Totally Dublin

Being omniscient, I can remember my own birth in perfect detail, and can I just say, dear readers, that on the 24th July 1984, oh how the Heavens themselves did sing! I gave my dear mother no trouble at all (“like a bit of pleasant wind” she said), several Palestinians arrived bearing gifts of unrivaled bounty, international conflicts ended in mutual rejoicing and just for that one, magical Tuesday, the moon itself changed shape.

Well, actually no. I was born into a ward named after St. Jacinta, in Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, thus confirming my faux-skanger status for all eternity. Not much is really known about the event itself (indeed my own mother seems hazy), and with a lack of baby photos, I’d actually always suspected I was adopted. Until it became clear that is, that I had inherited the absent-mindedness and fleshy eyelids of my dear old dad. When pressed about what my birth was like though, both of my parents still get wistful, before vaguely mentioning that it had been particularly warm that July and turning the TV volume up.

It would’ve been handy, of course, if I’d been born, not at the site of the world’s oldest horse show and original Supermacs, but at Princess Anne’s Hospital, Southampton. Here, for a show they’re calling One Born Every Minute, Channel Four have installed 40 automated cameras, to capture the miracle of birth in all its terrazzo-floored, antiseptic-stinking glory. A fly-on-the-wall documentary, the first episode followed two women through the labour process; 37 year old Tracy (accompanied by her witless husband Steve and son Liam), and 22 year old Lisa, with partner Will in tow for what turned out to be a rather complicated birth. The show, if we’re frank, could’ve been awful, and indeed on paper it sounds like it very well should be. Not so much a programme in its own right perhaps, as a desperate attempt by Channel Four to find an off-season use for all those Big Brother cameras. Thankfully though, and perhaps surprisingly, it’s actually pretty great.

Directed by Lisa Smith, One Born Every Minute accomplishes itself as an emotive and well-positioned documentary, that takes the everyday miracles of maternity wards and lays them bare on the small screen. It opens (terrifyingly) on a long shot of a busy hospital corridor, where nurses and midwives are busily running in and out of rooms, tending to their patients. What they seem to be ignoring however, is an animalistic and sustained howl of pain and anguish that’s slowly wearing down the walls. Whether you have a womb or just used to live in one, this noise is blood curdling, a sound more akin more to wartime torture films than how we like to envision modern medicine. It’s at this point that you begin to wonder what exactly you’ve let yourself in for, as nightmarish visions trip through your head, of gynecological reality TV that shoves the camera where only fee-charging websites have gone before.

But Smith is clever, and forgoes the idiot reference of her programme’s title. There is, in shows like this, a thin line between serious documentary and one note reality TV, yet OBEM seems to know as much, and treads carefully on the side of the former. The editing is seamless, and manages to avoid cheap tricks or obvious manipulation. No doubt makers have storyboarded the footage to some extent, in the interests of pacing etc, but ‘contributors’ Tracy and Lisa actually seem strong enough as characters to do most of the leg work themselves. Tracy, expecting her fourth child, has an endearingly pleasant nature, feeding the audience back story in pre-recorded interview snippets, while cheerfully panting her way through husband Steve’s bizarre sense of a bedside manner (at one point while Tracy is off screen in the bathroom, mid-contraction and in obvious pain, he tries to jimmy the door open so the cameras can catch her on the toilet). With both women, their good-natured capacity for mirth, even when they have a human being crawling out of them, is heartily cheering. So much so that for parts of the show you’ll feel like labour is just a walk in the park, and that your own mother’s unresolved anger issues towards you really are completely unfounded.

Lisa’s story is less straight forward though, as her unborn child has a condition causing his bowel to form on the outside of his abdomen, and leads to an emergency caesarean 11 days premature. There’s a palpable anxiety in these scenes, especially as the camera trains on Lisa’s worried face, seconds after the birth of her still silent son. It’s tense and even terrifying, like a somehow heartwarming version of the Saw franchise, where you actually care about the people getting cut up on screen.

OBEM handles these gearshifts well, from the good-natured banter to the grim realities of hospital life, and keeps its audience buckled in tight along the way (you can insert cliched stirrups joke). One thing that shines through all this horribly though, is how utterly surplus to requirements us men are to the actual business of birthing. Steve and Tim seem completely at a loss regarding what to say or do during the entire process, in a space dominated by professional and commanding women. Even Steve’s cutting of the umbilical chord seems perfunctory and a little awkward.

