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 *** WHISKEY ECHO ***
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Usual stereotypes surface in Sudan drama
Sunday, January 23, 2005 - By Emmanuel Kehoe
Ever eat poutine? It's a high-calorie Canadian fast food consisting of chips with gravy and curds poured on top.
The odd thing is that poutine - which tastes virtually of nothing but has the consistency of lumpy sputum - was invented in Quebec, the most exciting part of Canada.
The bits of Canada that are habitable are full of almost scarily polite people. It's lovable, except for the poutine. The Canadian film industry, however, is another reason to have qualms about the place.
As children, we were brought up on a diet of short films, the equivalent of poutine, made by the National Film Board of Canada.
In cinemas in those days, films were shown ‘continuously' - ads, the ‘B' picture, a short, a cartoon, a newsreel and then the main feature, and back to the ads and on again, with audience members arriving and leaving as they wished.
Well-meaning and ardent NFB shorts sent audiences racing to the toilets or even into the street. Those who actually died from the experience could be in their seats for hours, until the cinema closed, as the entire programme played over and over.
Canada and the movies were not exactly a stairway to the stars. I can remember only two Canadian films that didn't pretend slyly to be set somewhere in the US: Jesus of Montreal and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a mawkish affair starring Richard Dreyfuss.
More recently, the city of Vancouver had a starring role in Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx. It played New York.
So the heart sagged like those French fries wilting under curds 'n' gravy when I saw that Whiskey Echo (RTE 1), a new four-part drama featuring medical aid workers in Sudan, was an Irish-Canadian co-production.
Would it be all angst and earnestness? Would the growing Irish flair for television drama be smothered by whatever it is that makes Canadian movies almost invisible to the naked eye?
Then there is the rather tricky business of making a drama about a conflict that is still going on and still claiming lives. Whiskey Echo, according to RTE's press information, is set in Darfur province, in a situation that continues to be very real for the people living there and the aid workers.
A peace treaty signed on January 9 in Nairobi between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army ostensibly ended one of Africa's longest wars, which had cost two million lives. However, the agreement does not apply to the western province of Darfur, where the humanitarian crisis continues.
But one character at the start of Whiskey Echo says: “Welcome to southern Sudan'‘. Another says the genocide is taking place “far away up in the north of Sudan'‘. So is it set in Darfur at all?
The BBC drama series Warriors, about British troops in Bosnia, was virtually contemporaneous with events there. One critic said of it: “This is what drama is supposed to do: to tell you what you already knew, but this time to make you feel it.”
Will Whiskey Echo, a Little Bird/Barna Alper (Canada) co-production for RTE and CBC, do the same for this crisis in Africa? Might it also set a trend for dramas about aid workers, making them glamorous - a sort of hybrid of M*A*S*H, ER and Young Doctors in Love?
It certainly feeds into the stereotype of Africa as violent, corrupt, hopeless and deeply reliant on assistance from the ‘developed world'.
Send a lot of good-looking, do-gooding white folks and everything gets just a little better, in spite of the worst efforts of the local warlords, armed factions and endemic diseases.
The doctors and nurses of All World Medicine are mostly white, and all are good-looking, from mercurial Canadian team coordinator Jenna Breeden (Joanne Kelly) to former leading plastic surgeon Rafe Leger (Jason Barry) and - irresistible stereotyping at work - the sexually predatory Italian Carlo (David Alpay).
Carlo immediately directs the full glare of his attentions at the newly-arrived doctor from Dublin, the winsome Rachel (Dominque McElligot). Amazingly and stereotypically innocent, she claims this is not only her first mission but also her first time out of Ireland.
There surely was no need to go quite that far to establish her as the ultimate Irish virgin.
There are a lot of bad and dubious characters in Whiskey Echo, and most of them are black. The only white villain is an oil company executive who is involved with Khartoum's plans to push a pipeline through the area. The first episode ended with Rachel and Carlo captured by a group of drugged and armed boy soldiers.
Whiskey Echo, directed with some style by Harry Hook, features good performances and a strong atmosphere. Reservations taken into account, it is likely to prove popular, given the Irish appetite for supporting humanitarian causes.
The more cynical might consult their bookies for odds on who, if anyone, gets killed first.
In Tribe (BBC2), explorer Bruce Parry was asked at arrow-point to get his kit off by a chap from Papua who might not long ago have been sizing him up for the pot. Parry obliged and was kitted out (frontally) with a leaf, the Papuan having been pacified with tobacco.
Tobacco was the emollient in Parry's diplomacy. Here he was, hopping about the jungle bemoaning the passing of a jungle civilisation, while at the same time doling out tobacco to the bristling naked little men representing it. Doesn't he know that this can seriously damage their health? If the cannibals next door don't get them, the tobacco will.
