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Thursday 4 December 2008

Farewell, Foyle

Foyle's War (ITV); Age of Terror (BBC2)

Shrink Rap (Monday, More4) was a very weird programme. It featured the comedian Joan Rivers, whose appearance proved that plastic surgery and botox offer soft, youthful skin at the terrible price of making you look hideous. ‘Oh, granny, why are your eyes almost on the sides of your head?’ At one point she said that, at the age of 74, she still had sex, ‘but the room’s a little darker’. I think most men would request a total blackout, and a blindfold, to be on the safe side.

The theme of her on-the-couch interview with the therapist Pamela Connolly, née Stephenson, was betrayal. It seems she has been betrayed by just about everyone. She could sniff out betrayal like a truffle hound. She had been betrayed by her old mentor Johnny Carson, who arranged for her to lose her show. She was betrayed by Fox television, who wanted her back to do a show, but didn’t want her husband to produce it. When she refused those terms, she lost the show. She also lost him, because he betrayed her by committing suicide. Then, and she became truly perverse here, she claimed she had been betrayed by her parents, who had built up her confidence then ‘when you went to the school dance, nobody wanted to dance with you’. That isn’t so much chopped logic, as reason fed through a wood-chipper.

At every point, Mrs Connolly nodded gravely, sometimes adding, ‘That really was a betrayal.’ I appreciate that calm sympathy is the best way of getting someone to open up, but in my head I constantly heard the voice of Sybil Fawlty: ‘I know, oh, I kno-o-o-ow...’

The second of Peter Taylor’s series Age of Terror (BBC2, Tuesday) was about the IRA’s bombing of civilians at the Enniskillen remembrance day service in 1987. It was an exemplary documentary, letting the facts — and the survivors — speak for themselves. I was struck again by how little we understood the IRA, whose leaders saw the terrible event not as an unforgiveable and callous massacre, but as a betrayal of their own people, who had not died to see all that political capital blown away. We always saw the IRA as cowards; they regarded themselves as self-sacrificing heroes. No wonder the Troubles went on for so long.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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