When enough is enough
Violent images evade censorship; cracking a pornography ring is documented on Chain Reactions... and Big Brother is hardly worth a mention. By Dermot Bolger
It's an odd aspect of television that men can kill each other as brutally and graphically as they wish at any time of day without anyone batting an eyelid, when not long ago the sight of two men kissing each other would have caused consternation – certainly before the 9pm watershed. Television is more fluid these days and just about anything goes, including allowing people who appear mentally unstable onto Big Brother (Channel 4, ad nauseum) to be objects of public scorn and amusement. Radio remains a more constrained medium: when writing a recent afternoon play for BBC Radio 4, I was amused to be asked to exclude from the broadcast text such words as "God" "Damn" and "hell".
Television is less precious and one of its strengths is an ability to cut to the graphic heart of events. Yet at times there is a danger of history being used to cloak voyeurism. Two Civilisations: Days that Shook the World (RTÉ 2, Sat 8.25pm) has been a consistently good series, examining pivotal moments in history. This week it looked at 1989, when Nicolae Ceausescu's rotten regime fell in Romania. Almost as frequently as Irish county councillors bizarrely invoke the Nazis when debating Mickey Mouse disputes over drainage and land boundaries, we like to hurl patently unrealistic (and positively insulting to Romanians living in Ireland who suffered under this monster) comparisons with Ceausescu at political leaders who proffer overtly grandiose schemes.
Ceausescu and his wife Elena were tyrants who deserve little sympathy from history. Still, the story of his decades in power, from the early days, when he cultivated the cult of himself during a period of initial prosperity, to the final years, when minions played recordings of people cheering on loudspeakers to cloak the sullen silence of the population forced to parade past his window, makes for a fascinating case study in delusion and the corrupting alchemy of absolute power. Yet, despite their barbaric crimes against human decency, some of the video footage used seemed out of place for a time when children could be watching. The documentary cut between a re-enactment of the hasty assembly of the firing squad – who knew in advance of the sham trial that they would execute the couple – and actual trial footage, where the mocking demeanour of the elderly couple changed to terror as they realised that they would be shot. History needs to be made come alive, but I am not sure what is served and whether we are moving into a "snuff movie" area of entertainment when we casually show an old woman – however hateful – begging men not to tie her hands moments before her death. This was historical footage I have seen before, but rarely so early in an evening. However, no soldiers kissed afterwards, so there will hardly be an outcry.
Images of the elderly Elena Ceausescu realising that her time was up does not even begin to compete on the disturbing scale with the avalanche of images of child abuse circulating on the internet. Second series fatigue can be a common television complaint for shows that were fresh the first time around, but it is a pleasure to say that this is not a complaint effecting Chain Reactions (RTÉ1, 10.15pm Thursdays). Presented by Simon Delaney, it remains fast-moving and visually engaging, especially this week when following the sequence of events starting in Sri Lanka and winding up with dawn raids in every corner (and social class) in Ireland during Operation Amethyst.
If Chain Reactions was about unravelling the gross betrayal of so many children by adults, then it's nice to mention a celebration of trust. Roisin Loughrey's seven-minute film Fall into Half Angel (RTE 2, Sat 12.30am) was a lyrically shot documentary exploring the intense physical and emotional dependency needed between two trapeze artists, Ken and Tina, who can only create a mid-air ballet of grace by being bound by absolute trust.