The Case I Can’t Forget
RTE1, Mon
Along for the Ride with David O’Doherty
C4, Mon
Modern true crime TV is like an ageing hustler who struggles to go straight. The latter-day boom in demand for so-called “quality” true crime products has changed the game, placing new emphasis on sophisticated storytelling and the avoidance of lurid exploitation.
Discerning consumers now expect a dab of psychological depth to the schlock-horror, a dash of seriousness to the ghoulish rubbernecking. Most content providers are happy to oblige, but, every so often, even the most avowedly upright can’t resist a giddy back-slide into bad old habits.
The Case I Can’t Forget is the shiniest offering in the teeming bazaar of Irish true crime TV. Now in its second season, the series glistens with a prestige sheen and righteous glow. Its central conceit is the recollection of standout garda investigations through the eyes of lead detectives or other prime movers — a gimmick that, in a rare distinction, also serves a useful purpose. Slick production is matched by intelligent reporting, and discernible pains are taken to respect the anguish of victims and their families. For all its solemnity and sure-handedness, however, the format remains overreliant on presentational contrivances that can trivialise the consequences of crime and the job of crime fighting.
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Last week’s edition was a good example of what the show does best. The revisited case was the 1983 kidnapping of Don Tidey, a supermarket executive who was held hostage for 23 days by an IRA gang that demanded ransom of £5 million. A nationwide police hunt ensued, with the searchlight soon concentrated on isolated border enclaves. In their first joint operation, gardai teamed up with the defence forces, as hundreds of soldiers helped with the laborious task of combing through remote rural areas. Tidey was rescued from deep inside a wood near the Leitrim village of Ballinamore. As the search team closed in, the captors opened fire. Private Patrick Kelly of the army and the garda recruit Gary Sheehan were shot dead.
The jaw-dropping chaos of the hunt for Tidey was vividly evoked by PJ Higgins, a retired sergeant-major. Higgins still shudders at the thought of how badly prepared, poorly equipped and inadequately trained he and his colleagues were for the perilous task of taking on the IRA, a brutal and heavily armed terrorist organisation.
Ballinamore is surrounded by a densely forested wilderness, crisscrossed with rutted lanes. The terrain was intimately familiar to the Provos and their local admirers, as it was then essentially the factory floor for a thriving industry in cross-border smuggling. But for the soldiers and gardai it was unknown and treacherous territory.
As well as bringing us to the search’s front line, the film provided a useful measure of historical context. Socially and politically, 1980s Ireland was itself a dark forest, with all sorts of sinister notions lurking in the undergrowth. Higgins recalled the visceral hatred that soldiers and gardai encountered in some border towns, where hostility to “Free State forces” still festered. Backwoods attitudes were by no means confined to the backwoods.
Like most true crime shows, The Case I Can’t Forget revels in formulaic trills and frills. Despite the evocative richness of the featured testimony, Monday’s programme was heavily tricked out with unnecessarily antic hoopla: action-movie music, overexcited aerial camerawork and suchlike. Overuse of a plinkety-plonkety soundtrack whenever a bereaved person spoke was especially grating, and invariably served to distract from what they were actually saying.
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Tidey’s kidnappers escaped and have never been caught. Unsolved cases are a mainstay of the true crime renaissance, but, so far, Irish practitioners have conspicuously shied away from reopening IRA-related crimes. In the absence of a better idea, the show confected an inordinately neat and upbeat story arc, drawing a direct line from the Tidey kidnap to the cultivation of the peace process. It was a glib and corny conclusion to what had been a sharp and incisive documentary. It was also an eloquent reminder that true crime is, above all, an entertainment genre, ill-suited to reflecting the loose ends and unseemly mess of real life.
Plodding inconsequence is the dominant speed on Along for the Ride with David O’Doherty, a bike-based comedy travelogue with all the thrills and chuckles of a slow puncture. Each week the Dublin comedian and cycling obsessive is joined by a pedal-friendly showbiz chum for a leisurely whirl through the English countryside. Last week’s companion was Mel Giedroyc, while earlier episodes featured Richard Ayoade and Grayson Perry. Freewheeling conversation is the promise, but what we actually get is a stilted slog that goes nowhere at circuitous length.
Comic-led travel shows ran out of road years ago. Travel TV should tell us something we didn’t know about the myriad wonders of a great big world — but the increasingly ubiquitous comedian-fronted variety merely confirms our worst suspicions about the insular smugness of a cliquish entertainment industry. Narrow horizons and old ground are its route markers.
O’Doherty’s readiness to clamber aboard such a rattletrap vehicle is disappointing. As a stand-up comedian he has always charted his own distinctive path, eschewing the beaten track. Here he’s reduced to the most hidebound and hackneyed of MOR TV figures: the ingratiating talk show host who laughs too long and too heartily at even his guest’s frailest quips.
Throughout the series O’Doherty keenly extols the merits of bicycle travel, but chatting and cycling are not a good TV match. Literal panting and puffing merely aggravate the prevailingly breathless tone of mutual admiration. Serious topics are occasionally broached but given a swerve at the last minute — usually because the protagonists are preoccupied with the more pressing task of dodging potholes.
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The transparent glee with which so many ostensibly sharp-tongued comedians have embraced the cosy comforts of the twee travelogue is highly instructive. Backslapping celebrity excursions of this kind would be laughed out of town by most stand-ups if they were fronted by anyone else. With the gagster fraternity in the driving seat, however, a rust-bucket bandwagon is suddenly recast as TV’s hottest new frontier-buster.
Ultimately, of course, it’s the viewer who’s being taken for a ride.
