30 years on, how a dark day of the Troubles still chills the blood
ONe of the sad enigmas of the Northern Ireland Troubles was that this sectarian madness was perpetrated by people with the loveliest, most laidback sense of humour on God’s daft earth.
Film- maker Vanessa engle captured that contradiction throughout her investigation into the violence of 1988 that culminated in the slaughter of two British soldiers, in The Funeral Murders (BBC2).
one republican sympathiser laughed out loud when she noted that ‘ volunteer’ — the IRA euphemism for terrorists — sounded like an elderly lady working in a charity shop.
And an old man chuckled as he recalled how his wife, a paramilitary activist, used to hide ammunition by stuffing the cushions of their sofa with bullets... not very comfortable when republican leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness dropped round to plot tactics.
Taking a sip from a paper cup, a former RUC officer, once one of the most senior policemen in Belfast, smiled wryly as he agreed he needed ‘fortifying’ before he could discuss his memories.
It’s impossible to equate that good humour with the scenes from police helicopter footage and newsreel of the killings at two funerals. The first segment was filmed as a loyalist paramilitary gunman opened fire at the burial of three IRA terrorists shot dead in Gibraltar.
The second eruption came as a cortege drove to the graveside one week later, to bury a mourner killed at the first cemetery. This cycle of murder really did seem endless.
engle’s reconstruction of events was more methodical than anything shown on TV news at the time. But few of her interviewees expected her to make real sense of it. ‘To this day, it’s inexplicable,’ said former Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison, talking about the sequence of events that ended with two British Army corporals being beaten to death by a mob.
The archive film made the blood run cold, but so did ex-IRA terrorist Seanna Walsh’s comment about the publicity value of ‘killing British soldiers’. The documentary ended with Walsh claiming that all viewpoints in the conflict had merit.
engle cut to footage of an Army funeral, with troops firing a salute over the coffin — and then IRA gunmen in balaclavas raising automatic rifles at a funeral for one of their own. For many viewers, including me, this was not ‘fair-minded reporting’: it was a mendacious comparison.
IRA bombings in London were the initial inspiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical evita — just one of numerous unexpected details in a portrait of the composer on the eve of turning 70 in Imagine... (BBC1).
Lloyd Webber is a reticent man. he admits his new memoir, Unmasked, is selective in the memories it reveals. (how furious his publishers must have been that he did not call the autobiography Memory, after his best-known hit.) Presenter Alan Yentob was his usual, ingratiating self, asking questions that flattered rather than searched. even Lloyd Webber looked bored by such fluffery, as he was dragged round a flat in the Kensington apartment block where his family had once lived.
The interviews were more revealing in what they didn’t say. Lord L-W was happy to talk with his ex-wife Sarah Brightman, for whom he wrote Phantom of The opera.
But his brother Julian, and lyricist Tim Rice, spoke to the camera in isolation. More clearly than words, their manner told us the star might write sublime tunes, but he’s more prickly than a porcupine with a rash.