Television
Clear confusion
Nigella Lawson
Somewhere high in the pantheon of thankless tasks is that of explaining The Troubles to foreigners, for, blind dogma aside, no single political view about the nature of empire or religion or armed force can explain the past 25 years. Ulster is inexplicable in any rational way which is why almost every documentary, and many dramas, about Britain and Ireland have failed so miserably. The dramas have either celebrated the unacknowledged and begrudged bravery of our boys, or tried to justify the dark and righteous fears on which the IRA have fed; the documentaries have relied in the main on exposing the careless morality of one side or the other.
Charles Wood's adaptation of Alan Judd's novel (Screen One: A Breed of Heroes, BBC1, 9.30 p.m.) managed to be about all these things and none of them and thereby explained why Ulster is inex- plicable. Scene followed scene, clearly enough; action and event unravelled with- out tricks. And yet confusion ruled. This wasn't bad writing or bad direction, but a dramatisation of the most important thing about, or beneath, the real story, the essence of it: confusion, utter, intractable confusion.
Lt Thoroughgood (Samuel West, an increasingly impressive young actor) becomes batallion Press Officer when his predecessor shoots himself in the foot, and is charged with keeping the press on the right side of the barricades in the Belfast of 1971. Brian Beazely (a sweatingly blubbery Richard Griffiths) is there, pissed and craven, covering the city for the Daily Mira- cle. And if the combination of the Bunyonesquely named innocent, the boozy hack and the jolcily titled tabloid sounds like pastiche, well, I suppose it is; but that's as far as the pastiche goes. Wood's screen- play, for all that the BBC has been billing it as a black comedy, takes Ulster seriously and grimly. Its message is that there are no cogent messages, its political basis that you cannot use the crude physics of political science to describe the metaphysical con- junction of Protestant and Catholic, loyalist and republican, left and right, armed sol- dier and gunless civilian and bomb-happy terrorist.
The comic elements were of the Doctor In The House, young-chaps-larking-with- their-new-responsibilities, variety but each time the larks threatened to subvert absolutely, a bomb would explode or a sniper fire. Wood did not judge the snipers or the bombers any more than he did the soldiers or the journalists. Naturally, that leaves him vulnerable to judgment from others, those who regard the fact that he wrote Tumbledown as evidence of unpatri- otic leftism, who see his detachment as cul- pable, political and treacherous, but it made the play work_ Wood might have toyed with caricature at the beginning, but he succumbed to the lure of his characters and made us do the same.
And so at those points where other playrights would expect our knees to jerk this way or that — Thoroughgood's agree- ment to ghost-write Beazeley's newspaper copy, the accidental shooting of an unarmed boy in some council flats, a group of republicans cynically harassing an army medical team trying to save one of their own, the IRA-loyalist hackette flirting with the squaddies — Wood pulls no strings. All is madness and in the lunatic asylum there is no morality.
Some critics have complained that last week's ceasefire — still holding at the time of writing — rendered A Breed of Heroes redundant_ If anything it was the perfect coda to the events of the last 25 years_ It explained why mere common sense hasn't been able to bring relative peace, why it took foreigners to broke the ceasefire and why the best peace Ireland can ever expect is a fragile one.
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