Lifestyles of the poor and unknown
Declan Lynch The Rehab (TV3) Broken (RTE)
IF you were to start with a blank sheet, trying to come up with an idea for a television programme which has a really good chance of being made, the first word you’d probably write down is “billionaire”.
The TV people love a billionaire. Or at least they love a billionaire allowing the cameras to capture his or her astonishing lifestyle, for the entertainment of viewers who are not billionaires. And many of whom indeed, have no money at all.
The Russian billionaires are in high demand, because they are so indiscreet about it — yes we have spent many contented hours watching them cruising around London in their vast limousines, shopping furiously, determined to become a part of the Establishment, or failing that, to buy it from the present owners.
There have indeed been many such programmes, but really they are all the same programme, based on the understanding that there are now about 40 people in the world who have all the money, with everyone else just observing from the perimeter in states of awe and stupefaction.
And then a much older understanding comes into play, the idea that you don’t show people what their lives are really like, you show them the lives of those more fortunate than themselves, you show them things they can never have.
So when you’re looking at The Rehab on TV3, even before the programme starts you’re looking at a kind of a triumph, a three-part documentary that is the polar opposite of the billionaire tendency, a series in which most of the protagonists have been in far worse situations than the majority of viewers can even imagine.
Directed by Martina Durac, it is about recovering addicts who are being treated in the Coolmine therapeutic community, and in turn, it is therapeutic for the viewer who is being fed on too rich a TV diet. Here we see human beings struggling to emerge from various kinds of ruination, drawing on the deepest resources they can find within themselves, these lost souls who are starting to find something they never knew they had.
There is no retail therapy in Coolmine, these characters are not going to tell us the meaning of life which they discovered while relaxing with their good friends from the F1 circuit in the cocktail lounge of the biggest yacht in Monte Carlo.
But they are, in their own somewhat less ostentatious way, looking for the meaning of life. And some of them might even find it at some stage over the next two weeks, which is a decent enough reason in itself to be on board.
Interestingly, the BBC production of Jimmy McGovern’s Broken, which recently finished its run on RTE, was also coming from the other side of the world to that inhabited by TV’s super rich, so that you could revel in the lack of luxury, you could gorge yourself on the plainness of the surroundings, you could feel liberated by the constraints which bear down on these characters, mainly due to the lack of money.
McGovern is a poet of poverty — and here he showed us that one of the more obvious difficulties which arise out of that is an addiction to gambling. Which has been a major theme of McGovern’s going all the way back to Cracker, but which was never more relevant than it is now.
Sean Bean as the priest at the centre of this community of troubled people — poor people, in essence — was magnificent. And the energy which drove this marvellous series all the way, was an incandescent rage at the way that the game is rigged.
The betting machines are rigged too, a perfect reflection of the wider malaise.
In The Rehab it tends to be heroin addiction, in Broken it was mainly the gambling, but they are all coming from the same place. And we should have a good look at that place, while we can, because pretty soon we’ll be back with the big shots, and their banalities.