Television
Doyle in
family values
Martyn Harris
The usual criticism of Roddy Doyle is that he is an engaging and amusing nov- elist with nothing to say. He is good at dia- logue and it is a fine thing someone is recording ordinary life and speech. The problem with Doyle's first three novels which are now all screenplays — is that they were half way to screenplay already, with no authorial voice and virtually no narrative, which made them incapable of dealing with any ideas above the most basic level. All three follow the squashily sentimental line that human values will tri- umph over material and social ones.
Family (Sunday, BBC1, 9.00pm) seems to be Doyle's response to the criticism — a much bleaker look at working class Dublin life, where the lovable Jimmy Rabbitte is replaced by the alarming Charlo: drunk, thief, bully, adulterer and wife beater.
Sean McGinty played the part with an effective mixture of charm and menace his arrival home from the pub spreading alarm through his family like a shark's shadow through a school of minnows. One of the best things about this first episode, in fact, was its understanding of bullying a schoolteacher's perspective perhaps? Doyle captures exactly the mixture of fear and fawning a bully creates in his circle. He beats a Pakistani shopkeeper with a pick axe handle 'Because he was wearing glasses,' so what will he do next? Will he kiss his wife or punch her face? Slap a friend on the back or snap his arm? The uncertainty of violence is more frightening than its actuality.
My only doubt was whether Doyle has gone so far over the top with his picture of an irredeemable monster that Charlo will. cease to be interesting. In dramatic terms his wife's decision to let him back into the house after beatening her was incompre- hensible though in everyday terms I am sure it happens all the time. I wanted to cheer when the girl in the pub repelled Charlo's advances with a solid, forearm smash to his throat — but as an acolyte consoled his choking friend: 'She must have been a lezzy.'
With people like Charlo in the world you wonder why they aren't all lezzies, but the problem for Anne Lister in 1817 was whether she might be the only one in Eng- land (A Marriage, BBC2, Friday, 9.30pm). This was the first episode of A Skirt Through History, Philippa Lowthorpe's six
part docu-drama series about forgotten women - and if it sounds like one of those batty exercises where we find it was really Anne Hathaway who did the best bits of Hamlet, don't worry. Sensitive feminist portraits of neglected heroines who might have invented the computer if they had been so oppressed are not my bag either. This was a wonderful programme with a heroine, played by Julia Ford, who had all the predatory sexuality of Charlo himself, without the arm-twisting.
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