I’m not sure where to begin with a review of Britain Beneath Your Feet (BBC1). It hopped around all over the place. One minute we were looking under the Shard and asking a structural engineer to confirm that the 300m building really did need foundations 53 metres deep to keep it standing (yes, it does, because it’s standing in clay. Presenter Dallas Campbell threw a clay pot on a wheel to show us how soft clay is. Clay!). The next we were haring off to Yorkshire to look at an underground waterfall. Really, really deep underground! Waterfall! Then it was down to Bristol, then across to London to look at the rivers the cities have covered over to facilitate their sprawl. Rivers! Covered! Sprawl!
A quick dash round a fatberg (pause for Campbell to puke at the smell, pause for moi to puke as the accumulated mass of sewage and solidified fat broke open to show the worms that had set up home inside) and the basalt majesty of Edinburgh Castle’s unyielding home, a dip in a hot Bath spa, the circumnavigation of a 440-year-old oak tree’s root system, a quick descent into a potash mine, and back up in time for Campbell truly pointlessly to demonstrate his lack of sporting prowess in an abandoned slate mine being used by the Threlkeld cricketing team.
It was, in essence, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in televisual form. Spectacles were presented, briefly admired, and then abandoned for the next thing. There was no overarching theme – the rivers of yesteryear perhaps, or feats of engineering, which could have united the mines, the new techniques responsible for the Shard, the Gherkin et al and the fatberged sewers, or ancient features of the underground landscapes – allowing one example to illuminate another. In a programme whose very premise begged the makers to go deeper, it was immensely frustrating. Scanning the root system of an oak tree that was planted when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne was excitement enough for me, but did you know that there’s a man in a laboratory a thousand metres down the potash mine in Boulby researching the existence of dark matter? No, nothing to do with potash. But it’s the only place where he can get far enough away from the light and radiation that keep intruding on his investigations. How can you not want to drill a bit further into that?
Campbell also used “summit” as a verb. I am too hot to care any more, so I haven’t yet sent the letter demanding the requisite percentage of my licence fee back, but if it happens again next week, I shall be posting first class and no mistake.
Similarly, what lies beneath Ben Winkett’s life of burglary, car crime and property damage on and around his local estate in Dudley is anyone’s guess. The 19-year-old was the focus of last night’s Channel 4 documentary Career Criminals. He’s not a drug user. “He uses it to fund his lifestyle”, says Stuart, part of the police team of “offender managers” who have the unenviable task of trying to stop and rehabilitate those they know are responsible for most of the area’s crime. But Ben’s lifestyle comprises mostly new trainers and McDonald’s and the suspicion is that he is stealing mostly at the behest and for the benefit of a more savvy entity. More of a reward, perhaps, is the hero status his thievery gives him among his friends.
Ben is the despair of his older brother Tom, who has been in prison for six of his 26 years and knows Ben is too soft to survive his surely eventual incarceration. “He ain’t like me,” he explains. “He ain’t a fighting person. It’s no good, is it? I know what my mum felt like now.”
By documentary-making standards, Ben was an unrewarding subject – unreflective, uncharismatic and, by the end of the period covered at least, unsalvageable. You felt far more for Tom, whose past caught up with him after he had apparently made a fine go of a crime-free life with a new partner, and who ended up in prison again after new evidence of a previous offence came to light.
The question of how effective the force’s strategy of harassing repeat offenders until they are – what? Annoyed into going straight? Frustrated into gainful employment? – was barely posed, let alone answered. I’d like to have heard whether that should ever really have been considered a thing outside some twit-brained politician’s Bright Ideas memo pad. Yet more digging required.
