TV REVIEW:A LINE FROM the poet Thomas Kinsella, from Nightwalker, satirising the Department of Finance (which at that time was giddily spreading its pinstriped legs to foreign investors): "Let my people serve them bottled fury in our new hotels." And a line from economist George Lee, from How We Blew the Boom,a poetic essay on our collective loss: "The whole country was in the grip of a glorified pyramid scheme."
What a pithy TV week it was: reluctantly skipping around the home channels, like a dizzy techno lamb, as a spring evening beckoned outdoors, it felt as if a moment of reckoning was emanating from the screen. With the skinny latte sippers in their palatial jeeps a disappearing species, and property millionaires experiencing the longevity of a flying ant, there was a sense from the box that we are finally weighing ourselves up, before collecting the sackcloth from the dry cleaner and beginning another long march towards some workable idea of national identity. We are, it would appear, being invited to ask who we are, where did we come from and, furthermore, does anyone have the faintest idea where we might be going.
First to Thomas Kinsella: Personal Places, and the superb Arts Lives strand, which is one of the few good reasons left to invest your decreasing euro in a TV licence. I loved Anne Marie O'Callaghan's film and, as the closing credits played out, it was all I could do not to weep.
In a long and detailed portrait of the artist, now in his 80th year, O’Callaghan managed to map out the Dubliner’s career, from a young lyrical poet working as a senior civil servant and personal assistant to TK Whitaker at the Department of Finance, and on to the US and the first of various academic postings which gave him time, initially, to complete his major work, The Táin. Philadelphia is where he now lives and writes, the geographical distance sharpening his eye for home.
At the core of his life is, it seems, his marriage to the elegant and wry Wexford woman, Eleanor Walsh. Vigorous, spirited and youthful, she said of Kinsella (not with any frothy delight or sentimentality, but with a kind of reckoning of her own): “I didn’t realise the capacity of the mind I had married.”
The film, which revisited Kinsella’s personal places around Dublin and Wexford, was not simply an elegiac love story or a gentle treatise on the life of a poet. It examined the fact of his decreasing profile as the Northern poets became pre-eminent and as his mainstream poetry became increasingly supplanted by more modernist and obscure work. Kinsella, who described his process as “experience digested, nagging, and then treated”, once featured in anthologies of British poetry, but spoke about losing 90 per cent of his English audience after the publication of Butcher’s Dozen, his response to the Widgery Report on Bloody Sunday.
Writer Colm Tóibín concluded by saying that “it will take time for the world to catch up with Kinsella”, and I suspect he is correct. It would be good to think that this muscular film will both introduce and reintroduce Kinsella’s daring, vaulting mind to an audience gasping for a courageous voice in these murky times.
SPEAKING OF WHICH . . . from Kinsella to George Lee, the bespectacled bard of the collapsing economy. I think Lee is pretty fabulous: the man has long been screaming into the wind about the state of the nation’s finances while the rest of us were out having the cat gold-plated (oh, don’t ask me what people did with their money, but it sure as hell disappeared somewhere). Anyway, the statistics were all gobsmacking, but I have forgotten most of them. I’m pretty sure, however, that Lee said that at the height of the property boom, between them, the top banks were taking in profits of €125 million per week (which is an awful lot of yachting and even more golfing).
Lee, in a fraternalistic and deeply concerned way, explained, terribly, terribly clearly, how, once the multinationals started seeping away, we ate each other, pretending that our houses were studded with diamonds and charging each other lots of money to buy them. He also illustrated how, in the course of our self-cannibalism, we began to believe that those plastic rectangles in our wallets were magic wands, capable of filling apartments and aeroplanes and wardrobes and American fridge-freezers and row upon row of ugly houses sprouting in what used to be the countryside.
Lee found four archetypical boom-busters to illustrate how vulnerable we became in the midst of this avarice. There was the pretty girl who had the big white wedding and who formerly made a living selling portions of Bulgaria; the furniture salesman who found that there was no one left in the country who didn’t already have a three-piece suite, then bought a taxi plate and now works 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep up the repayments on his overpriced home; the farmer who walked to school barefoot as a boy, who received a million quid from a developer for a field, took some financial advice, reinvested, and lost the lot; and the developer, with his lines of brand-new semis lying empty in some muddy field after selling just five of the 85 units. These are our new stories, our new myths; fecund turf for the likes of Kinsella.
Lee finished the report responsibly, with a positive look at how we could shore up the future. Leadership and, em, communication and, eh . . . oh yes, and change. The point was made that a lot of bright economists are out there looking for a sinecure; Ireland Inc, it would seem, has to head back to the drawing board.
JUST TIME TO let you know that Franc, wedding planner extraordinaire, is back with a new series of The Brides of Franc. This somewhat less frothy new series kicked off with Franc (displaying some interesting piping on the epaulettes of his tweedy suit) battling the elements to choreograph an eco-bling wedding (local organic produce, suspect hair extensions) in a hall on Inis Mór. The raging seas off the island's coast proved far less troublesome than the interior of the community centre – basketball hoops, box windows, ugly curtains, condensation, rancid sports bags (hell, we've all been there).
Anyway, Franc was a proper fairy godmother, and on the night the venue was transformed. What great bedfellows, eh? Franc, and a recession putting a sting in his bling. Still, in sickness and in health, and all that jazz, no doubt he will survive.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
Thomas Kinsella: Personal PlacesRTÉ1, Tuesday
How We Blew the BoomRTÉ1, Sunday
Brides of FrancRTÉ1, Monday
