Growing up in Derry, I didn’t quite get the running joke that the disappearance of Shergar became. I knew he was a horse kidnapped by the IRA, but only vaguely, as this had taken place two years before I was born.
It sounds a little as if I intend that last sentence to serve as an alibi, and perhaps that’s smart. Because just about every time I’ve heard Shergar mentioned in casual conversation, it has been from the mouths of the many salty old dogs I’ve met in Derry pubs who’ve claimed to know the precise location where the world’s most famous stallion might be found – specifically because they themselves buried him there.
I wouldn’t want to accuse any of those men of lying, least of all to their faces, but, having now seen an entire documentary filled with images of that noble stallion, I find it hard to believe it took 312 fellas to lower him into the ground.
Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA (Channel 4, Saturday) attempts to fill the gaps in my knowledge of this most famous case, starting with a lucid explanation of just how good a runner he was, not least in scintillating footage of him winning the Epsom Derby of 1981 by 10 lengths, a feat still unsurpassed nearly five decades later.
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There’s further grounding in why, precisely, Irish racehorses are so good, glancing towards a combination of excellent horsemanship, canny tax arrangements and particularly nutritious limestone-bedded grazing land.
But that’s not all. We’re also treated to a light treatise on the political woes of 1980s Ireland, with rampant unemployment reported daily on the front pages and horse racing supremacy filling up the backs. At times these explainers, from the likes of Diarmaid Ferriter and Ivan Yates, feel a little pat and condensed, in kin with the breezy, “remember when?” tone of an episode of I Love The 1980s.
This is especially true about a quarter of the way through the documentary, when the talking heads who’ve spent 15 minutes talking about bloodstock and limestone-rich soil are suddenly proffering a potted history of Irish history from partition to the early 1980s.
On the one hand it’s admirable of the film-makers to include so much detail on the iniquities of gerrymandering, deprivation and historic human-rights abuses. It’s just that this five-minute section is delivered with such Wikipedia blankness that one’s left with a sense of just how little the average British viewer is expected to know about their nearest neighbour’s recent history.
As for the Shergar case itself, the facts are these: in 1983 the world’s most famous and expensive horse was stolen by the IRA in a daring raid that, on further examination, doesn’t appear to have been particularly daring at all. Security, particularly for a horse valued at £10 million – which is to say £35 million, or about €40 million, today, taking inflation into account – was nonexistent, as is any sense of how exactly the IRA was able to enter and exit the crime scene without firing a shot.
It’s in the film’s latter half, however, when the sideshows within the wider drama take centre stage. Questions are asked about the Garda’s handling of the case, not least the somewhat comical behaviour of Chief Supt James “Spud” Murphy, a trilby-wearing character prone to answering in riddles and invoking the work of clairvoyants.
But there are also questions asked of the IRA itself, specifically whether it had thought to work out who owned the world’s most famous animal – no longer the Aga Khan but, instead, a 40-strong syndicate – before bundling it into a van and issuing ransom demands. Or, indeed, its decision to negotiate the horse’s release via a quartet of bewildered track tipsters and racing journalists.
The word farce is bandied around freely, but rarely has such a head-scratching mix of incompetence and confusion reigned in a case so ostensibly serious, and internationally notorious. It’s precisely the sense that nobody knew what was going on, and that we likely never will, which makes Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA such good viewing, and gives the documentary, and its odd, inscrutable case, their lasting appeal.
There are fewer wry asides in the BBC’s big documentary series of the week, The Mother of All Cons (BBC Two, Sunday), an absorbing account of fraud and fame that centres on the case of the cancer patient Megan Bhari and her mother, Jean O’Brien. In 2010 they began a charity called Believe in Magic, which within months had garnered a huge online following and a bursting pocketbook of celebrity ambassadors and brand endorsements.
Bhari was feted by the British press and showered with accolades for her youthful fundraising. She and her mother were hailed as fairy godmothers for their help with dozens of seriously ill children and their families, providing financial support, emotional succour and truly magical experiences, from meet-and-greets with One Direction and toy days at Hamleys to doorstep meetings with David Cameron and Christmas parties at Buckingham Palace.
Even if you’re not familiar with the threads of this story, previously covered in BBC Radio 4’s absorbing series Believe in Magic, its tense musical cues and gradually ratcheting sense of drama make clear, from the outset, that all is not what it seems. (The title of the opening episode, I Smell a Rat, leaves little to suspense, either.) But what could be a slightly tawdry, even gleeful takedown of a scam is, thankfully, treated with a great more tact and care here.
Much of the show is hard going. The charity’s recipients are placed at the centre of the frame, describing what they went through as parents of seriously ill children, some of whom have since died. We are given space to sit with their families’ stories and the unimaginable heartache they’ve been through.
[ Believe in Magic: a sad, complicated but rewarding tale of deceptionOpens in new window ]
There is also no shortage of footage detailing the incredible treatment their children received from Believe in Magic during this time. It’s only once they begin spotting cracks in the charity’s story that more serious questions are raised. Once benefactors are given shifting diagnoses for Bhari’s illness, the health status itself becomes a subject of suspicion.
The result is a disturbing survey of malfeasance that carries within it a knotty mess of moral dilemmas. Could a pop-mad teenager really pull off such a harrowing deception? Would a mother really feign her child’s illness in exchange for frivolous luxuries? And what should so many of the charity’s recipients feel about any of this, not least the very real wonders done for their children in the name of all these suspected lies?
The Mother of All Cons’ greatest asset is its ability to pull all these threads together into a satisfying, if occasionally harrowing, whole. What could be a tabloid shock doc mining these people’s lives for prurient details becomes something more moving and absorbing. Part mordant drama, part social autopsy, part whodunit, it’s an engrossing portrait of deceit that will have viewers asking questions for a long time afterwards.
