Filling in the gaps

An intimate look at the life of a young poet through the eyes of her father in Home Movie Nights, the life of a soldier wronged by the hands of time in Two Civilisations and the lives of drugged-up teenagers expressed through dance in Joyride

One of the few delights of getting older is that you meet old friends at unlikely times and places. Sunday afternoon seemed an unusual time to meet the wonderful Dublin poet Sara Berkeley, who first emerged into public view at 16 years of age, fully formed as a distinctive poetic voice, in the same way as the youthful Michael Hartnett first burst upon the world. It was all the more surprising to meet the 16 year old Sara Berkeley because she was 16 in 1984. This time, she was on Home Movie Nights (RTÉ1, 2.15pm), aged 16, aged six and indeed aged less than six days old being carried out of the hospital by her mother, with three excited older brothers crowding around to catch a first glimpse of their new baby sister. The reason for this was that her father David was an avid cine-camera enthusiast, who recorded the seemingly ordinary but now precious moments in the life of his growing family in Raheny in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

These occasionally grainy but joyous amateur home movies formed the nucleus of the first of what became a series of short documentaries by the talented Alan Gilsenan, now being re-shown on RTÉ. All were superbly edited, but Sara Berkeley's (the series was actually named after a poem of hers), was especially fascinating. Not because any huge events occurred in her childhood – Gilsenan's series avoided the scaffolding of childhood trauma, as recently seen in other programmes, and instead chose to focus on everyday lives. Berkeley brought him through her family's history with humour, warmth and intelligence, never overstating the importance of what was being shown for anyone other than herself, but also never losing sight of its special magic. In the ten or so years since the documentary was made, the American-based Berkeley has rather vanished off the literary radar, but recently, Gallery Press published a remarkable book by her. Strawberry Thief is a joyous celebration of a journey through the pain of a failed marriage into the happiness of a new one and the exhilaration of motherhood. In a curious way, poems are like home movies and Strawberry Thief is a startlingly brilliant book that fills in that missing decade for anyone who chanced upon Home Movie Nights on Sunday afternoon, 7 May.

A lot of missing decades were never filled in in the life of Private George Price, the young Canadian soldier shot dead at 10.58am on the 11th of the 11th, 1918. The bitter irony is that, even as his life's blood was trickling from him, all across Europe guns were falling quiet and a silence settled over places like Mons that was startling to both humans and animals who had grown accustomed to four years of bombardment. The irony was further deepened by the fact that the German surrender had been signed in a railway carriage at 5am that morning but did not come into force until the eleventh hour. Two Civilisations: Days That Shook The World (RTÉ2, Sunday, 7pm) explored the events leading up to the armistice as the Germans were forced into signing a treaty, the terms of which would help spark a further world conflict 21 years later. Narrated by the evergreen Cathal O'Shannon, it constantly juxtapositioned itself between the terse negotiations in the railway carriage and the men in the trenches preparing for what would be their last day of action. Bizarrely, news of the ceasefire coming into effect in a few hours time spurned both armies into a frenzy as if determined to use every battery shell and bullet at its disposal, with heavy and needless causalities on both sides as they waited for the clock to strike eleven. Two Civilisations, which focuses on major defining moments in history, captured that chronology well and made for intelligent viewing.

I am not sure I understood everything going on in Joyride, a contemporary dance choreographed by James Hosty in Dance on the Box (RTÉ2, Thursday, 11.15pm) but this very short film, with a sparse and muted score, was oddly compelling. Featuring lost adolescents trapped within an almost slow-motion nightmare haze of drink and drugs and in a desperate desire to belong and be part of something that spiralled into danger and eventual humiliation, it possessed a stark, uncomfortable beauty. Hopefully it will come around again.

Dermot Bolger's new novel, The Family on Paradise Pier, is about to be published in softback with an illustrated extended afterword