See beyond Adrian’s wall
THE Irish writer James Joyce penned a collection of short stories called Dubliners, full of symbols and hidden meanings. The main message was that Ireland was a drink-sodden, superstitious, stifling place where love and creativity were suffocated.
Joyce may have thought this and many Irish writers have echoed it but they’re forgetting how many brilliant writers this “stifling” country managed to nurture.
There was a touch of the same amnesia in THE SECRET LIFE OF SUE TOWNSEND (AGED 68 3/4) (Saturday, BBC2). In almost every respect, this was a much-deserved tribute to hugely missed talent.
Townsend’s name, for most people, is synonymous with Adrian Mole, her neurotic, acne-pitted adolescent poet whose fictional diaries, over the course of three decades, charted a bumpy path to manhood alongside the dwindling fortunes of Britain.
Townsend’s other work, as both playwright and novelist, tends to be overshadowed by the volumes of Mole, as does her own, remarkable life. Saturday’s programme redressed the balance a little at least, with readings from her work and candid chats with the people who’d known, loved and edited her.
A love of people and place shone through brightest of all, from her early “fieldwork” running a youth group on a tough Leicester estate to her refusal, when the royalty cheques poured in, to leave her beloved East Midlands for London.
When her eyesight began to fail towards the end of her life, her greatest sorrow was not the inability to type but the inability to watch.
It was watching she’d done all her life, compassionately, closely and at times savagely, observing the fine details of ordinary lives and writing about them.
She kept those writings secret for decades until her second husband encouraged her to join a group. From then on it was all agents and contracts and rave reviews but no matter.
Had Townsend never published a word, she’d still have been a writer, in the proper sense. Someone with that degree of interest in her fellow humans could hardly have gone through the Eighties and not taken a political stance, one reflected, not just in Adrian Mole’s excruciating poems, but in all the things his author penned.
She railed against unfairness and you have to wonder how much was wrong with a society where a girl could leave school with no qualifications, raise three children single-handedly and still become a respected, well-remunerated writer. It’s a lot less likely today.
It’s not quite Victoria but TUTANKHAMUN (Sunday, ITV) has a high volume of kings, toffs, period frocks and intrigue. There are few things less sexy than archaeology so it takes a starstudded cast and lots of dramatic licence to turn a dig in the desert into a Sunday night crowd-puller.
Sam Neill helps out as wealthy Lord Carnarvon, bankrolling maverick Egyptologist Howard Carter (Max Irons) on a crazy quest to find the tomb of the boy king in the Valley of the Kings.
It has echoes of a cop movie with Carter thumping people and having his licence taken away. I’m surprised Carter hasn’t been given 24 hours to find the tomb before they close the case.
Then again, this is 1914 and now “some crazy kid just shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand” and started the First World War, that’s pretty much the same plot device.