TV Review: According to Nuala O'Faolain, she set about writing her life story thinking that nobody would ever read it and, in this somewhat self-delusional hinterland of memory and privacy, produced the raw and moving memoir, Are You Somebody?
The book mined hostile and unhappy territory: alcoholic mother, feckless father, emotional and physical neglect of the children of their marriage, and O'Faolain's subsequent search for intimacy and belonging. O'Faolain was wrong about her memoir - the book was read by many, ensconcing itself at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and in the process changing her life.
A decade later, the writer, who is now sought after by American academia, was the first subject in a new RTÉ series, Flesh and Blood, a six-part exploration of the legacy of memory and of the impact childhood secrets have on our adult lives. O'Faolain is clearly the series' biggest catch - contributors over the following weeks (including author Kathleen O'Malley, who has written about her experience of child sexual abuse, and transsexual Linda Sheridan) do not carry a guaranteed audience. And there was no sense from the intense if somewhat blurred portrait the programme presented that O'Faolain was hauled on board this revealing and confessional ship with any reluctance; rather that, for some unknown reason, she had martyred herself to the programme. Terse interchanges with interviewer Mick Peelo ("You found solace in the arms of a woman!" Peelo seemed to goad) revealed a defensive individual haunted by the past and struggling to manage the childhood damage which seemingly still precludes her from engaging in "domestic life".
Shot over a period of months in Co Clare and Ranelagh, Dublin, and also in her boyfriend's Manhattan home, the programme sees O'Faolain retelling her story. Family photographs, especially those of her beautiful, dislocated young brother, Dermot, combined with her almost visceral memory and palpable upset, at times made for moving television. But the question remains why O'Faolain chose to submit herself again to the process of self-revelation, this time relinquishing control of her story to an untested strand, which seems neither cathartic for the subject nor of more than prurient interest for the viewer.
O'Faolain remains a tenacious woman and is worthy of respect for having the chutzpah to interrogate her own history and search for happiness despite, as she said, almost being in the queue for her bus pass. Speaking poignantly about ageing and her mother, she will have struck a chord with many when she said: "I see her emerging in my face, I am stuck with her." Whether the programme was worthy of O'Faolain's ready but bitterly real emotion remains questionable.
'All great drama is about revelation of the soul," we were told on this week's edition of Arts Lives, where Irish actors revealed themselves to be more than a bunch of pretty faces in underpaid jobs. Without an SSIA between them, the actors joined Gavin Quinn, artistic director of Pan Pan Theatre Company, for the 2005 project, One: Healing With Theatre.
All in all, this involved 100 actors, 100 rooms and 100 audience members coming together for a series of individual encounters or "performances". Quinn's concept, which housed actor and spectator in a single cell-like room, containing a bed, a chair and a coloured light within a "sculptural building", was a leap of faith for both the individuals involved.
The 20-minute performances, which were described as "uplifting and exhilarating", consisted of each actor telling their audience of one why they chose their profession, followed by a rendition of the actor's first-ever audition piece. After this, the actor shone a "healing light" on his or her cellmate (whether or not the cellmate wanted to get healed). The monastic feel of this ambitious undertaking, within what Quinn described as "this conceptual city of art", was intensified by footage of nervous actors pacing the corridor between their cells and muttering their lines or praying for guidance in anticipation of their calls.
"I regard what I do as a vocation," was how Tom Hickey described his job, and perhaps the theatrically uninitiated, purring in the velvet paws of the Celtic Tiger, might have come away from this documentary with a better sense of what a jobbing actor's life is really like, and the importance of that vocational, largely underestimated commitment. Interviewed in their unostentatious homes, Brendan Conroy, Ronan Wilmot and Geraldine Plunkett, among others, spoke of their work with a modesty, rigour and dedication that felt almost nostalgic. And Ger Ryan, addressing the collective talent that had assembled for Quinn's project, thanked Pan Pan for "taking us seriously for the first time", for offering "respect" to a profession that is often undervalued.
One among that community of Irish actors recently distinguished himself with such ferocity that more than a week later his words are still resounding down the airwaves and demanding a response. Brendan Gleeson's appearance on The Late Late Show transported us back to the programme's heady days when a good Friday night saw bishops and condoms unravelling and the political agenda for the following week being set. Pat Kenny, who is at his best on politics, allowed Gleeson to articulate the massive frustration the actor and many of his countrymen feel about the state of the health service and of A&E in particular.
Memorably, Gleeson's explosive rhetoric likened voting the Government back in for another term to patting them on the back after they had beaten up your ageing parents.
Gleeson tore open the Pandora's box that is our health service in a way that no opposition politician would dare to - articulate, confident, solid, and driven by immense anger, he was fearlessly declamatory. He has thrown down the gauntlet and, on a purely personal level, having spent a couple of nights on a trolley in the bedlam of an overcrowded A&E, watching the glassy-eyed despair of the sick and the elderly, I salute his efforts.
The State broadcaster has had a muscular and interesting week. Mark Little's three-part series, Who's Afraid of Islam?, began with a basic introduction to the world's fastest-growing religion. In an engaging and rigorous attempt to scan the breadth of interpretations of what it means to be Muslim - from the sterile corridors of an LA county jail (where many inmates are applying the discipline and solidarity of Islam to formerly disordered and atomised lives), to extremist followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on bleached rooftops, and back again to egalitarian American Muslim intellectuals walking California's golden beaches - Little unveiled a sometimes contradictory belief system. This was nowhere more evident than in the conflicting definitions of the term "jihad", which for some means death and destruction to the enemy, while for others, more profoundly, it describes the inner struggle to do what is right.
There is no single interpretation of a global faith that is, Little told us, as diverse as the human race itself.
As the third anniversary of the war in Iraq stumbles raggedly across our radars, this feels like an important and timely series.
TG4, with the assistance of the Irish Language Broadcast Fund, financed by the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission, has created a funny and sweetly observed drama, Teenage Cics, which, despite having on board such heavyweight Irish talent as Gerard McSorley, is crouching in the schedule like a reluctant debutante. Set in the Donegal gaeltacht in the dark old days of 1985, when plaster virgins were somersaulting on their plinths and jam sandwiches still held their place in the pantheon, and with a relaxed and talented young cast, Teenage Cics is a sort of localised Malcolm in the Middle with more lust and a lot of penance.
With its Ziggy Stardust soundtrack, those moulting angora jumpers that used to clog up your airways and a world-weary old priest who prescribes "50 Hail Marys, feck it" for two teenagers who accidentally destroy a statue of Our Lady, Teenage Cics is worthy of greater attention. To paraphrase the obstreperously youthful David Cameron in the House of Commons, it's analogue nostalgia in a digital age, and all the better for it.
