Mother of God, can you tie up these loose ends?
Ian Wright Home Truths BBC1, Thursday
Ireland, Cancer And Me RTÉ One, Tuesday
Line Of Duty BBC1, Sunday
Two years ago, former footballer and now television match pundit Ian Wright appeared on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and was widely tipped as the favourite to win. Instead, though, the public saw a side to Wright he had managed to suppress in his public appearances. He rounded on Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell, chastising him for not doing his allocated task of washing the dishes even though Maxwell had arrived back exhausted after winning stars for the camp’s dinner in the Bushtucker Trial.
With rugby player James Haskell, the other so-called ‘alpha’ in the camp, Wright continued a campaign of low-level sniping, pointing out everything he perceived Maxwell did wrong. The public saw what was going on and acted. Maxwell was second to be voted out, but was followed by Haskell first, and then Wright, who came eighth out the 12 contestants. His shock was palpable, but by his own admission, he realised something deep inside of him had surfaced. Afterwards, he spoke of his anger issues. ‘I lose it too quickly,’ he said. ‘It’s something that I’m working on.’
At the time, I thought he just was boorish, but his BBC documentary this week, Home Truths, about the abuse he suffered as a child and domestic violence against children in general, startled me. It was no excuse for his behaviour, but it went a long way to explaining it.
His father left the family when Wright was very young, and his stepfather was abusive and cruel. Knowing that the boy’s main interest was football, the stepfather would make him stand facing the wall when Match Of The Day came on, just to taunt him. Ian was beaten regularly and so too was his mother, at which point elder brother Maurice would cuddle him and place his hands over young Ian’s ears so he could not hear the violence. Nor was their mother Nesta always the help she should have been – on more than one occasion, she told Ian she wished she’d had her pregnancy terminated.
It was a teacher who set Wright on the path to success, and the emotional clip of him crying when, as an adult, he met his former coach Mr Pigden was played again. What struck me most was Wright’s vivid memory of the patterned orange wallpaper in the one room the family shared. He and I are months apart in age, and in the Seventies we had orange wallpaper in one of the rooms too. It placed me firmly in the stage of life he was at, but there the similarity ended. My childhood was a happy one filled with love, and while there was no excuse for how Wright revealed himself on I’m A Celeb, I left this week’s often deeply moving programme feeling that at last he realised what drove him to anger and why it was time to let it go.
Less moving but just as involving was Ireland, Cancer And Me, an RTÉ documentary about recently retired Northern editor Tommie Gorman. Over 20 years ago, what he thought was appendicitis turned out to be neuroendocrine tumours. A series of coincidences led him to seek treatment in Sweden, where he became the first Irish person to have a treatment not available here paid for by the State. While much of the programme was filled with footage of a previous documentary, Europe, Cancer And Me, the more recent film revealed that with his monthly injections and regular scans to see where the disease is at, there is no reason why Tommie cannot have a normal lifespan. The missing part of the equation, frustratingly, was the ‘Me’ in the title. The focus was more on the doctors and the institutional changes that now see this form of cancer adequately treated here in Ireland, and while that was fascinating, I still was left with questions as to how it made Tommie himself feel.
The programme became a frustrating hybrid, neither one thing nor the other, though I did laugh out loud once. Waking up after surgery all those years ago, Tommie looked at a baffled Swedish doctor and said ‘Up the Rovers!’, a reference to his home team in Sligo.
Many might have put it down to the anaesthetic, but for me it just proved that Tommie, so often the master of the non-sequitur, simply was being himself. A week on from the finale and I’m still not over the disappointment of the ending of Line Of Duty. Spoiler alert now, so if you have yet to see it, stop reading, but finding out that Ian Buckells was the fourth man in a police corruption ring was a bit like finding out Banksy is a granny called Doris who paints murals with the help of her cats.
Oh, how desperately we all wanted the fourth ‘man’ to be Patricia Carmichael, the glacial copper whose disdain for our beloved Ted Hastings made her the most hated character on television.
Far too many loose ends were left untied. Is Chief Constable Philip Osborne up to his neck in corruption too? Will Steve Arnott form a proper relationship with John Corbett’s widow? Were Kate Fleming and Joanne Davidson on the verge of having a romantic relationship too before Jo went into the witness protection programme?
There’s a lot of talk that this was the last series, and maybe it should be, but a feature-length episode at some stage, maybe the Christmas blockbuster to end them all in 2022, would be welcome. Just like Ian Wright, there are times all of us need closure, no matter how grave or how frivolous the reason for it.