Neolithic hijinks of Spinal Tap proportions

I was once briefly employed on the confused periphery of an odd Euro-pudding-esque Channel 4 film, the plot of which presumably made sense to somebody but not to me or, I suspect, to many reviewers because when I spied a copy of it years later in a video store, the only quote they could muster for the cover read "Deserves an Oscar for best use of snow."

I don't know if they give Oscars for best fusion of Enya-style music over soft porn heavy breathing, but if they do the producers of Craiceann: An Scéal (TG4, 9.25pm Sunday), should have their speech ready. The new series attempts to explore the development of sexuality in Ireland from Neolithic times up to the present day, delving into history and legend to let the facts emerge. The visual facts that seemed to emerge was that our Neolithic forebears engaged in foreplay on the banks of streams that would not be out of place in a Spinal Tap video, where that band were to emulate Horslips.

It should be said that TG4 is possibly the best television channel on these isles, not least for the fact that it has used the freedom of being seen as a minority interest ghetto to both buy in and produce intelligent and off-beat programmes. The animated Inis Cuil, for example (also Sunday evenings) makes the world of Father Ted seem positively rational. I praise TG4, by the way, not as a Gaelic-speaker but as a Viking descendent with only a smattering of school Irish and the ability to read sub-titles.

Perhaps the Neolithic age is just not very sexy or the producers of Craiceann: An Scéal were afraid of non-committed views switching away if not sufficiently titillated. But this first programme was an uneasy mix of scholarly historical speculation and mistily-tinted titillation as if simultaneously trying to be David Attenborough and Conan the Barbarian. What is certain is that the invention of the Neolithic cooking pot suggests that babies did not need to be breast-fed for as long and therefore women could physically cope with more babies. It is also certain that Neolithic tribes went in for a great deal of fertility symbolism and ritual, from the sun fertilising the bones of the dead in the burial chamber at Newgrange to the various womb-like mounds dotting the Boyne valley. Christianity did gradually change the idolised representation of women from earth mother goddesses to saints and virgins, but the reenactment I longed for would be for some of the New Age theorists on the programme returning from celebrating the solstice at Tara to meet a group of Neolithic hunter gathers outside a chip-shop in Navan. That might be a memorable, if decidedly brief, encounter between theory and reality. However, to the credit of the film-makers it doesn't look a series to shy away from matters and may become fascinating viewing after it has skipped a few centuries and the men (not to mention the women) begin to wear trousers.

The odd Victorian nipple did appear on Anne Roper's excellent Hidden History: Women of the Gold Rush (RTE 1, Tuesday 10.15pm) but there was a decided lack of misty dry ice effects. The old illicit postcards of prostitutes simply highlighted how everything was for sale, at an extra premium, amid the gold fever of the Klondike gold rush. Roper's finely judged documentary explored the diverse lives of three Irish emigrants who joined the harsh trek by 100,000 potential prospectors to stake a claim when gold was found in Alaska. Only half those who set out ever completed the journey through snow and icy blizzards.

Alaska was a new world where the old rules did not apply. It gave the Irish women a chance to grasp at a financial independence which they could only dream of at home. The hard crossing from Ireland had instilled in them the need to work and if they were going to run eating houses and hotels for men they might as well do so in Alaska at ten times the profit they would make for the same work in some drab coal mining American town.

But in this new world at the end of the 19th century, one golden rule from the old world still applied – freedom for a woman depended on staying totally clear of men. For Mollie Walsh, who began working in laundries aged 12 and aided Irish prostitutes, entanglements meant being shot by a drunken husband who was acquitted of her murder. Belinda Mulrooney might have been a brilliant entrepreneur who built the finest hotel in Alaska but this didn't stop her losing her fortune to a handsome foreign Count who transpired to be a conman dentist from Montreal. Only the amazing Cork woman, Nellie Cashman, stayed free of men and remained rich despite giving away almost as much as she made to the poor as she constantly sought out uncharted frontiers to pan for gold in well into her 70s, driven by an independent spirit of adventure. This was simple, effective documentary making without pyrotechnics.

DERMOT BOLGER

Dermot Bolger was recently appointed Writer in Residence in South Dublin County. His new play, "From These Green Heights", opens in the Axis Art Centre, Ballymun, on Nov 24th.