Brian Keenan is with his family in County Mayo. God, it's beautiful - creamy, lush and peaceful. Why would he want to go anywhere, let alone Lebanon, where he spent four and a half years as a hostage, blindfolded and chained, beaten and tortured? asks the Guardian's Sam Wollaston. Wouldn't it be easier just to stay with his lovely family, his lovely dog, and the lovely view of the shimmering lake with the black mountain beyond? It's pretty clear that Keenan doesn't do easy, though. Eighteen years after he emerged blinking and bewildered from his evil cradling, here's Brian Keenan: Back to Beirut (BBC2).
"You remember me?" says Ali the taxi driver on the way from Beirut airport into town. Brian clearly doesn't, and looks uncomfortable. "You're old now," says Ali. They're quite direct, the Lebanese, but he's right; Brian is grey and grizzled; the past 18 years, even free at home in Ireland, have taken their toll. Brian suddenly relaxes; he does remember Ali after all. For a moment he thought he was one of the guys who took him, another Ali, "a violent, sickening shadow of humanity". He's good at poetic descriptions of bad things, a skill he picked up on his previous "holiday" to Beirut, when he disappeared into an "excruciating darkness" and lived as an "animal, screaming in the abattoir".
Today, a Palestinian refugee camp gnaws at Brian's soul. The stones scream out at the scene of a devastating Israeli airstrike; the whole atmosphere is full of anger, revulsion and suspicion. It's not his own misery he's wallowing in, but a whole country's pain, of which his story is just a tiny part. But it's not all doom and gloom. Even in Khiam detention centre there's hope, and beauty: a group of young girls playing in the old camp come over to say hello. Except that Brian doesn't do "a group of young girls", so "a cloud of butterflies descended on me, and ever so gently, ever so sweetly, tried to kidnap me all over again".
See, he can be poetic about the good things, too. And Lebanon, the place that once held him captive and still captivates him, is a place of extremes. It's like his old guards - one day they'd be beating him, the next they'd give him a birthday cake. Ah good, here's more of birthday-cake Lebanon: the source of the river Adonis, as sparkling as that lake in County Mayo. Brian takes his shoes off and has a paddle, numbing the pain and washing away the memories. It's all uphill from here: a spot of tourism, a visit to a vineyard in the Bekaa Valley to sample a little of the wine. And then a little more. OK, so the grapes are grown in the shadow of war. But there's always a little bitterness among the sweet.
Having described the experience of captivity so powerfully already, Keenan didn’t say too much more about it here. Instead, he reminisced about the time before his kidnapping, vividly relived the moment itself, and then concentrated on seeing how Lebanon is today. Quite often last night, you got the impression that he’d like to have given us the story of a country reborn from the ashes of civil war. Unfortunately, he was too honest for that. Lebanon’s history was impossible to avoid wherever he went – and, in any case, there have been plenty of atrocities since.
"You remember me?" says Ali the taxi driver on the way from Beirut airport into town. Brian clearly doesn't, and looks uncomfortable. "You're old now," says Ali. They're quite direct, the Lebanese, but he's right; Brian is grey and grizzled; the past 18 years, even free at home in Ireland, have taken their toll. Brian suddenly relaxes; he does remember Ali after all. For a moment he thought he was one of the guys who took him, another Ali, "a violent, sickening shadow of humanity". He's good at poetic descriptions of bad things, a skill he picked up on his previous "holiday" to Beirut, when he disappeared into an "excruciating darkness" and lived as an "animal, screaming in the abattoir".
Today, a Palestinian refugee camp gnaws at Brian's soul. The stones scream out at the scene of a devastating Israeli airstrike; the whole atmosphere is full of anger, revulsion and suspicion. It's not his own misery he's wallowing in, but a whole country's pain, of which his story is just a tiny part. But it's not all doom and gloom. Even in Khiam detention centre there's hope, and beauty: a group of young girls playing in the old camp come over to say hello. Except that Brian doesn't do "a group of young girls", so "a cloud of butterflies descended on me, and ever so gently, ever so sweetly, tried to kidnap me all over again".
