Sunday Independent (Ireland)

CATCH -UP TV - IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...

- EMILY HOURICAN

Searching For Shergar RTE Player, until August 30 It is the unsolved mysteries that grip us, latching onto the imaginatio­n and playing out endless scenarios, always beguiled by that tiny, irrational ray — hope; ‘what if…?’ The 1983 abduction of Shergar, one of the world’s most beautiful and valuable racehorses — he won both the English and the Irish Derbies in 1981 — is a story that has run and run, fed by the fact that, even now, no one quite knows.

Here, documentar­y maker Alison Millar does her best to trace a trail gone very cold, talking to those who knew the horse, were there the night he disappeare­d, or might know something about what happened to him. What is certain is that armed men, presumed to be IRA, burst in upon head groom Jim Fitzgerald, his wife and their five children, as they were having dinner, and forced Fitzgerald to take them to Shergar’s box, and load him into a van, saying they wanted “£2m if you want the horse back in one piece”.

After that, no one quite knows. The best guess at the time — that the IRA believed the Aga Khan owned him, and that claiming a ransom would be simple enough, only to find that he was owned by a consortium — is still the best guess.

Negotiatio­ns quickly broke down and contact ceased.

Shergar was never seen again and is presumed buried in a field in Leitrim. This documentar­y may have little new to offer, but does a great job of rounding up the existing bits of the story.

Liar TV3 Player, until August 30, episodes 1-4 Thriller that was first screened on ITV last year, this has Joanne Froggatt (left) as Laura, a schoolteac­her newly out of a relationsh­ip and feeling fragile. Reluctant to begin dating again, she neverthele­ss agrees to go out with the father of one of her pupils, respected surgeon Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd). After a seemingly pleasant night out, she wakes with a terrible hangover and fragmented memories of what may — or may not — have happened, and insists on going to the police.

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