TV Review: Abused: Breaking the Silence; Submarine School, by John Crace, The Guardian, June 22, 2011

TV Review: Abused: Breaking the Silence; Submarine School

By John Crace
The Guardian
June 22, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/21/tv-review-abused-breaking-silence

The late Fr Kit Cunningham, at the centre of allegations in Abuse: Breaking the Silence.

The element of surprise has long passed. We've got so used to Catholic priests being accused of child sex abuse that the real rarity would be a TV documentary about one who kept his hands to himself. Yet it's the very familiarity of these stories that makes them still so powerful; the recognition that child abuse isn't limited to a few isolated priests but is an endemic problem that the Catholic church has gone out of its way to cover up for the best part of 50 years.

Abused: Breaking the Silence (BBC1) catalogued a devastating history of abuse at two boys' schools, Grace Dieu Manor in Leicestershire and St Michael's in Soni, Tanzania, that would never have been revealed had not a group of ex-pupils started emailing each other about the sadism and sex abuse they had suffered at the hands of several Catholic priests of the Rosminian order in the 1960s. As so often in films like this, where the depressing repetitiveness of the abuse can be numbing, it was the more casual remarks, such as "Soni broke my spirit" and "It was a violent, loveless, sad place" that brought home the emotional damage. These men didn't just want retribution for what they had suffered, they wanted to be healed.

That's precisely what the Rosminian order was most keen to deny them. Having initially told the former pupils he was horrified by the abuse and encouraged the accused – Fr Kit Cunningham MBE and others – to write letters of apology, the head of the Rosminians, Fr David Myers, was rather put out when some of the abused said that wasn't enough. They wanted to know why the church had sent a known suspected paedophile to Tanzania and why the church had permitted systematic abuse in the same school by several of its staff.

They also wanted financial compensation, which Fr Myers declined to offer on the grounds that the innocent recipients of the church's current charity shouldn't be punished for the sins of its priesthood 50 years ago. Fr Myers works in mysterious ways. Some of the abused found a kind of peace regardless, but the church ended the film where it started: on the offensive. The priests had withdrawn their letters of apology, suggesting their former pupils must have been hallucinating, while Fr Cunningham was seen on his way to heaven this January with a memorial mass presided over by Fr Myers.

When Fr Cunningham died, this paper was among several that gave him a generous obituary. This programme and this review hopefully serves as some corrective. Fr Myers declined to appear in the programme, quoting the passage from Lamentations: "It is good to wait in silence." I'd suggest he look elsewhere in the Bible for inspiration.

Military training courses often make great television but, despite a breathless voiceover from Peter Capaldi, Submarine School (Channel 5) felt flat. Judging a programme by what you would like to have seen, rather than what was shown, may not be ideal, but it's sometimes hard to avoid. We were told at the start that the Perisher – the training course for submarine commanders – was the navy's toughest course and that commanding a sub was the most prized job in the service, but we were never told why. Nor were the five officers on the course – Oily, Jeff, Filthy, American Dan and English Dan – asked what attracted them to the idea of spending months at a time underwater in a 100m-long tube. Nor even were we told if there were actually enough subs to go round should they all have passed.

But the biggest miss was that the programme completely failed to capture the claustrophobic quality of life on a sub. It's this that makes submarines so mysteriously fascinating to those, such as myself, who know they would go mad within 10 minutes of getting on board and why the film Das Boot is a classic; even a few minutes spent showing us the sleeping quarters would have helped. As it was, almost all the action centred on the control deck where the five trainees – some more sweaty than others – pulled the periscope up and down while barking incomprehensible instructions under the supervision of Commander Jim Perks, AKA Teacher.

Occasionally someone would throw in a comment such as "Good ranging", but it was hard to know just how well or badly anyone was doing. Or what exactly was going on as I've only got the programme's word that the emergency special forces extraction had passed off well. There seemed to be a lot of hanging around doing nothing very much. All five trainees were still on the course by the end of the hour, though the trailer for next week's episode informed us that at least one was going to be sent home. The stakes for trainee submarine commanders are clearly rather higher than for paedophile priests.