See, he can be poetic about the good things, too. And Lebanon, the place that once held him captive and still captivates him, is a place of extremes. It's like his old guards - one day they'd be beating him, the next they'd give him a birthday cake. Ah good, here's more of birthday-cake Lebanon: the source of the river Adonis, as sparkling as that lake in County Mayo. Brian takes his shoes off and has a paddle, numbing the pain and washing away the memories. It's all uphill from here: a spot of tourism, a visit to a vineyard in the Bekaa Valley to sample a little of the wine. And then a little more. OK, so the grapes are grown in the shadow of war. But there's always a little bitterness among the sweet.
Having described the experience of captivity so powerfully already, Keenan didn’t say too much more about it here. Instead, he reminisced about the time before his kidnapping, vividly relived the moment itself, and then concentrated on seeing how Lebanon is today. Quite often last night, you got the impression that he’d like to have given us the story of a country reborn from the ashes of civil war. Unfortunately, he was too honest for that. Lebanon’s history was impossible to avoid wherever he went – and, in any case, there have been plenty of atrocities since.
At times Keenan’s endlessly lyrical approach did perhaps lead him, as lyrical approaches will, into contradictions. Certainly, it was difficult to square his rhetorical flights about the importance of always acknowledging the past with his rhetorical flights about the importance of forgetting it. (At one stage too, he exhorted his sons to live “free from fear” – even though we knew by then that being free from fear was precisely what had helped to get him kidnapped.) In the circumstances, mind you, a spot of confusion between analysis and wishful thinking can probably be forgiven.
He's not bitter himself: thoughtful, philosophical, modest, forgiving, he makes a lovely guide. Sure, he goes to town on the old poetry, but hey, he's Irish. And he spent all those years in the dark, with only the thoughts and the words in his head for company. When he tells the owner of a Beirut hotel, an old friend he hasn't seen for 20 years, "I'm still a nice man," he's not lying. He is.
Switching channels... documentaries don’t come much more timely than Dispatches: Undercover in Tibet (C4). Although the programme’s three months of filming took place before the recent riots, the result provided harrowing proof of the grievances that lay behind them, says James Walton of the Telegraph. The man with the hidden camera was Tash Despa, who left Tibet 11 years ago in the traditional way: he trekked for a month across the Himalayas, passing many frozen corpses as he went. Since then, needless to say, thousands more of his countrymen have made the same trek – prompting the obvious question of why they’re so desperate to escape.
Once Tash re-entered Tibet, the answers soon started to become clear. On the way in, his car passed a Chinese army convoy three miles long. (According to the programme, the country now contains one Chinese soldier for every 20 Tibetans.) And, despite his nervousness – at one point he confessed he’d just been vomiting with fear – Tash turned out to be an assiduous collector of evidence.Thousands of Tibetan nomads, for example, have been resettled in what the Chinese claim is a programme of social development. Yet, when Tash navigated his way to the middle of nowhere to visit one of the new “villages”, he accurately described it as seeming like a prison camp, with no school, clinic or transport links.
Switching channels... documentaries don’t come much more timely than Dispatches: Undercover in Tibet (C4). Although the programme’s three months of filming took place before the recent riots, the result provided harrowing proof of the grievances that lay behind them, says James Walton of the Telegraph. The man with the hidden camera was Tash Despa, who left Tibet 11 years ago in the traditional way: he trekked for a month across the Himalayas, passing many frozen corpses as he went. Since then, needless to say, thousands more of his countrymen have made the same trek – prompting the obvious question of why they’re so desperate to escape.
Once Tash re-entered Tibet, the answers soon started to become clear. On the way in, his car passed a Chinese army convoy three miles long. (According to the programme, the country now contains one Chinese soldier for every 20 Tibetans.) And, despite his nervousness – at one point he confessed he’d just been vomiting with fear – Tash turned out to be an assiduous collector of evidence.Thousands of Tibetan nomads, for example, have been resettled in what the Chinese claim is a programme of social development. Yet, when Tash navigated his way to the middle of nowhere to visit one of the new “villages”, he accurately described it as seeming like a prison camp, with no school, clinic or transport links.
He also met several people who’d suffered more personal forms of oppression. One victim of torture broke down as he explained why “being electrocuted in water is much worse than when you are dry”. (When you’re dry, the electric prod only hurts where it touches. When you’re wet, it sends pain shooting through the whole body.) A woman literally had the scars to prove that, contrary to official Chinese law, the one-child policy now applies to Tibetans – and is imposed through forced sterilisation. If she’d had the money, she told us, she could have bought a false sterilisation certificate. As it was, she couldn’t even afford a drip to treat the “agonising pain” from an operation carried out without proper anaesthetic.
