Black Earth Rising, BBC 2, Monday at 9pm
September is the television month of drama launches, but Black Earth Rising is a bit different and worth keeping an eye on among the multitude.
It’s a crime drama, but here the crime is monumental. It’s the genocidal slaughter of the Tutsi people by the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994.
It also tackles the effects of colonialism (in this case Belgium’s), the rights of a European based International Criminal Court to hand out justice to Africa and whether the oppressed can later become the oppressor.
Because it’s a drama, there are also personal relationships.
Our hero, Eve Ashby (Harriet Walter) is a human rights lawyer who adopted a child survivor of the Rwandan genocide and has now agreed to take on the prosecution of Simon Nyamoya (Danny Sapani), a Tutsi general who was a hero of the fight to save his people from the Hutu but has been involved in murder and mine stripping in neighbouring Congo.
Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), who works at her mother’s law firm, continues to suffer from the mental trauma of her early childhood (she doesn’t know her Tutsi birth name and has horrific scars on her stomach) and cannot understand why her mother would prosecute someone she regards as a hero.
There is also an as yet unexplained relationship between Eve and her legal mentor Michael Ennis (John Goodman), but it is hinted they have direct knowledge of events around the time of the genocide which relates to Kate.
Perhaps her relatives were themselves involved in atrocities. It should be remembered that while up to one million Tutsi were killed in Rwanda, an estimated four million people were killed in neighbouring Congo, many of them Hutu, in the years and wars that followed.
There were difficulties with the opening episode.
There is yet to be an explanation as to why Eve would be allowed by the International Criminal Court, or would allow herself, to take on a case which crossed into her personal life. There was a curious intervention from the Americans proposing Eve despite the US not being one of the 124 countries signed up to the court.
The acting was a bit clunky at times and Black Earth Rising is certainly not as polished as US drama series.
And also because of the nature of the historical subject matter, there was a lot of explaining of the background to be worked into the narrative. It got a bit silly at one point, with Eve and Kate having a row where they are shouting facts at each other about Africa, colonialism and the genocide.
Nonetheless, this opener had enough to bring me back for more of this eight-part series.
***
The John Pauls, RTE 1, Monday at 9.35
The award for stretching a single idea to a full hour of television goes to the producer of the John Pauls.
The simple idea: to find people across Ireland who were named after Pope John Paul II when he visited Ireland in 1979 for a programme to be broadcast after the visit of Pope Francis.
We met a slew of John Pauls and JPs across the country and their parents who explained why they had chosen the name. The sons, now in their late 30s, were also queried as to whether they would name any of their children Francis.
It would have made an item on the RTE News; would have been perfect for a newspaper spread; five minutes on the Joe Duffy Show, or perhaps even 10 minutes on Countrywide but 60 minutes of television in a prime slot?
