Fight the power

Dermot Bolger looks at dingy pitches, dictator dads and the downfall of three of the world's most powerful leaders

An interesting bind occurs in Irish theatre during almost every production of The Plough & The Stars. It is that the Protestant loyalist slum dweller Mrs Burges (despite being as much a pure Dubliner as every other character) is inexplicably played with an Ulster accent. This is the first and last time that an analogy will be drawn between the works of Sean O'Casey and The Premiership (RTÉ2, 7.15pm Saturdays). But while welcoming that programme back in its extended format (with still more intelligent analysis than its counterpart), its extremely snazzy new opening credit sequence displays a similar mindset as it shows a myriad of glimpses of young Irish boys kicking football, but only in moodily-lit industrialised urban alleyways.

That large bulk of the audience of The Premiership who live on farms and in villages across Ireland must feel that either the RTÉ design people never leave Donnybrook or that the powers-that-be in the GAA would have a heart attack if they saw glimpses of young brothers kicking a soccer ball amid the four green fields of Erin.

Sociologists will tell you that if two brothers kick a football long enough, a fight probably follows – and the recent BBC documentary Brothers in Arms showed that if they form a rock band a fight invariably follows. The drama-documentary Strauss: The Waltz King (BBC One, 6.35pm, Sunday) proved that fathers and sons sharing the same creative patch rarely hit it off too well either.

Johann Strauss Senior was the original waltz king and a precursor to the modern rock star in being the first private citizen to own a personal orchestra and indeed to bring it on a world tour. I don't know if he ever reached Ireland, but in the year of Queen Victoria's coronation he gave the waltz to London (to the consternation of scandalised Times letter-writers) and London, not to be outdone, gave him severe pneumonia.

This debilitating illness gave him at least the chance to get reacquainted with his long-suffering wife and five children back in Vienna, the eldest of whom, also called Johann, had composed his first waltz at age six and was secretly learning the violin behind his father's back. Brendan Behan was heard to growl at the opening of a play by his brother: "Geniuses are born in fucking litters". Mr Strauss Senior showed a similar welcoming tolerance by smashing his son's violin, forbidding him to play and then, when the son set up his own orchestra at the age of just 19 – having him blacklisted from every venue where his father played in Vienna.

Strauss Junior could only get his first gig in the Viennese equivalent of Kinnegad, but it was enough to alert the world to the advent on an even-greater musical talent. After that it went downhill for Strauss Senior. In the revolution of 1948 when workers and students seized Vienna, Strauss Junior wrote music to encourage them, while his father composed a march in honour of the new emperor who had regained control by butchering 2,000 citizens. Backing the winner is not always a good career choice for a composer, because the only reason young people came to hear the father in his final concerts was to boo him as a reactionary. He died in squalor in the arms of one of his mistresses who stripped the room and corpse of everything, including his nightclothes. This seemed the most chilling image in the programme and – being broadcast on the Sabbath – was perhaps inserted to encourage martial fidelity among the viewing public.

Chilling images were plentiful in Warlords (Channel 4, Sunday 8pm), the concluding episode of the series which examined the mind-games, paranoia and bluff between Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt upon which hinged the fate of the world. Ironically, the most devastating moment in the final episode was the most peaceful. On a beautiful day in April 1945 in a peaceful retreat called Warm Springs, while having his portrait painted, Franklin D Roosevelt dropped dead. To the end he made the fatal mistake of seeing Stalin as a practical politician like him whose excesses he could always rein in. Within months, with Hitler dead and Churchill voted out of office, and Stalin was left as the true victor of the Second World War, having out-bluffed the others, whose misjudgement left the Polish people to continue to suffer the horrors of occupation for decades.

Churchill remarked to aides at the time: "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed that he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I believe that I am not wrong to trust Stalin". Warlords was an intelligent counterpoint to the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of VE day, a reminder that for millions the war didn't end in 1945 – a new oppressor simply took over. It makes one understand why so many Poles travelled to Rome when John Paul II died to proclaim their emergence as a free nation.