Elsewhere, mental illness has been the subject of quite a few good novels but not many films, or at least not many that you can think of offhand, observes Andrew Billen. Perhaps that's partly because the whole business of writing and reading a novel is not that far from a kind of mental illness: isolation, self-involvement, paying attention to the voices in your head are part of the package. Films, on the other hand, are an inherently gregarious, extrovert business: you won't do well if you can't relate easily to other people. So films tend to go for a flamboyant, entertaining, even cute version of mental illness that doesn't have a great deal to with how most people experience it. Poppy Shakespeare at least came to the screen with a veneer of authority, being based on the much-praised novel by Clare Allan, who has spent much of her life as a psychiatric patient.
Viewers with prior knowledge of Allan's novel will have been struck immediately by two things in last night's Channel 4 adaptation. The first was that Poppy was played by a black actress, Naomie Harris. There is, it is true, no mention of Poppy's colour in the book but the narrator, N, is such a cheeky observer, keen on epithets such as “Middle Class Michael”, you would have thought her ethnicity might have got a mention. The casting, happily, proved inspired. Harris's beauty stood out all the more among the drab community of NHS psychiatric outpatients - known by N as “dribblers” - confined to North London's Dorothy Fish Ward.
Viewers with prior knowledge of Allan's novel will have been struck immediately by two things in last night's Channel 4 adaptation. The first was that Poppy was played by a black actress, Naomie Harris. There is, it is true, no mention of Poppy's colour in the book but the narrator, N, is such a cheeky observer, keen on epithets such as “Middle Class Michael”, you would have thought her ethnicity might have got a mention. The casting, happily, proved inspired. Harris's beauty stood out all the more among the drab community of NHS psychiatric outpatients - known by N as “dribblers” - confined to North London's Dorothy Fish Ward.
The second thing you realise is that the director Benjamin Ross has made the story less funny and satirical. The tragi-comedy is now more tragic. The relief the reader feels when N finally escapes institutionalisation is for the viewer non-existent. Instead, the narrative focuses on Poppy's descent from successful mother and career woman into a vegetable planted on the hospital's highest storey. Poppy originally becomes entangled in the NHS web after filling in a psychometric assessment form provided by a government employment initiative. Told that unless she enrols at the Fish as an outpatient she will be sectioned, she enters determined to prove herself sane. But to claim legal help to prove this, she must first make herself eligible for “mad money” by declaring herself insane. This is Catch-22 in reverse.
Most people at the Fish have a different problem: a morbid fear of being released. Yet being released early - often with suicidal results - is exactly what is happening as the hospital strives to meet targets by “curing” its charges. Michael, a tank-top-and-tie pressure group veteran, the book's Middle Class Michael, is on to the Government's little game but, because he is “mad”, no one takes any notice. The only person who is improving under the Fish's regime is N, who bonds with Poppy after being told to show the new girl the ropes. This she does only too well. In learning how to fake mental instability, Poppy makes herself ill even as N becomes a more and more competent teacher. In this story, as in life, you are the roles you are required to play. By the end, N has assumed Poppy's poise, her dress-sense and free spirit.
Anna Maxwell Martin's performance as N was remarkable. In a pudding bowl haircut and red puffer jacket, she looks not so much childlike as babyish. Her face is at first glance blank; in fact, however much she tries, it is unable to conceal her emotions. And Harris was good, if not as arresting, as Poppy. They had excellent support, particularly from Jonathan Cullen and Tessa Peake-Jones as the ward doctors, full of bright, meaningless encouragement (throwing N out into the "community", Peake-Jones intoned: "You can be anything you want, N, anything. You have the power! Take life by the horns! Step into your dreams!"). Benjamin Ross directed with some flair, interspersing the gritty reality of a run-down psychiatric hospital with visionary sequences – the lights flickering insanely in a jammed lift, camera whirling round N and Poppy as they turn a therapeutic exercise into an ecstatic dance.
