This blog first appeared in The Andersonstown News
It’s summer, which means it’s time for the BBC and other channels to save money and roll out repeats. This can have its upside, as it gives viewers a chance to look again at programmes they had enjoyed or to view those they’d originally missed. How this all fits in with Catch-up I’m not sure, but I was glad when I saw ‘HEIST:THE NORTHERN BANK ROBBERY’ (BBC2) was to run again last Thursday.
Uh-oh: awful experience. I don’t mean the bank robbery, I mean the programme. It was built on a sort Q and A between Daragh McIntyre and Sam McBride. Sam looked as if he were about sixteen years old (which he’s not) and serious to the edge of stern (which he is); Daragh looked overweight and had a fine head of grey hair that clashed with his brownish beard.
This wasn’t so much a whodunit – everybody assumes the IRA dun the. robbery – as a question of how they’d dun it. Here there was consensus: everyone seemed to assume that the Northern Bank raid was a work hatched in the brain of the late Bobby Storey and delivered by him.
Anthony McIntyre, whose white beard would have matched nicely with Daragh’s grey hair , had no doubt about Bobby’s ability: “Of all the people in the IRA, I haven’t met anyone more intelligent than Bobby Storey. I used to walk the yard with him and I believe Bobby Storey had the capacity to pull together a team that would be virtually impenetrable”. The PSNI Chief Constable of the time, Hugh Orde, begged to differ: “If we had believed he [Storey] was involved, we’d have arrested him. Although I do think he knew about it.”
Much was made of the way the Northern Bank replaced the stolen notes with replacement notes that had a different colour and style.”That made it the biggest heist of waste paper in the history of Northern Ireland”.
We heard of people in Cork who were found with large sums and were believed to be laundering Northern Bank notes to business associates in Bulgaria.
Nobody was ever convicted of the robbery. But then we knew that. Incredibly, HEIST: The Northern Bank robbery managed to make a tedious programme out of a dazzlingly-effective bank robbery. More often than not, life is dull and art exciting. In this case, they managed to take an exciting event in life and beat it into tedious form fit for summer television.
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My favourite bit in TV coverage of the Olympics to date: the raw pain of sobbing Dubliner Jack Woolley. He’d trained perfectly, he’d fought perfectly – but then his taekwondo opponent Argentina’s Lucas Guzman did a last-minute kick and all Jack’s preparation meant nothing. He was out of the competition and he didn’t care who saw him bawling.
Take heart, young Jack, and remember the words of that fiercest of competitors, Roy Keane: ‘Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser’.
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