The night they drove us down
Declan Lynch
The Bailout (Virgin One)
WHEN I heard that there was going to be one of those political docu-dramas in which our great affairs of State would be re-constructed, I thought of the writer Tony Parsons.
I remembered the night on the BBC arts programme The Late Review when Parsons was asked to give his opinion of Topsy-Turvy, a film about the operetta kings Gilbert and Sullivan, directed by Mike Leigh. To which Parsons responded that probably the two things he hates most in the world are the music of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the films of Mike Leigh. Therefore, a film about Gilbert and Sullivan, directed by Mike Leigh…..
And yet Parsons’s antipathy was probably quite mild by comparison with my dread of these re-enactments of various Irish political intrigues, with our little ruling class celebrating the good of it all — you just have to think of, say, the MacGill Summer School, and how much the regulars would really, really love that stuff, and let that be your guide…
So there must have been some benign weirdness in the making of The Bailout, because I came through it all remarkably well, on the whole — a bit like Tony Parsons going to see Topsy-Turvy and being forced into an agonising reappraisal of all that he held to be right and true.
Naturally I have thought deeply on the reasons for this, and I sense that they may be three-fold.
The Bailout itself was one of those extraordinarily rare situations in which the political class finds itself engaged in something of genuine importance — much of the daily reporting of politics is done on the pretence that it is all innately significant when in truth it is mostly a low-level acting out of a shared addiction to the game, the only game that they know.
So with the banks collapsing and “the markets” having their sport with poor Paddy, you could say that this was a genuine drama with proper stakes, a true national emergency with only our political class to defend us — of course they failed, but at least it gave them something to be doing that might justify a TV docu-drama at some stage.
Which brings us to another possible explanation for this breakthrough by The Bailout, the cleverness of the way it was done. Made in RTE studios — though shown on Virgin One — it wasn’t just a play being shown on television, because that would not have been a good idea at all. Instead the writer Colin Murphy drew the audience into the workings of the drama, revealing how it was being made, the studio sets being visible at times from on high, all of this displaying a certain know-how and a confidence which to me was pleasing.
I also appreciated the fact that they weren’t inclined to be making things up, just because they could. One of the great modern evils, as we know, is the convention whereby a film is “inspired by real events” — then they take that spurious authenticity which is conferred by the “real events”, and they make up most of it anyway. With this, you sensed they were always inclined towards the real events, that they didn’t just use them as “inspiration” for something else altogether.
It even got me through a moment when someone made a quip about Fianna Fail being responsible for the shooting of Michael Collins — yes I even got past that one, which again was impressive, because my usual reaction to Fine Gael slagging Fianna Fail or vice versa about Beal na mBlath or anything else pertaining to their disgraceful origins, is to take up arms myself against anything that happens to be convenient.
And then there were the performances by fine actors such as Denis Conway as Brian Cowen and Declan Conlon as Brian Lenihan and Ali White as an Advisor. It is one of the great public services that television provides, this employment of the talents of fine actors, and I would say that the performance of Ali White in particular was tremendous.
Now what’s this about an operetta about the Beef Tribunal?