How the power of motherly love helped stop bullets and bombs
Thank heavens that Mother’s Day (BBC2) kept politics away from this story about the birth of the northern Irish peace process, because I don’t think I could have stomached watching Tony Blair or, God forbid, Sinn Fein’s Gerry adams claiming the credit.
and as this one- off drama unfolded, it became clear that the fledging 1993 peace movement, nursed by two mothers — one an English dinner lady, the other a Dublin housewife — survived purely because politics had nothing to do with it.
The women had no idea how an end to the Troubles could be negotiated, and only the haziest notion about their history. They just knew the killing of children could not be allowed to continue.
This 90-minute dramatisation, marking the 25th anniversary of the double bombing at a Warrington shopping centre, was a long, hard watch. Its unrelenting depiction of grief was almost too awful to bear.
Line Of Duty’s Vicky McClure, with an Irish accent as hard-set as her brunette perm, gave a sympathetic performance as Sue Mchugh, whose frustrated outburst on a radio talk show kickstarted a series of anti-war rallies.
McClure showed how, in her complete certainty that she was doing the right thing, the redoubtable Mrs Mchugh sometimes trampled on sensitive feelings and, as a result, seemed occasionally to be showboating.
But, in bursts of tongue-tied self- doubt, she also revealed the campaigner’s vulnerable side.
anna Maxwell Martin as Wendy Parry, the mother whose adored 12- year- old son Tim went out shopping for football kit and never returned home, was simply heartbreaking — so raw, so confused and angry, so bereft until at last she found a way of channelling her grief into the peace appeal.
The menfolk (Daniel Mays and David Wilmot) were supportive though less deeply drawn: this was very much an essay on how nothing but the infinite love of a mother could ever be strong enough to break the cycle of violence.
Director Fergus O’Brien used stylised silence to emphasise the most dramatic moments. When the bomb went off, and when the Parrys were told that Tim would not survive, all sound cut out. as it returned, muffled and booming, I had the sense of struggling to the surface in deep water — it was moving and exhausting.
a little light relief was to be had in looking at the nineties props, which were stacked up in profusion: stone- clad fire surrounds, Trimphones, Ford Mondeos and rental TVs. But this was not a drama to watch with one eye. It took hold — and it hurt.
Police documentary Reported Missing (BBC1) returned with a different sort of drama, one so odd it was scarcely credible and filmed by coincidence in another Cheshire town, Macclesfield.
Sgt Simon Degg was searching for a five-year-old who seemed never to have existed. The child’s father, John, spent thousands of pounds on solicitors’ fees to gain access for visits, but the mother, Tracey, said the man was a deluded stalker — and she’d never had a son.
as she changed her story endlessly, it became plain she was lying. But she was also telling the truth: she really didn’t have a son. She’d just borrowed a friend’s toddler, told John he was the dad, and defrauded him of maintenance payments.
Whatever faith in human nature Mother’s Day might instil, this fly- on-the-wall film swept away. You’d hardly credit a woman could be so cold and so convincing, unless you saw it with your own eyes.
POP CLASSIC OF THE NIGHT: Madonna and William Thackeray may not seem a natural match, but the star’s song Material Girl hit the perfect note as the credits rolled on Vanity Fair (ITV). That track sums up heartless Becky (Olivia Cooke).