A simple twist of fate

American politicians that are a bit too good to be true; Liam Clancy living the high life and a very strange train ride.
By Dermot Bolger In the early 1990s I served four and a half years on the Arts Council of Ireland and noted to myself more than once that you would not serve four and a half years for armed robbery. My tenure necessitated very occasional forays into the world of the south Dublin dinner party, where I discovered the central difference between working class life and middle-class life. When working class people sat down together to eat back then, we discussed last week's Late, Late Show. When the middle classes assembled back then they discussed the Late, Late Show and the financial affairs of someone called Twink. Twink's affairs no longer command such attention and the main difference now I suspect is that while the working class discuss Fair City, the intelligentsia discuss a soap opera of their own called The West Wing (RTÉ 1, 11.05pm Thursdays).
They wouldn't term it a soap opera, and on one level they're right, since Vera Duckworth rarely gets to make critical decisions relating to China invading Kazakhstan every second week. However, many of the same principles apply, although Coronation Street does not go out of its way to flatter the viewer into feeling good about their own intelligence. The show, primarily set in the White House in the twilight of a Democrat administration, also follows two candidates criss-crossing America in the campaign to succeed President Bartlet. Despite exploring the inner workings of an election campaign, these episodes have the slightly flat feel of a drama running out of steam. American viewers of this series have dropped from 11 million to just 8.2 million, although it did regain a mini-peak of over nine million for the presidential debate between Republican candidate Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) and Latino Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits). Part of the appeal is watching Alda  – known in real-life for his liberal views) play a Republican so very convincingly. Strands do interweave cleverly, like the  shotgun wedding that needs to be arranged for the president's daughter amid all the hustlings and international panics. But in the end, the problem is that both Alda and Smits as Vinick and Santos make public speeches containing home truths with such intelligence, moral integrity and passionate intensity that you know that neither of them would stand a chance of running for president in a world of Al Gores and George Bushes. In the end, that's why it's a soap opera: because soap operas don't need to be real and real politics is no place for home truths.  
Home truths were aplenty in Arts Lives: The Legend of Liam Clancy (RTÉ 1, 10.15pm, Tuesday), excellently directed by Alan Gilsenan who unearthed a huge amount of rare archive footage and gave Clancy the space to talk with raw openness about the early part of a remarkable life. The last music documentary Clancy featured in was Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home about the life of Bob Dylan. Dylan's advice to “blame it on a simple twist of fate” could have been coined to describe the quirk of fluke which saw the young Clancy whisked away from his home in Carrick-on-Suir when barely out of his teens, by the incredibly wealthy, incredible possessive and highly unstable Diana Guggenheim. Not only did the young Clancy find himself in America on the vast Guggenheim estate, but he found himself a virtual prisoner there until he broke free and established his own identity in New York with the young Dylan spell-bound at his feet. The Clancy who talked about that time in No Direction Home (in footage shot almost a decade ago) looked like a caricature of the hard-drinking blustering Irishman. Now several years on the dry, the Clancy in this new documentary has stripped away that veneer and is honest and raw. Watch out for the second part next week.
A shootout on a train in rural Ireland seems more like a Paul Durcan poem than a Clancy Brothers song. Indeed, Six Shooter (RTÉ 2, Sunday 11.40pm) had no small touch of the surreal world of Durcan. It was however a short, sharp glimpse into the wonderfully grotesque and blackly comic world of Martin McDonagh where a middle-aged man (the brilliant Brendan Gleeson) whose wife has just died has a nightmare train journey across Ireland in the company of a callous, psychotic young man Ruaidhrí Conroy is the travelling companion from hell and is well on his way to that place. Gleeson however is truly stuck in limbo of grief despite all his efforts in a day that begins bad and gets worse. RTÉ showed it in advance of the Oscars and were right to do so. It deserves its success not just for McDonagh's writing but as further proof of Gleeson's stature as one of the most intelligent actors working today.