It was a touching, lovingly acted film, with a highly evocative score by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott, but it replaced Clare Allan's angry, satirical brio with a futile melancholy. Poppy's descent and N's mirroring rise felt formulaic, and Allan's literary roots showed a little too plainly: Catch-22, Kafka, as well as, obviously, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A lot of the problem lay simply in the transfer from page to screen, not just because of that enforced gregariousness, but because things on screen are real in a way they aren't on the page. N's narrative had fantastic elements, often with a satirical edge – there was an unspoken polemic here about the NHS's culture of targets and economies, but her subjective fantasies were shored up by the camera's air of objectivity, which gave fantasy and gritty reality exactly the same look, so that I couldn't sort out romance, satire, and documentary. A sweet, enjoyable film, but something harsher was missing.
The title of Marty Feldman – Six Degrees of Separation was a slightly clumsy way of pointing out that Feldman worked with everyone. In his early days, writing in partnership with Barry Took, he supplied gags to Frankie Howerd and was responsible for the glories of Round the Horne, a radio comedy that's to my taste survived far better than the Goons. In the Sixties, he worked with David Frost and most of the Pythons. Michael Palin and John Cleese turned up here to pay tribute to his talent, but also to remember with a little bitterness how swiftly he went all Hollywood on them. TV stardom took him to America, where he made a succession of terrible films with Mel Brooks. Among those paying homage were Gene Wilder, Barry Levinson, Larry "M*A*S*H" Gelbart and Dom DeLuise, who for some reason brought along a parakeet that did a trick, holding on to a stick with its beak while DeLuise whirled it around at high speed. I was mesmerised – what happens if it loses its grip? Few words were minced about the sheer crappiness of the films, but you were left with a strong impression of Feldman's gentleness, and how much people liked him. He was only 49 when he died, and he hadn't been funny for a while; but the programme made you wonder whether that wasn't just a blip: maybe there were more laughs to come.
Anna Maxwell Martin's performance as N was remarkable. In a pudding bowl haircut and red puffer jacket, she looks not so much childlike as babyish. Her face is at first glance blank; in fact, however much she tries, it is unable to conceal her emotions. And Harris was good, if not as arresting, as Poppy. They had excellent support, particularly from Jonathan Cullen and Tessa Peake-Jones as the ward doctors, full of bright, meaningless encouragement (throwing N out into the "community", Peake-Jones intoned: "You can be anything you want, N, anything. You have the power! Take life by the horns! Step into your dreams!"). Benjamin Ross directed with some flair, interspersing the gritty reality of a run-down psychiatric hospital with visionary sequences – the lights flickering insanely in a jammed lift, camera whirling round N and Poppy as they turn a therapeutic exercise into an ecstatic dance.
It was a touching, lovingly acted film, with a highly evocative score by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott, but it replaced Clare Allan's angry, satirical brio with a futile melancholy. Poppy's descent and N's mirroring rise felt formulaic, and Allan's literary roots showed a little too plainly: Catch-22, Kafka, as well as, obviously, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A lot of the problem lay simply in the transfer from page to screen, not just because of that enforced gregariousness, but because things on screen are real in a way they aren't on the page. N's narrative had fantastic elements, often with a satirical edge – there was an unspoken polemic here about the NHS's culture of targets and economies, but her subjective fantasies were shored up by the camera's air of objectivity, which gave fantasy and gritty reality exactly the same look, so that I couldn't sort out romance, satire, and documentary. A sweet, enjoyable film, but something harsher was missing.
The title of Marty Feldman – Six Degrees of Separation was a slightly clumsy way of pointing out that Feldman worked with everyone. In his early days, writing in partnership with Barry Took, he supplied gags to Frankie Howerd and was responsible for the glories of Round the Horne, a radio comedy that's to my taste survived far better than the Goons. In the Sixties, he worked with David Frost and most of the Pythons. Michael Palin and John Cleese turned up here to pay tribute to his talent, but also to remember with a little bitterness how swiftly he went all Hollywood on them. TV stardom took him to America, where he made a succession of terrible films with Mel Brooks. Among those paying homage were Gene Wilder, Barry Levinson, Larry "M*A*S*H" Gelbart and Dom DeLuise, who for some reason brought along a parakeet that did a trick, holding on to a stick with its beak while DeLuise whirled it around at high speed. I was mesmerised – what happens if it loses its grip? Few words were minced about the sheer crappiness of the films, but you were left with a strong impression of Feldman's gentleness, and how much people liked him. He was only 49 when he died, and he hadn't been funny for a while; but the programme made you wonder whether that wasn't just a blip: maybe there were more laughs to come.
