricious, foolhardy, careerist and loud (all of which, let's face it, pales into insignificance beside the assertion by one pundit that she has thighs like boxer Lennox Lewis).
Cherie, in an attempt to humanise the marionette-like face, invited viewers into the Downing Street state rooms, her private office and the back of a couple of taxis as she struggled to keep up with the hectic schedule that is the jigsaw of her life. She hosts political and social events, makes five visits a week in support of charities, holds down a job as a barrister, has four children and, astoundingly, cooks all the prime minister's meals.
"We have no help," she claimed. "When Tony comes in in the evening, the first thing he asks is: 'Where's Cherie and where's my dinner?'" (In the dog, mate, get a takeaway).
Although promising to offer an "intimate portrait" of life as the PM's wife and despite Cherie sharing the tribulations of living over the shop and having a conspiratorial giggle about the awful curtains in the family quarters, the early part of this documentary felt as tight and uncomfortable as the stilettos she shed under the chair at a meet-and-greet in Downing Street.
Things got more relaxed when Cherie got out of the spotlight and interviewed her surviving predecessors. A candid Mary Wilson, wife of Harold, described going into his bedroom in the middle of the night to find one of his private secretaries, "hair streaming down her back", taking notes on his bed.
A tightly coiffured Norma Major, wife of John, described as "a kindred spirit in the goldfish bowl", was more discreet, although she had clearly detested her spouse's time in Number 10. She spoke of unwanted press intrusion into her children's lives and of the absence of her husband from meals, though Cherie, politely, didn't speculate about takeaway curries.
One of the more fascinating couples to bed down in Downing Street was surely "DT and the Boss". "Steady pet, steady pet. Late now! Bed!" DT (Dennis Thatcher) would say, being the only one, we were told, who could persuade the sleepless Margaret to put a sock in it when her subordinates were drooping with exhaustion. Last Tuesday, when the shaky Maggie was admitted to hospital and kept in for observation, a BBC news reporter reassured us that her state of ill-health had nothing to do with her daughter, Carol Thatcher, being crowned celebrity queen of the jungle. "We are very excited," she is said to have pronounced from her hospital bed.
"I'M A GULLIBLE Twit, Stuff Me In A Shuttle" could be an alternative title for Space Cadets, Channel 4's new reality-TV show, which presenter Johnny Vaughan, from the depths of a furry-hooded parka, lisped "is the most elaborate and expensive hoax in TV history". Basically, Channel 4 has turned a disused military base outside Ipswich into a replica of a Russian space training station, having advertised in the British media last summer for "thrill-seekers" to participate in a "mystery" reality show.
After whittling down the applicants by getting them to "bridge jump" into rivers, abseil down mountains and humiliate themselves on the dance floor, the programme-makers have selected a dozen of the most "suggestible" candidates, who have been told they are being brought to Russia to be trained as Britain's first televised space tourists, with a lucky few launched into orbit on a five-day mission. Then the naive "way to go Johnny" twentysomethings were herded on to a plane, with their lip-gloss and thongs and sturdy egos, to be flown around for four hours in a circle and then greeted on their "arrival" by an actor with a bad Russian accent to start their training. The few that make it to "space" will, unknown to themselves, spend five days in a simulator before being paraded as TV's biggest tosspots.
Good sports, though, all the same, no? Maybe it's the time of year or the fact that in Pakistan a couple of million earthquake survivors are freezing on the sides of mountains in leaky tents but somehow this excessive idiocy feels stomach-churning.