Yet OBEM doesn’t alienate its male viewership. Actually I’d go as far as saying that it manages the neat trick of cross-demographical appeal. Some of this is in its subject matter, undoubtedly, but most is in the crafting. Smith has produced a documentary here that is intelligent without being elitist or agenda-driven, human without veering into the ditch of sentimentality. Even in its depiction of understaffed wards and services stretched to their limits, it comments in the telling rather than the telling off. This quiet, non-judgmental approach is at the core of One Born Every Minute, and the main reason why it excels at portraying families on what must be the most incredible yet vulnerable days of their entire lives.

One Born Every Minute airs Tuesdays at 9pm on Channel Four, and is available for catch up online at

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/one-born-every-minute/4od

On a completely unrelated and arbitrary side note, someone at Channel Four needs to do a spin off on Nancy the clearly bonkers but brilliant receptionist, stat.

During the great 2009 celebrity die-out, we were treated to some truly appalling cut and paste biopic jobs, as well as some blatant money grabbing from programme makers looking to capitalize on fan grief. The welly-sucking low point of this muck was Derek Acorah’s risible Live Séance, where Sky One allowed him to manipulate some emotionally vulnerable people into believing he could provide a direct line to the recently deceased Michael Jackson. The rapid turn around in producing these slipshod obituaries always left you wondering how much thought could really have gone into them, or if Jackson could really have even settled into his heavenly Hilton, before Acorah started maniacally jabbing at the celestial doorbell.

With these still fresh in our Telly Thursday memories, it was incredibly refreshing to sit down to Channel Four’s Mo at the weekend, a well considered, living, breathing remembrance of a much loved political personality on both sides of the Irish sea. Beginning with the diagnosis of her terminal brain tumor, the feature length drama follows ex-Northern Irish Secretary of State through her political success and later isolation, right up to her death in 2005.

The focus of Mo however isn’t on the political work that drove her life, but rather on the woman behind it. Indeed, anyone tuning in for  an in-depth account of the Northern peace process may feel shortchanged here, as the nuts and bolts of history are eschewed in favour of the personalities that shaped it. Though Mowlam is obviously the centre of attention here, it is how those around her interact with her outgoing personality that gives the drama its substance, particularly in a Northern Ireland unused to having a woman at the political table.

Julie Walters’ casting as Mowlam (though she had very publicly voiced her own personal concerns about her physical suitability) turns out to be an utter success, as she expertly embodies the willfulness, humour and bottom line humanity of her character. This humanity turns out to be one of the defining themes of the show, as well as a double-edged sword for Mowlam herself, as it is the cornerstone by which she endears herself to the public, but also the Achilles heel by which she flounders in the hard-nosed world of politics. It’s a poignantly drawn conflict, but also one that is perhaps overused in places, and too often reiterated.

That small gripe made however, it doesn’t take away from an excellent portrait, that is intelligent enough to challenge the viewer in their preconceptions of the woman. Early fears of a drama about ‘Saint Mo’ get quashed in the second half, as her illness begins to take hold and the viewer is confronted with the ugly reality of a hard fought death. As Mo lashes at those around her, we get a nuanced, 3D Mowlam, in a drama that is fearless and dignified in the portrayal of a proud woman facing oblivion.

For Irish viewers, Mo Mowlam should resonate as a familiar and well-liked figure, like a feisty aunt who lights up the house when she comes to visit. Going into this drama you feel as if you already know her a little, before you proceed to get to know her a lot through Walters’ excellent portrayal. When things get tough towards the end, and they do get tough, this familiarity just makes her decline even more difficult to watch.

While it is difficult to emphasize just how emotionally evocative this drama is, it’s also important to point out that this is by no means an utter dirge. There is humour aplenty here, in a script so peppered with under your breath one-liners that it bears endless re-watching. As an overall drama, it checks every box. A wonderful success, in other words. If by nothing else, this was evinced by the fact that its premier on Channel Four drew more viewers than any other drama since 2001. Almost five years on from her sad passing, it seems Mo Mowlam is still capable of drawing a crowd.

Mo aired onChannel Four on Sunday 31st January 2010, and will be available for a limited time on 4oD.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/mo

After Conan O’Brien’s high profile exit from NBC last week, and the media circus that went with it, the network in question has been scrabbling to save face in any way possible. In a U-turn on their recent programming policies, they’ve declared their intent to plug up the gaping Coco-shaped hole in their schedule by commissioning an abundance of original scripted content. The jobs and cash this means to American comedy and drama shows such as Law and Order: SVU and the struggling Parks and Recreation is certainly no small change, but in the cut throat world of US network television, critics and execs alike were quick to hop all over the statement. Too little, they scoffed and tweeted, too late.

