These ‘normal people’ are the nation’s heroes
David Brophy’s Unsung Heroes RTÉ One, Wednesday Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich Netflix Normal People BBC1 Monday/RTÉ One, Tuesday
HANNAH Power summed it all up in one sentence that would pierce a heart fashioned from titanium. Speaking about life with Patrick, her husband of 48 years who now has Alzheimer’s disease, she said: ‘There isn’t proper conversation [anymore] and there’s terrible loneliness for me.’ We saw her trying to jog Patrick’s memory about his favourite actress, Ann-Margret, and while he said he remembered, there was the feeling he agreed just to please Hannah.
She was one of a few dozen carers who signed up for a choir assembled by David Brophy, the RTÉ conductor who previously worked with the High Hopes choir of homeless and formerly homeless people. Brophy is a great choice – there’s an innate empathy about him that brings out people’s inner confidence and once they find it, there is no stopping them (mind you, the voiceover on Unsung Heroes said they were finding their musical feet, which seemed an oddly mixed metaphor).
In a few of the cases, we got a look at what daily life was like for the carers. Jane Johnstone is raising two autistic sons alone, one of them with profound learning difficulties. Her husband had a massive heart attack a few years ago – ‘here in the kitchen,’ she said – and tragically died, and the toll of sole parenting was obvious. As she went to choir practice, and for a night away to sing at a carers’ conference in Galway, she kept expressing her guilt at leaving the boys with family, when respite should be the very least the State could provide.
Her eldest boy Evan is tall and stocky, and sometimes doesn’t appreciate his own strength. Heartbreakingly, she said she sometimes is scared he might injure her just with affection.
We met Phil and Betty Power, whose 32-year-old son Jason has cerebral palsy – watching Phil sing to him, and the beaming smile that followed, pretty much sent me over the edge. The stories kept coming, including from Fiona and Dave, whose sons also have cerebral palsy. The elder boy, Daniel, needs constant care, and added to this is the fact their eldest child, daughter Jay, is in end-stage renal failure and needs a transplant.
How, I kept asking myself, how do they get up every day when most of us would wrap the duvet around our heads and give up? It’s hard to remember being so in awe of everyday people living lives of such extraordinary selflessness.
Those in the choir represent the estimated 330,000 carers in Ireland, and watching them as they came out of their shells was a delight. One of the songs they were practising was Aslan’s Crazy World, and when Christy Dignam and the lads showed up unannounced, there was almost teenybopper hysteria. Hannah chanced her arm and said ‘I never thought I’d kiss you’, leaving Christy no option. Her delight when he did so (and he is such a genuine man) was a wondrous thing to behold, and the whole programme left me undone. In the second and final part this week, the choir are set to perform in the National Opera House in Wexford. I’m sure it went swimmingly, and was a credit to them all, but in truth they’re really a credit to our country. If we learn anything from this pandemic, it’s that we need to appreciate the people who don’t get anywhere near the €350 a week Covid payment from the State, despite the fact they save it billions every year.
Their sacrifice is all the more saintly when compared to the $559million banked by Jeffrey Epstein, who used his fortune for such depraved pursuits it scarcely bears thinking about. The new fourpart Netflix documentary, Filthy
Rich, doesn’t offer any new revelations, but it is a useful compilation of the all the accusations levelled against him, and all the friends who either were complicit in his criminal exploitation of underage girls, or chose to turn a blind eye so long as he was offering them the use of his private jet.
The programme was initiated before his death in a New York jail, allegedly by suicide, but there were plenty of people who would have celebrated his demise. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it certainly seemed very convenient.
Whatever the truth, the world is better off without the disgusting paedophile. It’s just a shame that many of his victims, now adults, never will have the satisfaction of seeing him face the justice he deserved.
Finally, Normal People ended this week, and what a triumph it was. Would it have been as successful outside lockdown? Maybe, but the themes of isolation, of not being able to communicate, were a perfect match for our time.
It has made global stars of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and rightly so – their performances were luminous and, in Mescal’s case, starkly affecting during his battle with Connell’s failing mental health.
Add in Fionn O’Shea as the odious Jamie, and we are living in a golden age of Irish acting, from the casts of Derry Girls and The Young Offenders, to Cillian Murphy in
Peaky Blinders, to Niamh Algar, Mark O’Halloran and Helen Behan, nominated this week for a Bafta for her work on Channel 4’s The Virtues.
Normal People was special, though, because it maybe reminded us all of a time of teenage awkwardness, and first love, and the intoxication of youthful physical intimacy, and anyone who saw it as pornographic really missed the point. It was honest and affecting, tender and beautiful, and it will be the benchmark for Irish drama for years to come.