Republican News · Thursday 9 January 1996

[An Phoblacht]

 

Hunger Strike drama deserves plaudits

I won't say it's great to be back because I was enjoying the break too much but at least the turkeys can relax for the next eleven months or so. Animal rights activists should stop reading at this point because I'm afraid my festive season had a high mortality rate for feathered and furry animals, and pigs of course.

I helped demolish our own family's Christmas turkey in Dublin, cooked another family's New Year turkey in Donegal and a couple of porkers had to die to keep the plate balanced. The Dublin government were so impressed when I turned up to their EU Presidency bash at the Castle that they gave me a whole smoked salmon. I can't be bought but I do occasionally accept gifts. So far most of the population is at least as culpable but my star Christmas present takes the prize. To produce my hand-made Innuit mocassins a moose, a bear and a rabbit all met grizzly ends, but they are so comfortable you wouldn't believe it (although the curing process means they smell as wild as their deceased previous occupants). Apart from a bit of beef for variety, that's pretty much it on the animal casualty front, apart from my liver, which has been alcohol free for a full 38 hours as I write.

It's probably just as well that my festive season was a carousel of drink, travel, a quick bout of flu', picking stones on windswept hillsides and enjoying dead animals because overall the television was pretty bland, very much like the year just gone, with just Michelle Smith, Martin Storey and a forgettable 12 months of political shadow-boxing to recall.

So I was a bit shocked at `81 (Network 2, Monday 6 January, 10pm). The award-winning 26-minute drama, set in Belfast in the weeks leading up to Bobby Sands's death on hunger strike, was imaginative, powerful and very moving. This is the second in a series of three films by director Stephen Burke about the conflict and to see it on RTE first, indeed for RTE to have commissioned it as part of their Short Cuts series on new Irish talent in film, was a refreshing surprise.

The story opens on a hill overlooking Belfast, the viewers' perspective throughout is from the lens of a French television documentary crew. The French reporter meets a young boy who brings the crew home to meet his family, the Friels. This nationalist family live on one side of the peace wall, and meeting them gives the reporter the idea of interviewing the Protestant Campbell family on the other side of the wall. The two families never meet but the political tension leading up to Sands's death is seen through their eyes and their very different perspectives.

The families have much in common but Burke doesn't make the mistake of underestimating their differences. The dialogue is perceptive, asinine stereotypes are avoided and the result is an original film which deserves the plaudits which it has already received. Here's hoping the rest of this six-part series, to be screened each Monday evening at 10pm, is as good.

Fans of fluff will be glad that Ballykissangel is back (BBC 1, Sundays, 8pm). Romantics will be able to watch the barely concealed on-screen lust between the young priest, Father Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson) and local bar owner Assumpta Fitzgerald (Dervla Kirwan) and rest easy in the knowledge that they are real life lovers. They first met on set in Avoca. Aw shucks! Otherwise, the series' return was unremarkable, having sacrificed any attempt at satirical humour for quaintness and soft-focus airbrushed Irish village life. If you've got to have priests on the box give me Father Ted any day.

Otherwise this week I have been watching darts and American football. It's that time of year again, when the beer bellies and their loyal beer-swilling cohorts do battle with the arrows. There was a big split in the darts world a few years back (maybe that's why I have this strange attraction to it) but because I don't subscribe to Sky Sports my allegiance was untested and I watch the traditional event on BBC2. Darts coverage is pretty unreconstructed stuff. There are only so many camera angles possible when two men are fecking three little darts at a roundy board a couple of yards away. So we get a lot of crowd shots of animated partners and supporters. Whatever the purists might say about the right of darts to be classed as a sport it is great entertainment and the ordinary folk who come to support their heroes, whether they are cheering in victory or groaning in disappointment, are always engrossed. I've been targeted in the past because of my oft-repeated passion for golf. I wonder if my detractors (yes, that includes you, O Donaíle) will follow me across the great class divide to have a bash at the darts too. There's nothing like a bit of begrudgery to start a New Year.

To comment on poor old Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand's failure to get more than 19 hours around the world on their latest balloon adventure is not begrudgery. The only reason I bring it up at all is to slag off Sky News, whose reporter, on Wednesday morning, interviewing Lindstrand's son about the balloon's premature deflation, suggested to the youngster: ``You would expect your father to be fairly buoyant about this?'' Ouch!

BY LIAM O COILEAIN

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