While these death knells might be premature, it is true that NBC could learn a lot from the performance of their competitors, in particular CBS, who have turned their fortunes around in the last few years by repeatedly putting their faith in the development of scripted drama. After cleaning up stateside, a lot of these slow burners are now starting to trickle across the Atlantic airwaves to a European audience, with the latest arrival in the form of The Good Wife, which debuted on Channel Four this week.

Starring Julianna Margulies (ER, Scrubs), the plots revolves around Alicia Florrick, the wife of a recently incarcerated State Attorney (Chris Noth), awaiting trial for charges on a sex and corruption scandal. Reeling at the revelations of her philandering husband (in particular the Youtube clips of him “sucking on the toes of a hooker”), Alicia is forced to resume her cut-short career as a litigator to provide for herself and her children. Deciding to stick by her jailbird spouse in the process, The Good Wife charts Alicia’s progress, moving from little more then a domestic and political adjunct to a player in her own right.

Getting straight down to business, the well paced and (for the most part) well written pilot kicks off as a worthy rival to shows like Law and Order. You get the same pared back approach, though with early hints at higher levels of character and thematic sophistication. Margulies’ Alicia has already proven to be a Golden Globe and SAG winning performance, and is instantly likeable in her capacity as the put-upon good gal, even if some audiences are likely to question her personal motives and decisions. To facilitate this cynicism, we have private eye/sidekick Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), a refreshingly entertaining foil to Alicia’s woes, who is also direct enough to call her out on her choices. This not only grants the viewer greater insight, but thankfully does so while avoiding the recent ubiquity of schmaltzy voice-overs and inflated inner monologues that have consumed the American prime time. Episode one of The Good Wife has also thrown up several other major players for the coming series, all of whom already seem well realized and busting at the seams with subplot potential. That said, there’s an element of déjà vu about some of the story lines here, as well as some clunky dialogue in the scenes where it really counts. Given the overall quality though, you can probably put this down to opening night jitters, and give the show a chance to find its stride. If the consistent US viewing figures are anything to go by, it looks like the good faith may pay off.

What’s interesting about The Good Wife though, is the delicate balance it’s striking in terms of its genre and gender games. It’s a legal drama, where each week a stand alone episode centers on a particular case and crime that Alicia Florrick, Litigator is grappling with. However, it’s also a family drama, where the real action is taking place outside the courtroom and evolves over the entire series. This balance between the stand-alone episodic approach, and that of the arcing mythology is a challenge for many TV shows, but The Good Wife faces particular problems because of the ingredients of its chosen mash-up and the deployment of a female lead.

Strong female roles (in case you’ve never heard an Oscar acceptance speech) aren’t all that common, particularly for prime time TV drama. The Good Wife however, has them in spades; especially in Margulies’ lead casting. Unjustly though, shows with female leads tend to become marketed as shows designed solely for females, through many a network’s misguided attempts to capitalize on demographics. The Good Wife refuses this tactic outright, preferring to strike a delicate balance between those conflicting aspects of its genre that could fall prey to reductionist marketing tactics.

While the familial and domestic plot-lines of the show are indeed worthy enough for the spotlight, producers have opted to allow them to develop in the background, as a story within a story, where the weekly courtroom action is foregrounded. It’s a device that works well, allowing Alicia’s personal turmoil to speak for itself, and relying on the emotional intelligence of the viewer to read between the lines. The final scene of the pilot is a case in point, as Alicia listens to a voicemail from her erstwhile husband. Without giving anything away, it’s a loaded message that resonates on the show’s many emotive and thematic levels, from the hard facts of her husband’s trial, to their past together and Alicia’s burgeoning path towards independence.

If your TV tastes are more Top Gear than Tess of the D’Ubervilles, then the complicated emotional impact of the brief scene might not float your boat, but The Good Wife’s refusal to gender-fence itself off is successful enough that you won’t turn off the screen in some Gilmore Girls-esque bout of nausea. It’s a thin line, but one excellently tread, and whether you originally come for the courtroom intrigue or the woman fighting to have her worth recognized, The Good Wife is sure to have you tuning in for more.

The Good Wife runs Mondays on Channel Four at 10pm, catch up online at www.channel4.com/4od