Brendan O’Regan
Nightsleeper, BBC One It would be great to live in a world where life was valued. At the moment, the right to life is undermined so often, whether through war, capital punishment, euthanasia or abortion. And that’s not an exhaustive list.
The news during the week featured a man, Marcellus Williams, who was executed in the USA despite there being serious doubts about his conviction. The war in the Middle East escalated further, even while there was talk of ceasefire. The news programmes last weekend were dominated by reports of the ongoing rocket exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. I was impressed by the reports from Sally Hayden of the Irish Times, reporting from Beirut for The Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk, Friday) and News at One (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) when she told of visiting a Jesuit church that was sheltering internally displaced persons – something that should give us a sense of pride but not complacency.
What started the current intensity of the conflict was the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year – expect to hear a lot more about it in the media as the anniversary approaches. Surviving Oct 7th: We will dance again (BBC Two, Thurs) was a tough watch as we got to look back on that awful atrocity. It was an episode in the Storyville series and followed the assault on the Nova Music Festival with moving testimonies from survivors and footage of that morning from mobile phones, dashcams, security camera and, most chilling of all, from the bodycams of the attackers, which showed them revelling in their callous and murderous onslaught, scandalously convinced that God was on their side. We were spared very little in this shocking documentary – only the faces of the dead were blurred out. There were so many impactful moments – the attackers shooting into portaloos in case anyone was hiding there, the murder of a partygoer in a wheelchair, grenades being thrown into a bunker and promptly thrown out again by brave young people inside – it didn’t end well for most of them. A young mother hid for ages in a fridge, determined to live for her son.
The young survivors were catapulted traumatically into sober adulthood. Many started as naive partygoers, often high on drugs, and yet found courage and determination to try and save their friends, even at the risk of their own lives.
Many of you will have heard of the ‘suicide pod’ controversy from Switzerland. The device may look cool, sleek and oh so modern, like a spaceship from a sci-Fi movie, but it’s a killing machine – the machine equivalent of a euphemism. It was featured on Press Preview (Sky News, Tuesday), when journalist Jenny Kleeman was very critical of this approach to the end of life – she saw it as driven by “opportunists” who love publicity. I’m not sure she’s entirely against euthanasia, but she felt this wasn’t the way to go, literally. She thought eventually we’d come up with a good solution to end-of-life issues, but unless deliberate killing of patients is ruled out, any solution will be ugly. Her fellow reviewer, PR consultant Alex Deane, was likewise critical of the “charlatan” approach, but was blunter, referring to “killing” and the “bump them off” attitude. He could see one positive in the suicide pod – at least it didn’t ‘distort the medical profession’ – here the death was self-inflicted. Side tracking the medical profession had led to arrests and was why the device had fallen foul of the already liberal law in Switzerland.
Sometimes it seems like a good idea to seek refuge in fiction. BBC’S high-profile drama series, Nightsleeper (BBC One, Sunday, Monday) was about a train hijack or “hackjack” as they called it. Such a situation has a built-in tension, especially as it seems to be happening pretty much in real time, but they made a mess of it – the leading actors and their characters were weak, the secondary characters were annoying, and it was hard to care what happened to them – their stories were like ‘soap on a train’. Plot developments were implausible, tension drained (or trained?) away, there were wads of turgid digital dialogue as a virus infected the anti-virus (yes, that’s the plot).
The budget seemed to have been spent on special effects, with pennies left over for script and acting. And yet I kept watching – wanting to see what would happen at the end of the line. Silly me!
Pick of the week
Sunday Sequence
BBC Radio Ulster Sunday October 6, 8.30am
Topical religious and ethical issues with Audrey Carville.
Songs of Praise
BBC One Sunday October 6, 1.15pm
Claire McCollum introduces favourite harvest hymns from Jubilee Farm, Northern Ireland’s first community-owned farm, a place with faith at its heart.
Spirit of John Paul II: Stories of His Interior Life
EWTN Sunday October 6, 9pm
This documentary provides insights into the interior life of Pope John Paul II. Hear fascinating stories shared by those who knew him best.