We, of course, know that tobacco is bad for us - the equivalent of poisoned arrows, in fact. And we have adjusted our tribal ways accordingly. Now, even the Cubans are banning smoking in public places.
If Parry were to take his anthropological antics to, say, deepest Temple Bar and proffer ‘baccy' to the beer-swilling locals in one of the tribal longhouses, he'd be kicked out on his ear.
Which brings us to the heartwarming common cultural experience in Parry's programme. If you hand a smoke to a Papuan tribesman who has his hands full with a bow and extremely long arrows, where does he put it? Why, behind his ear of course. That's what ears are for, the world over.
Also vanishing - though there seems to be some attempt to revive, or at least preserve it - is Cant, the secret language used by travellers.
Cant – Caint an tSiulora (TG4) looked at the parlous state of the language today. Cant is also known, academically, as Shelta, and also called Gammon. Elsewhere I've heard it said that Cant and Gammon are distinct Shelta dialects spoken in different parts of the country.
The travellers' language has dramatically declined in recent years, and about 86 per cent of the vocabulary has vanished.
Cant is related to other lingos used by discrete groups who find themselves outside the law, including professional criminals. Rearranging letters in a word, reversing the meaning of words, and adding prefixes or endings are common to many lingos designed to hide the speaker's meaning from other people in the immediate area.
Whether it comes from the Irish word ‘caint', as asserted in the programme, is arguable.
Captain Grose's 18th-century Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - easily found in its 1811 version on the internet - describes Cant as “a kind of gibberish used by thieves and gypsies, called likewise pedlar's French, the slang'‘. The Canting Crew are “thieves, beggars, and gypsies, or any others using the canting lingo'‘.
So Grose, when out on the tear in the rougher quarters of London, might have heard a pair of likely lads say the next morning, “The cull docked the dell all the darkmans'‘ (“He was in bed with the girl all night'‘).
This kind of advanced slang also had its versions in Dublin, surviving in songs such as The Night Before Larry was Stretched and in everyday slang well into the 20th century.
Irish travellers' Cant was more complex because it employed words from the Irish language, reflecting the widespread use of Irish up to 150 years ago. So ‘bóthar' becomes ‘tobar' and ‘priosún' becomes ‘rispún'.
Marian Browne has worked with children from both settled and traveller communities in a Newbridge school to produce a basic Cant picture dictionary, Can't Lose Cant.
She pointed out that the dictionary consists mainly of nouns and a few verbs, and that adjectives in Cant are almost gone. New words are being based on English rather than on Irish.
The prospect of preserving Cant by teaching it in schools appeals to some travellers who appeared on the programme. But, given the state of the Irish language after decades of dedicated teaching, Cant is unlikely to survive as more than a curiosity.
The programme was rather elegiac about aspects of traveller life and perhaps somewhat fanciful about Cant, which some suggested might go back as far as coded entries made by Irish monks in manuscripts.
There was one howler of an assertion that “Lord Sidney, Cromwell's right-hand man, put hundreds [of travellers and others] to death in Cork in 1563'‘. Cromwell wasn't born until 1599, and Henry Sidney was Elizabeth's man who scorched Munster in 1569.
In modern Munster lives an unusual family - unusual in that the father has had a ####### change. Fran Landsman's film My Dad Diane (BBC2) was narrated by son Gareth, a boy who, frequently teased about his situation, wants to join the British army - which is hardly likely to lead to less teasing.
Originally from Wales, Caroline and Diane Hughes have been married for 25 years. But when they met, Diane was a rugged chap named Richard who used to shoot for Wales.
Caroline, in effect, has lost her man and ####### no longer happens.
However, she still has someone about the farm who's handy with machinery and doesn't mind climbing to the top of the wind turbine with a spanner.
Alternative? Unconventional? At one point, Gareth, who seemed to get on better with Diane than with Caroline, described his family as abnormal, hurting his mother deeply.
But he later gave his parents a certificate ‘To the World's best Mums', listing their qualities as parents.
They've worked out a life for themselves and seem thoroughly decent people, but their chosen habitation will convince viewers that parts of Cork are brimming with people living all sorts of alternative lifestyles, boggling old Dev's constitutional concept of the family.
The Hugheses were invited to tea by Diane's friend Nick, a bearded Russian who lives in a grand country house. “I'm not so sure what we have in common with them,’' Gareth said. But all was to become clear.
Nick used to be Nadia, and his partner is the woman with whom he was involved before his change.
http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2005/01/23/story1674.asp#
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