This is a bleak but attention-grabbing tale of a sad has-been comic face-to-face
Posted in General on 26. Jul, 2010
This is a bleak but attention-grabbing tale of a sad, has-been comic face-to-face with lager-lout animalism, cruelty and rape. Five minutes in the life of this character and you’ve seen it all – life is ugly and there’s no getting away from it. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a cat playing with a half-dead mouse – torturing its victim with incessant jabs and slaps – then you’ll know what this anti-hero is going through. It’s all push, push, push.But everyone is said to have that invisible line where tolerance reaches saturation point, and which, when crossed, unleashes the fury within So, watch out, this fly bites back.. Warnings are issued about a doomed flight on an American airline.
A number of VIPs cancel their seats shortly before take-off, but the public is not alerted to any risk. Alleged US Drug Enforcement Agency-approved narcotics smuggling, international terrorism and a workaholic Swiss timer supplier all have their parts to play. This isn’t the plot of some new thriller, but what Allan Francovich claims is the “true” story of Pan- Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie in December 1988 killing all 270 people aboard. Francovich’s film of the disaster, The Maltese Double Cross, is broadcast for the first time tonight (9.30pm C4), following its sudden withdrawal from the London Film Festival last November, “on legal advice”.
Its claims, includingthe assertion that Iran and not Libya was behind the bombing, and its allegations about what the British and US governments knew at the time, are compounded by a cast list including CIA agents, a former president of Iran and both of the Libyans accused of the bombing.But controversy also surrounds the funding of the film, by the Metropole Hotels group – two-thirds owned by Tiny Rowland’s Lonhro (Rowland himself is seen as a staunch defender of Colonel Gadaffi) and one-third by the Libyan Arab Finance Company – raising questions about the independent nature of its conclusions. Now that it’s finally being aired, you have the chance to decide for yourself..
I’d better get the apology out of the way first. Reviewing Minders last week, a series which follows the work of a South London community mental health team, I noted television’s ability to arouse “facile indignation” in its viewers. Unfortunately I ignored my own warning and went on to make a rather casual condemnation of the unit’s head, Professor Tom Burns, implying that he had an unquestioning faith in the chemical cure and an arrogant attitude to his patients’ distress. Watching subsequent episodes of the series I’ve come to see, with increasing uneasiness, that this was an unworthy suggestion. In the very next film, for example, you saw him demonstrating considerable empathy with Alan, a young schizophrenic. He realised that the protective, anxious love of Alan’s mother might be aggravating the illness rather than easing it.
Far from medicalising Alan’s problem, Professor Burns attempted to work on the relationships within the family. Subsequent films have also brought home how abrasive and exhausting such patients must be – wildly inconsistent, unshakeable in their convictions, fantastical in their accounts of their own wellbeing. A manner that, at first glance, looked unheeding now appears sensibly contained So.. sorry.
This isn’t, I should say, a complete volte-face. The issue raised by that first programme was, in one sense, a matter of disputed vocabulary. Who decides what “treatment”, “illness” and “cure” really mean? Who decides when behaviour is “appropriate”? And if treatment leaves the patient virtually disabled by muscle-cramps, can they really be said to be better or just easier for an over-burdened system to handle? Even in far more difficult cases, such as that of Valerie (shown last Monday) medication can look awfully crude in its operations.
Valerie was hypermanic, her speech a torrent of angry accusations and wayward observations. She could switch mood within a sentence: “I have NOT got acute psychosis!” she shouted angrily during one session with her doctors, “I have got a cute face”. She grinned playfully.After injections, though, her speech was slurred and a strand of saliva dangled from her chin “I feel useless… I want to kill myself,” she moaned, and her own accusing question – “What’s wrong with being high anyway?” – seemed to have some force. And, though her mood had calmed by the end of the film, it didn’t seem likely to be any kind of long-term solution “You want the honest truth?” she said at the end.