Television: Prosperity

'Prosperity', the new RTE drama series, which, given its theme of urban poverty and despair, is bizzarely bookended by glitzy sponsor ads for a car manufacturer, started last night with a day in the life of an unmarried mother as she drifted from B&B to the Welfare to the chipper to her sister's and eventually to the canal to booze. In between these destinations, Stacey hangs around a shopping centre with her child, looking to recharge her mobile, striking up an unlikely friendship with a gormless security guard and waiting for her shit of a boyfried to call her. To say it is boring and repetitive and exhausting is probably some kind of praise for the filmakers because no doubt the intention here is to show the mind-numbing routine of a life excluded from 'our' national narrative of success and, naturally, prosperity. Amidst all the tarmacadam, concrete, hedge funds and financial controlling, what does 'real life' amount to in Ireland today? 'Prosperity', in the first episode, doesn't really answer that instead it offers a gallery of monosyllabic victims all of whose sentences seem to end in 'anyways' and 'is all' while at the same time failing to resist stock types like the buffoon in the shopping centre, who could have been Freddie in 'The Dead' in another life. They are making a point about the invisibility of these lives but if Abrahamson et al wanted it to be realistic, why add an occasional soundtrack intended to heighten the viewer's sympathy for Stacey's plight? Perhaps some loss of nerve.
Dramas like this often end up condescending their subjects. It is always other people who live 'lives of quiet desperation' and they rarely make mainstream television programmes. It is fundamentally an issue of class and it is why I wouldn't watch 'Adam and Paul' and found the most affecting scenes in 'Prosperity' those in which the characters joked about babies being ugly and talking dirty. The rest skirted too close to handwringing.

Television: The Trap

I watched ‘The Trap’,Adam Curtis' new documentary series on Sunday night on BBC 2 with great expectations, given that his previous efforts, The Century of the Self, which traced the part the Freud family played in the creation of the public relations industry, and The Power of Nightmares, an examination of the intellectual origins of both the Neo-Conservatives and Al-Qaeda, were startling pieces of television.
In this third series of films, Curtis seeks to analyse how the idea of freedom, officially at least, has become so prevalent in modern Western societies. The chief aim of governments in Britain and the United States now is not only to ensure freedom for their own citizens but also to promote the concept, by waging supposed wars of liberation, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, Curtis has identified that the foundation of this drive for freedom is premised on a deeply pessimistic view of human nature that assumes humans only ever act in their own self-interest, a theory posited by Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, above, as a refutation of the post-WWII consensus that governments had to play an active part in the economy for the common good.
From this point of departure, Curtis links the utilisation of game theory by Rand Corporation scientists during the Cold War to the attacks on the family made by psychiatrist R.D. Laing as instances of how the idea of the common or public good was chipped away at in favour of an individualist ethos that assumed people were always essentially ‘out for themselves’. But this championing of the individual did not usher in a new era of freedom, instead systems analysis, whether it was in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders or the operation of public institutions, became the dominant method of organising how the individual acted in society. The new emphasis in psychiatry on diagnosis by reference to lists of symptoms rather than specific treatment and the introduction of incentives and goals in the British health service were both examples of the contradictory nature of this pursuit of freedom which appeared to accept the ascendancy of the individual while at the same time putting in place ever more rigid systems in which people could live, work and think.
It is only fair to withhold judgement until the final two programmes are broadcast but I felt that Curtis was trying to draw too many disparate strands together and at times I longed for a more straightforward rendering of say the history of economic thought after the Second World War rather than these undoubtedly daring but you sense unsustainable intellectual leaps. Curtis has been praised in the past for his ability to unearth remarkable archive footage for his documentaries but this time the constant jumping from one image to another was distracting and I felt rarely added a whole lot to his thesis.