Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work
Being the Queen of England must be hard. She has all those palaces in which to play around, hundreds of servants to carry out her bidding and oodles of money with which to indulge her every whim, and yet she ventures forth every day to earn her crust. It's that damn sense of duty thing and it doesn't come with a retirement option -- it's 55 years since she embarked on her job and she's still putting in the hours. It must be really boring.
It shouldn't be boring for the viewer, though, and it was depressing that the first instalment of Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1) had so many minutes of tedium. Maybe the makers were so awed at the limited access they'd been given that they didn't dare make something amusing, or even quirky, out of the footage. But whatever the reason, this dutiful account of a state visit to the United States didn't justify the 90-minute slot it had been granted.
There was the odd amusing moment. We got to see the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot that had caused so much fuss when a BBC promotional film implied that Her Majesty had stormed out of the session. She hadn't, but she seemed pretty icy throughout and not at all amused when the celebrity photographer deferentially suggested that she might remove her tiara.
As for the pictures themselves: did the Queen like them? That, according to her haughty press secretary, was the wrong question to ask: "The Queen approves the release of them -- she doesn't express a view about them." That seemed enough for Leibovitz, who "liked her feistiness" -- feistiness apparently being indistinguishable from withering disdain.
Over in the US, a construction worker indirectly praised her by pointing out that "we've got a president half her age who can't even speak English," while on the White House lawn the said pres stayed true to his inimitable form by recalling her bicentennial visit "in 1776" -- for which, as he himself noted afterwards, he received "a look that only a mother would give a child".
Otherwise, though, the film was as stately, low and uninteresting as the visit itself. We may have been watching a bit of history -- the twilight of monarchy -- but does history have to be so boring?
As if to defiantly answer that question, along came Sean O Mordha's contribution to the current Hidden History season on RTE1. Entitled The Irish Historian, this was O Mordha in playful mode as he chose the Constitution Room of the Shelbourne Hotel as a suitably resonant venue in which to ask some of our most eminent current historians a few basic questions about their subject.
The result was a film that was more sprightly and revealing than some of the laboured documentaries that have been shown in this series, though more difficult to write about, too, in that, lacking a central plot, it was all about ideas and opinions -- many of them just tossed off in response to particular questions. But so tantalising and suggestive were most of them that the viewer was wholly absorbed -- and, indeed, coming up with alternative responses.
A few of the scores of soundbites I jotted down will have to suffice. Asked to name the most overrated event in Irish history, TCD's Ciaran Brady came up with the fall of Parnell; UCD's Cormac O Gradha opted for the Battle of the Boyne ("because William would anyway have won eventually"); and Roy Foster saw Grattan's parliament as an achievement of "hype and presentation over substance".
And the most underrated event or person? John A Murphy chose Daniel O'Connell; Margaret O'Callaghan of Queen's picked the 1925 Boundary Commission; UCD's Mary Daly opted for the introduction of the potato into the Irish diet; while the modern figure singled out by Roy Foster was Jack Lynch, though he didn't explain why. But this was part of the teasing nature of the film, which was fizzing with so many provocative notions -- about the role of the historian, about revisionism, about the North -- that the viewer spent the duration either nodding in enthusiastic assent or wondering how scholars of such eminence could possibly believe such silly nonsense.
Ultimately, though, the variety of responses made us think about our own attitudes, preconceptions and prejudices regarding Irish history and perhaps to re-evaluate some of them. That's the hallmark of an exceptional film.
Cranford (BBC1) is adapted from three novels by Mrs Gaskell and is set in a market town near Manchester where so little happens that a commotion in the street leads one of the female characters to ask: "What is all this agitation? Are the summer gloves come in?" The series, come to that, is almost entirely populated by women, so when a handsome young male doctor arrives in the town he's practically mobbed by these otherwise genteel creatures.
If this sounds a bit too fluffy for your taste, it should be pointed out that the women in question are impersonated by such eminences as Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton and Julia McKenzie and that they all play a blinder in keeping you engrossed. So far, the tone has mainly been light and witty but there are suggestions of darker moods to come.
In Sex in the Noughties (Channel 4), Sun columnist Deirdre Saunders identified "seven shocking new sexual trends", which included female promiscuity, the role of porn, online cheating and threesomes.
The film tried to be shocking, too, with endless fuzzy shots of naked bits and pieces, but it just came across as tacky -- much like any such show on Channel 4.
I fully intended to watch RTE1's Prime Time Investigates film about the murky business of land rezoning, but on the morning of its transmission reporter Mike Millotte popped up on Pat Kenny's radio show and went into such lengthy detail about what I was planning to watch a few hours later that I failed to see why I should bother.
Indefensible perhaps, but there you have it.
- When history's this dull, one is not amusedJOHN BOLAND
