Beautiful documentary will be difficult to match
Shackleton’s Cabin RTÉ One, Monday Clodagh RTÉ One, Thursday World’s Weirdest Homes RTÉ2, Thursday
The world is full of people who go with the flow, who roll over when life throws them a curveball and just get on with it. Then there are others who devote their lives to a singular challenge, or to many of them, and triumph. We met three of them this week. The first, in Shackleton’s Cabin, was Sven Habermann, a conservator who restores old objects to their original state. This doesn’t just involve adding a coat of varnish to a piece of old wood, but investigating its origins, peeling back existing paint and checking it under a microscope to see what colour it originally was, conducting a forensic investigation into its provenance. He is, if you like, a pigment pathologist, among many other skills.
Sven was tasked with the restoration of the ship’s cabin in which the famed Antarctic explorer, Irishman Ernest Shackleton, died of a heart attack in 1922. Cabin actually is a big word in this case. With costs mounting for Shackleton’s expedition on a ship called the Quest, his ‘cabin’ and an adjacent one were self-contained structures placed on the deck. After the ship was sold, the cabin became a shed in Norway. This proved to be its salvation. The air there is not humid, there is little of the fungus that destroys wood and multiple coats of paint over the years kept it well preserved. When the owners offered it to the Shackleton Museum in Athy, near his birthplace, Sven was called to restore it, saving what he could and replacing missing pieces.
What might have made for dull television proved riveting. He consulted books from the era, met a descendant of the wealthy American who funded the expedition, spoke to Ranulph Fiennes to get an insight into an explorer’s mindset, and discovered a single contemporary photograph of the space.
The attention to detail was extraordinary, as he used the photo to measure the gaps between the bookshelves and a mirror, the size of the bed and so on. The ceiling was covered with a textured paper not unlike today’s Anaglypta and the company that made it gave him original moulds to make something almost identical. The finished cabin was as near as it could be to how it looked 100 years ago and the film finished with a really sweet scene of Sven and Shackleton’s granddaughter Alexandra.
On the night he died, Ernest asked one of the crew to play him a lullaby, Brahms’s Wiegenlied (you’ll know it as Go To Sleep, or the tiny tears tune). Sven and Alexandra listened to it together, the air crackled with emotion, and it delivered an unexpectedly emotional punch. Shane Brennan and Moondance Productions deserve
huge credit for telling the story – it will be difficult for any documentary this year to be quite to beautiful. As for Sven Habermann, this was a labour of love. Fascinated
since childhood by polar exploration, he brought those days vividly back to life.
On Thursday, we met Clodagh, an Irish fashion and interior designer who goes by her first name only (her surname was Phipps). Clodagh was a trailblazer. As a teen in the mid-Fifties, she decided she wanted to be a designer and her father threw her out of the house. Her more sympathetic mother gave her £400 to study at the Grafton Academy, and soon she was selling her clothes all over the world. Marriage to an older man soured after her third son was born and she asked for a separation, which was slow in coming.
At the time, she was seen as the deserter and her husband kept the boys, with her taking them in summer. Clodagh moved to New York, where she became a celebrated interior designer, delivering to her clients some extraordinarily calm spaces.
All worked out, eventually. One son sadly died in his twenties, but another now works in her business, and her second marriage has proved happy and enduring.
Her greatest asset seems to have been her determination, that intangible spirit that drives people to dream and then to achieve those dreams. Funny, feisty and, one suspects, quite fierce when necessary, she was delightful, a trailblazer at a time when women were discouraged from speaking at all, never mind speaking up. It was a joy to learn of someone else who challenged the stifling norms and followed a very singular path.
A path I wouldn’t be following is the one chosen by almost half the residents of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in South Australia, who presenter Charlie Luxton meets in World’s Weirdest Homes.
To avoid scorching summers and freezing winters, they make their homes underground in the mines, blasting rocks with dynamite to make cavernous spaces (that’s banned now and they have to remove tonnes of rock by chisel!).
You’d have to admire the resilience of people who can live this way – an antenna and cable have to be mounted up above to get a phone signal, while flooding and insect intrusion through gaps in the walls cause other problems.
They persevere though, as Sven did, and Clodagh did in their own ways. For those of us more inclined to roll over, it was a week to sit and admire those who never settle for second best.