Wednesday
Border Country: When Ireland Was Divided 9pm, BBC Four
It’s arguable whether Wednesday night’s documentary on the history of the Irish border is the week’s most important programme – although I would argue it is. What is not up for debate, however, is that it presents us with the week’s grandest opening.
Specifically, it offers the magnificent sight of Paddy Gillespie, a gentleman of Strabane, bombing down a busy highway on his electric bicycle, unencumbered by a helmet. A man riding a motorised bike is not, you might say, such an unusual spectacle. But here’s the kicker: Mr Gillespie is 102 years of age. Older than the border itself.
The meandering dividing line that cuts across nearly 300 miles of rural farmland has existed since 1922. From the first, it has been a source of turmoil, confusion, contradiction, anger and absurdity, best summed up by the exasperated comment of another contributor, journalist Fintan O’Toole: “I get fed up when people keep talking about ‘The Irish Border’ – it’s a British Border!” Now, of course, as Brexit staggers on, it is the source of a whole new tension. Which is, of course, only all the old tensions bubbling up again.
Short but sweet and achingly sad, this terrific film draws from almost 100 years of archive footage shot by documentary and news crews attempting to understand the nature of the border, and the fault line it represents. Meanwhile come new interviews with people whose lives have been affected by it. Among them is John, who served there as a member of the British Army, and has been in a wheelchair since being shot in the spine on an operation in 1981 during which his colleague was killed. “The border is inside me,” he says.
It begins, though, like a comedy, as people discuss the various smuggling traditions that instantly flourished around the border, stories of the little guy beating the system that have the sly air of a Whisky Galore. Paddy Gillespie remembers swimming the river with illicit cows. Ardal O'Hanlon recalls men getting paid for driving the same load of pigs back and forth again and again. Fintan O'Toole describes returning to Dublin from Belfast feeling like a Michelin Man, because of all the layers of smuggled new clothes he wore under his coat.
Things get harder-edged, but remain absurd, as the film explores the subject of how any infrastructure erected along the border becomes a magnet for trouble – we see Sisyphean footage of authorities labouring to block off roads and bridges, only to find all their work destroyed the next day, the paths open again.
From here it is into real horror. This film is not a history of The Troubles, but it is bluntly eloquent about illustrating them, and the atrocities come evenly balanced. We hear the story of the horrendous 1975 massacre of the Miami Showband by the UVF; and we hear about the murder of Patsy Gillespie, who was kidnapped from his home by the IRA in 1990, and, while his family was held hostage, chained into a van loaded with a massive bomb and ordered to drive it into a checkpoint. Lastly, we hear about the unlikely, hard-won friendship that has grown between his widow, Kathleen, and Anne Walker, a former IRA member.
It’s an unassuming little film, but tough, clever, pointed, human and – to employ a recently much abused word – meaningful. From a 102-year-old man to a wounded ex-soldier, from comedians to journalists to farmers, from ex-IRA woman to widow, the voices are diverse. But all speak as one to say a hard border must not exist again.
Sunday
Line Of Duty
9pm, BBC One
Following his fun but wildly overrated Bodyguard, writer Jed Mercurio returns to business with a fifth series of his cops vs cops saga. It pays to brush up on LOD internal history before going in: while tackling all their previous individual cases of corruption, AC-12 investigators DI Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) and DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) have spotted hints of a much bigger conspiracy involving an enigmatic “H”, and are still trying to avoid suspecting it could be their noble father-figure leader, Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). But the main plot this time is gripping enough on its own. When a routine transport of seized heroin ends in the brutal murder of three police officers, the team uncover evidence that suggests an undercover officer has gone native. Stephen Graham is among the intense wrong ’uns.
Monday
Storyville: The Trial Of Ratko Mladic
10pm, BBC Four
One of the most infamous figures of the war that consumed Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, the Bosnian Serb general Mladic presided over the siege of Sarajevo that saw thousands of civilians slaughtered across several years. In the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 alone, 7,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in what had been classed a UN safe zone, an atrocity at the heart of Europe unlike any since the Second World War. That year, Mladic was charged with war crimes by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, but went into hiding. His genocide trial didn’t begin until 2012, and would last until 2017. For this fine, sobering film, directors Henry Singer and Rob Miller were given unprecedented access to the trial’s five twisting years. They interview lawyers and witnesses on both sides, including Mladic’s cult of supporters in present-day Bosnia.
Tuesday
The Murder of Jill Dando
9pm, BBC One
This month marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most high-profile murder cases in recent British history: the killing of television presenter Jill Dando, who was among the UK’s best known faces when she was fatally shot outside her London home in 1999, aged 37. Myriad theories instantly sprung up, including the notion that, as host of Crimewatch, Dando might have been the target of an underworld hit; or, more bizarrely, executed on the orders of a Serbian warlord. In 2001, though, it seemed the case was closed when local man Barry George was convicted of her killing. In 2008, however, the case was quashed, George was ordered retried, and found not guilty. No preview material was available, but this film promises to explore the unsolved murder with new interviews with officers involved in the investigation, and examines rare and previously unseen evidence.
Thursday
Jack The Ripper: The Case Reopened
9pm, BBC One
It’s been, ooh, at least a good half an hour since there was a documentary about Jack The Ripper, so it’s high time we had another. And, say what you like about there having been so many of these things it’s surely time to just give it all a bloody rest – this is the first one ever to have been presented by Emilia Fox, and, as such, clearly represents new ground being broken. For this film, the Silent Witness star joins a team of hot forensic experts as they employ hot cutting edge tech and serious faces to re-examine all the evidence (including screamingly pointless/ way cool CGI “virtual reality autopsies”) to come up with a whole “new” bunch of theories that prove nothing and mean nothing and nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing Jack The Ripper.
Friday
Our Planet/
Quicksand
Netflix
Netflix tonight unveils its spectacular eight-part nature documentary, narrated by the lord David Attenborough. Created with the same team that made his majestic Planet Earth and Blue Planet series, it’s as incredible to look at as you might imagine – truly stunning – it’s very carefully crafted as education, and it doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to delivering an ecological message about the urgent threat the planet is now facing. Also arriving on Netflix today, the Swedish drama Quicksand is based on the best-selling novel by Malin Persson Giolito, exploring the events around a mass high school shooting, after a teenage girl goes on trial charged with conspiring in the crime. Scandi fans will want to know that the six-part TV adaptation was created by Camilla Ahlgren, previously one of The Bridge’s main writers.
Saturday
Follow The Money
9pm, BBC Four
Long-term members of the BBC Four Eurozone cult will recall Follow The Money, the Danish crime drama with the socially pickled plots that have previously involved the economic crash, politics, big business, big energy, corruption, and the odd corpse in the water. This third series features some familiar returning characters – fraud squad detective Alf (Thomas Hwan) and the young-mechanic turned budding underground kingpin Nicky (Esben Smed) – in a whole new story. Still rising, Nicky is back in Denmark and now running a drug smuggling operation for a Spanish syndicate, laundering his cash through a juice bar front. Meanwhile, Alf, secretly struggling with PTSD, is working with a new taskforce, on a case that will put him in direct opposition to Nicky. The ten-part story kicks off with the traditional Saturday night double bill.
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