The Channel Hopper column, written by Paul Bradley, features every Thursday in the Donegal News.
Bad: The Song That Saved My Life RTÉ1, Monday, 9.35pm
I’m sure even RTÉ could rustle up a regular series on the origins and meanings of the more familiar songs in Irish music.
After all, they’ve just screened quite a substantial film called Bad: The Song That Saved My Life, about one of U2’s most significant early songs – you know, the one with all the heavy “-ation” rhymes (isolationdesolationcondemnation…) that people sniggered at Bono for.
But it always seemed that the song, while it could plausibly be interpreted in different ways by different people now, was getting at something specific. The film explores what that was: a man called Andy “Guck” Rowen, who grew up with members of U2, was traumatised by witnessing the 1974 Dublin Bombings, and fell into heroin addiction as a young man. His struggles inspired three U2 songs: Bad, Running To Stand Still, and Raised By Wolves.
It was Bad which had the biggest impact, not just on audiences, but on Guck himself: he tells us about it here, from his childhood as the smartest boy in the street, to his time in rehab in the USA, to the (incredibly random) moment he read the handwritten lyrics.
Other interviews with family members and Bono paint vivid pictures of the early 80s, the drugs epidemic, and perhaps even the increasingly-quaint idea that rock music could save us.
It’s quite a bleak film, though – a surprise to some, maybe? – Bono brings some lighthearted humour and affection to it. And maybe some people will turn off, not knowing who Guck is in the first place.
But there’s a good story in here, and some recent social history, and surely some interest for U2 fans or people who remember the times. And, RTÉ, we know you’re reading: what about that series of short films about significant songs, eh?
Lawmen: Bass Reeves Netflix
I’d never heard of Bass Reeves before Netflix made a series about him, but he was a genuinely remarkable figure: a Deputy US Marshal, born into slavery but later forging a legend in the dangerous years after the Civil War, when much of the country was still hostile to Black people.
It’s a great premise, and Taylor Sheridan (the man also behind the still-multiplying Yellowstone universe) obviously saw that too: his western(ish) series was made for Paramount+, but it’s now on Netflix, and worth a look.
It begins in outstanding fashion with a brutal Civil War battle, establishing Bass’s courage and intelligence, and introducing us to some individuals who have meaning in his life outside of the war.
One early scene in particular, in which Bass is told that Black people are destined for “nothingness” after death, has a real kick all the way through, ending with a card game that will determine his freedom: the tension is intense, and it changes the lives of everyone in the scene.
At the centre of almost every scene, David Oyelowo is commandingly smart and strong, quiet but capable of violence if driven to it. The series is also beautifully shot, with a cinematic look that makes it a pleasure just to watch.
But, without becoming a bad show, it does lose its way a little. Time lurches forward, the main story dissipates, and by the end of episode two Bass is becoming a bit preachy: the show wants to make sure we get its message of tolerance and equality, even at the expense of realism.
Each episode is perfectly watchable, even quite strong; they just never accumulate to more than that, and so the series doesn’t quite live up to the early promise. Still, it’s worth a look.
Cape Fear Apple TV
I was more emphatically disappointed by the new Cape Fear series (unbelievably, it’s 35 years since Martin Scorsese’s film version ran aground in 1991), mainly because, before I actually saw it, I had only seen a five-star review in a newspaper. So I went into it feeling hopeful – that cast, that story – only to lose that feeling fairly quickly.
It happened during a very specific scene, in which a family (two parents, two children) of skunks are found dead in the swimming pool of our central family (two parents, two children) – an implied threat to the family presumably from a man recently released from (allegedly wrongful) imprisonment.
I kept thinking how skilled the villain was to trap a family of skunks, of all animals, seemingly within hours of his release, and then to evade the family’s security cameras; and how very lucky he was to find a perfectly matching family unit, especially since skunks don’t live in such family units.
But when the business model for TV is “remake a two-hour film as 10 hours of soapier, uglier telly”, we shouldn’t expect the makers to spend 45 seconds on research.
They have at least, under the extraneous characters and events, squeezed the bare bones of the original plot in there. The released prisoner is Max Cady (Javier Bardem), and he might be angry at married couple Anna and Tom (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the lawyers involved in his original trial (on opposing sides, but perhaps too interested in each other at the time to focus on Max’s case).
As things begin to go awry in their lives (skunks, toes, remote gameplayers, the stupidest choices…), they begin to suspect Max is plotting a terrible revenge on them.
Not to worry. Bad things do happen, but are forgotten by the next episode so that the family can continue to do incredibly stupid things; we have, after all, ten schlocky hours to fill.
Bardem at least enjoys himself, taunting his way through dialogue that would embarrass a daytime soap, and was clearly a good choice. But then there’s also the usually-reliable Amy Adams, gifted with some equally bad words to deliver and presumably regretting her decision.
Her new life, her old secrets, her marriage, her children, and her job, are all under threat, yet she spends most of the time staring glassily into the middle distance, apparently wandering around her home waiting for an unseen tranquiliser dart to take full effect.
If the actors were at least all working together it might still have been, if not tense, then at least fun; but it’s too bloated and borderline deranged even for that.
Tiger Island BBC1, Sunday, 7.15pm
On the subject of hope, and the tiny glimmers of it still left, well, BBC1’s new Sunday night natural history show Tiger Island provided some.
It follows three tiger mothers and their cubs in Nepal, promising to show us things we have never seen before. Indeed it does, perhaps most strikingly the mothers working together to raise and protect their cubs: they’ve long been understood as simply solitary animals, so this was a revelation.
But it’s also – and I won’t say too much here – difficult to watch in places: nature, and apparently big male tigers, are neither cruel nor kind, but just don’t care, and things are rarely easy here for adults or young.
Even more difficult to watch, for different reasons, were the constant intrusions from an overexcited crew: why are we seeing them at all, in a film about an animal that has a claim to be the world’s most magnificent?
On that subject, though, the promised optimism: Nepal’s tiger population has nearly tripled since 2009, rising from 121 to 355. Great stuff, however long it lasts.