TV review: Bellany: Fire In The Blood/

OF ALL the extraordinary moments in Fire In The Blood, Paul Bellany's achingly honest portrait of his father, artist John Bellany, one of the strangest is when the painter, having drunk himself into liver failure, lies in a hospital bed at death's door. He's been told that there's nothing more the doctors can do, to which he shouted out: "But I want to live as long as Picasso!" His family, having suffered greatly over the years from his addiction, think that they're about to lose him.

He's lost the ability to draw and has almost given up on life until he hears gentle music drifting towards him. It's a familiar figure, a friend who has come to serenade him with an accordion which will somehow revive his will to live: can you tell who it is yet?

"I thought my goodness, Rolf Harris has given me hope to soldier on… you can't give up life as easily as that," recounts Bellany of that epic encounter. That part of the story ends there – we don't even get to hear what song good old Rolf was playing which had such an effect on the dying man, though presumably it wasn't Two Little Boys. And it's typical of this strange, personal film which reveals much, but – perhaps understandably – skirts over other aspects of the family's life.

Paul Bellany certainly didn't shy from showing the intimate details of how his father's problems affected his children.

John left their mother, Helen, when they were young because he "had the world to conquer". He remarried, but when his second wife died – which is one of those missing pieces the film slightly skips over – they reunited, partly because he was expected to die at any minute.

But – thanks to Rolf's music and a transplant – miraculously he didn't, gaining several more decades of borrowed time. And the film showed how things changed over that time.

John was a bad husband and father – then he stopped drinking and the family forgave him. His daughter was a troubled teenager who was expelled from school – she eventually graduated with a First. The sons, film-maker Paul and John Jnr, were skinheads in the fascist music scene, whose violent activities and beliefs made their parents disown them – but they left it behind and reconciled with the family.

"We've been lucky," said Helen Bellany, "that we've been able to turn it all around and whatever life holds for us now, we've had such a life." "But it's not been plain sailing," said her son. "Oh, no!" Her exclamation spoke volumes.

This was a fascinating portrait of a family which had somehow survived; if it didn't explain quite how they had managed what so many haven't, perhaps that's because they were too close to their own story.

Yet this documentary wouldn't have been the same if it had been made by an unrelated film-maker – Paul even recorded the Billy Bragg-style original songs for its soundtrack, which could have been tacky had the whole thing not felt like such a personal project, almost public therapy, but approached in an unpretentious way.

It was more about the man than the artist, but John Bellany's work, he told an audience at a gallery opening, is all about passion, an almost obsessive mining of his way of seeing. And maybe the film did show the effects of that passion on the lives of all around him.