Prestige Drama is a bitterly funny take on TV’s obsession with the Troubles

Stories about past conflicts are often presented as an act of remembrance, but what of those who didn’t need an eight-episode drama to remind them of the horrors they endured? In Prestige Drama, the debut novel by Séamas O’Reilly, the old adage that we must “never forget” feels like something of a threat. 

American actor Monica Logue arrives in Derry to research a “lavish mini-series” about the Troubles, set in the 1970s and written by Derry man Diarmuid Walsh. Dead City, a press release promises, will explore “the impact of conflict on the local people and the human cost to family and community”. 

Monica takes to the local people, particularly her real-life character, Yvonne Mulvey, a “headstrong matriarch” who is “beset by trauma” after the killing of her teenage Catholic son by British soldiers. 

However, she takes less well to the local dialect, with her “nigh-on incomprehensible” attempt at an Irish accent perplexing listeners. When Monica goes missing, the last person to see her alive is Diarmuid who, given his stalling career as a novelist, senses that his big break is slipping away. We are passed around the community – with each chapter presented as a first-person monologue – as rumours circulate about what might have happened to Monica. 

Reading Prestige Drama, it is hard not to think of Say Nothing, the recent TV series based on the book by the American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, created for television by the writer behind films such as Patriots Day and RoboCop, and broadcast, somewhat improbably, on Disney+. The Hollywood-ification of Northern Ireland and the rise of Troubles tourism is brilliantly and bitterly rendered in this very funny book. O’Reilly – a Derry native and regular writer for The Observer magazine, whose memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? was similarly uninterested in sentimentality – has a gift for capturing strange behaviour and the comedy in all of our ugly humanity. Though Prestige Drama’s climax feels like a shaggy dog story that builds anticipation it doesn’t justify, it’s easily forgiven considering the company O’Reilly provides throughout the story. With nobody particularly bothered about the show’s missing heroine, Dead City’s production rolls on and the great collective money grab continues apace. “All the biddies on the block” are “suddenly competing to say that their house was the biggest shithole on the street” as the crew seek “period-appropriate” properties for filming; two lads are enlisted to repaint a terrible mural featuring a gunman and a peace bird (“If I do another dove as long as I live, God help me”); a former IRA fighter tries to wangle a consulting role. Who can blame them for trying to cash in, at a time when the golden age of prestige television has given way to trauma porn that proclaims it is “based on a true story”, and nothing is too personal or private to be manufactured into content? 

As one character savagely puts it: “A parade of corpses for their Sunday night. Taking people’s pain and using it to sell dish soap and car insurance. Find the perfect American to play the grieving mother, grab a list of dead children and the right wee English actors to play them so they can all feel bad after their dinner for an hour and pat themselves on the back for it. They’re cute for that, the Brits.” 

Prestige Drama is published by Fleet (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49 (10% off RRP)

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