TV documentary format a very powerful medium

Two very fascinating but very different documentaries had me enthralled in the past week – one was a royal saga, while the other was a story of pure evil.

The Queen’s Mother in Law on Channel 4 on Tuesday was a complete surprise. Before I am accused of being a royalist, I happened upon it by chance, probably to get away from the drawn out Rose of Tralee coverage on RTE.

The story of Prince Phillip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenburg, was fascinating because it gave a great sense of what his childhood was like.

Basically he was bundled off to boarding school when he was nine and his mother was sectioned in a mental asylum for what was probably just post-natal depression.

Here was a woman born in England, married off to a royal Greek, who was then exiled when the monarchy was overthrown, and forced to live in Paris as outcasts of sorts.

It would be years before Philip saw his mother again – at a family funeral, and years later she attended the Queen’s coronation as a nun.

She had been very active in helping the homeless and, later, Jews, and she ended up setting up her own religious order in Athens.She was also deaf but could lip read in three languages, was more than likely unhappy in her marriage to a playboy who just turned his back on her after her first breakdown.

It also gave an insight into how Freud and his colleagues treated mental illness, as she had been a patient of his. It is frightening to think of methods used in institutions to treat patients years ago.It was also sad to think of the young Philip as homeless in the Summers when he got out of boarding school but this was the case, which was how he got to spend so much time with his uncle, the late Lord Mountbatten.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.