Television
Net work
Clive Gammon
I once knew three men called the Murphy brothers — no one seemed to differentiate amongst them Christian name-wise — who operated a lobster boat out of a small harbour in Connaught. They came into town once a fortnight, stayed in O'Sullivan's Bar until they fell down, when they were borne home in a thoughtfully pre-booked cab to a wife whom they were maliciously said to have in common. That is merely background information. What is anthropologically very interesting is that they kept a careful division of labour in the boat. The eldest steered it, and there his duties ended. The second brother with' the engineer; he kept the motor topped up with fuel and flung the starting handle. The third and youngest did everything else, hauling and stacking, carrying everything that had to be carried down to the quay, brewing tea.
The Murphy brothers had a lot in common with the boat people of Hong Kong who were colourfully featured in Sunday night's The World About Us (BBC 2), except that the Chinese fishermen were a lot prettier. With the fish coming ashore and the tonking of the diesel engines in the waiting boats, the faraway, alien harbour suddenly seemed very like Lerwick or Killybegs, and the information that one man aboard each Chinese vessel simply and exclusively tended to the engine confirmed that the Murphy brothers were universal types.
But what they lacked, lurching about in the grey drizzle of a West of Ireland summer's evening was colour of the kind provided by the delicious paper dragons, paper boats and million-dollar bills drawn on the Bank of Hell, all of which is seemingly part of life on the water for the Hong Kong boat people; though I wonder how much of a part. Prettily-photographed documentaries have to be self-indulgent, I suppose, or why do we have colour sets? But Hugh Gibb did indicate certain changes in the traditional lives of these people, though he didn't always know how significant they might be — such as the revolution brought about by the new, nearinvisible, monofilament nylon nets. If they work in Chinese waters as well as they do for the Murphy brothers (who now, having fished out the lobsters, are ravaging the salmon shoals approaching the coast of Ireland) they will be running short of fish in a year or two.
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