Brendan O’Regan
While psychological thrillers can be ‘intriguing’, a story of defiance, of good versus evil is ‘inspiring’, writes Brendan O’Regan
Of all the psychological thrillers I’ve followed on TV, River (BBC One Tuesdays) has to be the most intriguing. Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard plays John River, a London detective who sees or imagines ghosts, or “manifestations” as he prefers to call them. Mostly it’s his recently murdered colleague, often people who have been victims of crimes he has been investigating, and frequently a notorious killer from the distant past who seems to represent River’s darkest side.
His often public conversations with these ghosts makes life embarrassing for those around him and it strikes me as straining credibility that he’d be allowed to continue working in his mental state. Mind you, it’s becoming a fashion for modern TV detectives to have serious psychological issues of their own – the recently concluded From Darkness, also from BBC 1, being an extreme example.
The ghosts in River are not quite like the ghost in Hamlet – they don’t provide vital information that leads to the cracking of mysteries, but are more likely to reflect what River is thinking, either helping him to clarify or to feel guilty.
Apart from the ghosts the plot is quite complex in a good way, and would be satisfying even without them. The pace can be slow but the show is marked by an admirable humanity, with empathy for its flawed characters. Despite the dark matter there are thought provoking reflections on life and loneliness, relationships and revelations. It is also adult fare, but in the best sense of the phrase.
And there’s some Irish interest – Sorcha Cusack (recently the housekeeper in Father Brown) as an Irish mammy with a gangster son and then last week Jim Norton as a businessman.
Though I’m a fan of pure dramas like these, I’m not so enamoured of dramatised sequences in documentaries. Somehow it feels a bit patronising, a dumbing down that assumes the audience can’t imagine stuff, or can’t make do with archive material.
So it was with an otherwise excellent documentary The Teacher Who Defied Hitler (RTÉ One last Saturday afternoon). The basic story was inspiring – Leonore Goldschmidt was a Jewish teacher in 1930’s Berlin who tried for as long as she could to run a private school for Jewish children who were increasingly harassed in mainstream schools.
She used loopholes in the restrictive Nazi laws to set up the school when she was fired from her regular teaching job for being Jewish. Increasingly she realised she’d have to get her students out of Germany and so taught them English as a priority.
Her school survived the pogroms of the late 1930s because she sold the school for a pittance to an Englishman to make it technically international property. Many of her students got away, sometimes unfortunately without their parents, and Goldschmidt herself went on to found a school in England.
The best of the programme was the interviews with some of her past pupils, along with the archive footage shot by filmmaker Julien Bryan who visited the school, and also secretly filmed evidence of the increasing discrimination against the Jews. With all this the dramatic re-enactments were superfluous and even irritating at times.
Children under threat was also the upsetting theme of Unreported World: Frontline Family Reunions (Channel 4 last Friday). Here the background was the current civil war in South Sudan, where atrocities continue, children suffer and families are fragmented.
The film focused on efforts by UNICEF to reunite separated children with their families and you’d have to be moved by the joyous scenes of reunion at the start.
After that the focus was on a young boy, Machar, who lived in a refugee camp while efforts were made to locate his father. Machar was understandably sad and withdrawn, but began to smile again when his father was found and later we saw him laughing after the two were reunited.
Yes, a happy ending in this case, but we weren’t allowed to forget the squalor of the camps, the horrors the children had seen, the daily deaths of children from malaria.
Reporter Morland Sanders was empathic and seemed to relate well to the children. I wondered if he wasn’t too central but this series is typically reporter-driven and when he gave his own opinion it was just a sharing of universal concern at how children are victimised in war, sometimes even deliberately.
Pick of the Week
Comhrá
TG4, Thursday, November 12, 7:30pm
Interview with Fr Fiontán Ó Monacháin currently serving as secretary to the Archbishop of Tuam.
FILM: The Mission
BBC 1, Tuesday, November 10, 11:55pm
(1986) An 18th-Century Jesuit establishes a mission in the South American jungle and recruits the help of a former slave trader.
Unreported World
Channel 4, Friday, November 13, 7.30pm
Documentary about the child surrogacy industry, especially in Mexico.
