The former hostage makes a moving return to the scene of his kidnap
Brian Keenan: Back to Beirut
BBC2
I was going to start by saying that Brian Keenan will hate me for saying what a good man he is. But that would be wrong: being truly modest, he can take a compliment. Only the corrupt and egomaniacal brush off praise, either because they know that this is what you expect of them or, more often, because they hope that you will repay their disdain with an even bigger blandishment. Keenan accepts tributes gratefully, with a big smile.
In Back to Beirut (31 March, 7pm), a documentary about his first return to Lebanon since he was released from captivity there in 1990, you saw him accepting more than a few generous words from old friends, moved to say how much they love and admire him, how fervently they'd once prayed for his release: encounters from which he seemed visibly to draw strength. That was the pleasure of this film: watching Keenan walk ever taller and lighter the more hands he shook, the more faces he looked into. "Lebanon endures because of its people," he said. And human beings, you felt, have been the key to his survival.
I watched Back to Beirut two hours after I came off a plane from Lebanon, and could only marvel at how finely Keenan caught the place; it always slips through my hands like so much mercury. From the outset, his point was that, although he intended to lighten his psychic load a little by making this trip, his own story - four years and five months of hell - was just a "tiny part" of the suffering that is the history of Lebanon. There were flashback scenes: a grim basement; the pitiful sound of Keenan's frail, post-hostage voice dictating his book An Evil Cradling into a recorder. But mostly his attention was given over to Lebanon - to the poison that lurks in her vivid petals, but also to her beauty.
As he walked around the notorious al-Khiam prison in southern Lebanon, he noted that people often ask if he is afraid of small, dark places. He isn't. "What bothers me is that they continue to exist," he said. He spoke, briefly, of sadists, but this was as black as his narrative got; almost everything else in the film was an antidote to it, a balm. Outside the prison, a "cloud of butterflies" appeared: a group of young girls. The sun bounced off their hijabs in a way that felt somehow holy. In that moment, one of the world's small, dark places was suddenly flooded with light and hope.
Keenan arrived in Beirut in 1985 to teach English. "My first feelings were: 'Oh, shit,'" he said, recalling how, as he travelled from the airport to his new digs, he noticed that every driver on the road was holding a gun. As the hostage crisis deepened, one of his students offered him a pistol. Keenan refused it, at which point the student offered him two grenades: his teacher, he suggested, could construct a very effective booby trap for his bedroom door. Keenan laughed at the memory. At the time, he was convinced he was safe: this wasn't his war, so why would he be in danger? He was, of course, profoundly mistaken in this assumption.
In the street outside his former house, he described how the kidnappers blocked his way along the pavement with the open door of their car. Keenan, ever polite, stopped, waiting for the driver to get out and close it. Big mistake. The only outward sign that this was a painful memory was the way his hands played with a handkerchief he was holding; no self-pity here. In Beirut's elegant reconstructed centre, a property developer asked him how he had been able to get on with his life. "I don't feel I need to forgive anybody," Keenan said, quietly. And then he set about exploring the forgotten Lebanon of the tourist brochures: the Roman ruins at Baalbek, the Jeita caves, the cedar forests. I don't have the words to express how much this brave but never blithe tour moved me, so I will content myself with saying, as he did, that Lebanon waits to receive you. It sounds odd to say it, I know, but she is a kind and generous host.
Pick of the week
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6 April, 10.45pm, ITV1
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Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me
9 April, 9pm, BBC4
Titter ye not! Final drama in the Curse of Comedy series.
Celebrity Come Dine With Me
10 April, 8pm, Channel 4
Famous people host dinner parties.
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