Britain's glorious 1970s

It wasn't as much fun back then as people make out.

I have been watching Say Nothing, the TV adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s truly great book about the Troubles. The TV series cannot accommodate the scope and depth of the book, of course, so it focusses on two stories in particular, those of the notorious Price sisters, Dolores and Marian, and Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten children who was taken away by the IRA, aged 38, and murdered, although the children were never told that she wouldn’t be coming home, and the body wasn’t located until 2003. The children were left to fend for themselves. Words fail me, as they should everyone.

I can’t make up my mind whether a dramatization of this harrowing and still raw moment of British history is justifiable or not. I suppose that argument has already been settled by countless other movies and TV shows about atrocities, but both the abduction and the Price sisters’ hunger strike in Brixton Prison make for deeply uncomfortable viewing, and it’s especially weird opening the Disney app to watch it. Certainly I would understand if you watched Adolescence instead. OK, maybe not Adolescence. What’s the one about the end of the world? No, not that one. The other one about the end of the world. Or the one where they find the girl’s body in…Anyway. There must be something.