Spring cleaners
Hidden History told how a woman was burned to death for witchcraft in 1895. Present-day practices still terrify Dermot Bolger, namely the revamping of ordinary people's house in Desperate Houses and the so-called sport of International Rules
The greatest fear of almost everyone who keeps an intimate diary is that an insensitive stranger will find it and read their personal secrets. I say "almost everyone", because the greatest fear of writers, sports people and public figures who keep intimate diaries is that some insensitive stranger will find it and read their secrets before the newspaper serialisation. Personally I have never kept a diary that anyone else can read. What I keep instead is an ingeniously encrypted record of my days, a gloriously intimate and detailed code that – just by going through it – can help me to relive any period of my life. The word for this device in the Oxford English Dictionary is "clutter".
It would be an exaggeration to say that I associate the words "spring cleaning" with "ethnic cleansing", but I sat down with a certain shudder to watch Desperate Houses (RTÉ 1, Fridays, 8.30pm), where professional "de-junkers" descend like a well-dressed and sparsely populated plague of locusts upon Irish homes that look cluttered but also decidedly homely. Through the use of skips, plastic bags, interior decorators and possibly brainwashing techniques, they leave behind them re-invented rooms with enough lighted candles for a black mass and families who appear positively ecstatic at this new-found space.
However, I harbour the suspicion that their victims may be hypnotised and that, as soon as the film crew has left, they make desperate raids on the skip to retrieve their old possessions. I may be wrong, and the finished houses do look awesome, if impersonal. But I'm buying a shotgun and putting a lock on the wardrobe in which I keep the green suede jacket I wore to the Grove nightclub in 1976 until this dangerous television series from CocoTV Productions is over.
If Desperate Houses carries the high-minded Victorian tone that de-junking is good for the soul, then The Culture Show (BBC 2, 11.15pm) has the proselytising tone that culture is good for the brain. Although interspersed with slower and more engaging sequences about individual artists and events, much of the show is a succession of brisk excursions into what's happening in cinema, art and music, delivered with such speed and seriousness that, at times, it feels like a sort of Blue Peter for intellectuals. With that said, it covers a lot of ground and we could use something like it in Ireland.
A culture show in 1895, or at least a culture supplement in a periodical, would have had its work cut out to keep up with the developments in science and outlook. X-rays were invented in 1895, as were the first, grainy motion pictures. It was a year of forward movement, when women were starting to strive towards careers previously closed to their sex. It was also the year when the last woman was burnt for witchcraft in Ireland.
Hidden History: Fairy Wife, the Burning of Bridget Cleary (RTÉ 1, 10.15pm, Tuesday) told the horrific story of how this childless woman was tortured by her husband, held down on a bed by four strong men and forced to drink a hideous quack brew, had urine thrown over her and was set alight with paraffin, all in the belief that she was a changeling and the fairies had stolen away the real woman.
This true – though almost unbelievable – story has been explored by a range of Irish playwrights from Patrick Galvin in the 1960s to Tom McIntyre this year in the Peacock Theatre. Several books have been written about the events, most notably Angela Bourke's very fine The Burning of Bridget Cleary. It is a story that should make for gripping television, yet oddly enough, for this viewer at least, it didn't. Perhaps it was over-familiarity with the material or perhaps the preview tape I had was slightly muffled in quality, but there seemed a flat tone to the programme. It only briefly came to life when Angela Bourke revisited the actual cottage and stood over the fireplace and in the bedroom where Bridget Cleary was held by her husband, father and cousins, who had all succumbed to the hysteria that she had been bewitched.
Perhaps the events were so traumatic that it would have seemed exploitative to dramatise them, or because the rather reluctant neighbours, who answered questions with intrinsic Irish courtesy, also had an intrinsic Irish reticence against saying too much. But the programme felt over-extended at an hour and might have benefited from a shorter slot or more dramatic re-imagining.
Nothing could benefit the so-called International Rules (RTÉ 1, 10.30 and RTÉ 2, 9pm, Friday) so much as its abolition. As the commentators noted more than once, "this is not sport". To the credit of the Irish players, they got straight back up after assaults, so that the farce could be renamed Convict Rules. I know money rules the GAA, but whoever had the idea of calling this cup after a true Irish sportsman and gentleman, Cormac McAnallen, made a mockery of his memory.