Christy Brown’s Self Portrait ( RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm) is a commendable attempt at disentangling Brown from the Sheridan movie and restoring to him some of the prominence he had during his life. Born with cerebral palsy, he was disabled in an Ireland where people in his circumstances were often locked away and left to whither.
But Brown was determined not to be forgotten. Alex Verner’s film – narrated by Aidan Gillen and featuring readings of Brown’s work by Saoirse Ronan – passionately conveys the drive of a man who looked at the world much as a boxer regards an opponent: as something to be punched in the face until it lay stretched out on the canvas. Verner sketches out the bare-bones trajectory of Brown’s life.
We begin with his impoverished upbringing in Crumlin, his supportive mother, Bridget, and his friendship with Katriona Maguire, a social worker from a privileged background. Despite their radically different backgrounds Maguire became his lodestar – she helped draw Brown out of his shell and showed him that if the world was cruel and judgemental, there was kindness in it, too. One surprise is that neither Brown’s writing nor his art are highly regarded today.
Both were intensely inward looking: his first book, My Left Foot, was an autobiography; the second, Down All the Days thinly-veiled memoir. His paintings, meanwhile, often consisted of self-portraits in which he depicted himself as a Christlike figure, awaiting elevation to on high – or.
