Five hundred miles south of Moscow, there is a town which doesn't appear on any map. It is home to 20,000 people and is Russia's most important strategic nuclear missile base. The military men there sing like performers in a Mel Brooks musical, drink vodka on picnics and live in a luxury akin to a Blackpool guesthouse. As Correspondent (BBC2, Saturday) revealed, this isn't even the half of it. The missileers - or rocketchiki - who inhabit the town with their families are each responsible for an arsenal roughly equivalent to the UK's entire nuclear capability. They get paid $60 a month. Sometimes, on their days off, they moonlight as cab drivers. This is the bad news. The good news is that they don't let women become missileers in Russia. "They are programmed to preserve peace", explained a pre-pubescent male rocketchiki. "Men are more programmed for destruction and war."
The ladies are allowed to be support staff, "in communications". Presumably that means they answer the phones (though not the big red one, obviously). Well, thank goodness for that. We wouldn't want any peaceful ladies with their fingers poised on the big red buttons now, would we? Not when we can have spotty adolescents with destruction on their minds. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Not that they accept any old (or young) bloke as missileers. They have to undergo psychological tests. Tatiana the Psychologist (evidently a permitted lady's job) examines their biorhythms and penchants for colour. "On the basis of people's attitudes to colour, one can determine their emotional state and qualities", she explained. You can also make a guess at what shade of eyeshadow suits them.
All of this is enough to get you digging that bunker in the back garden or tuning into Jim Davidson's Generation Game (BBC1, Saturday). Until you realise that the Generation Game is a lot more clear and present and disturbing than the threat of an errant missile blowing up London. It's amazing such low-rent shows still manage to attract contestants when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? offers ginormous prizes for relatively little trouble. And they write the cheques so very neatly. It is, one supposes, horses for courses. Or, more accurately, idiots for apt humiliation.
Love In A Cold Climate (BBC1, Sunday) was chockful of ghastly idiots. While prettily period and consummately Costume Drama, it was hard to get involved in this adaptation of Nancy Mitford's novels. Characters saying things like, "When you go to London, you'll be too busy to think about badgers," didn't help matters, despite the valiant efforts of a formidable cast, including an understated Celia Imrie, a mavenish Sheila Gish, and the excellent Alan Bates, who played the disagreeable Lord Alconleigh like a labrador with irritable bowel syndrome. Fey, frivolous and whimsical it may be, but the main problem with Love In A Cold Climate is that its milieu, as represented in costume drama, has been so parodied. It takes too much effort to regard it seriously: I kept expecting French and Saunders to pop up from behind a bush asking after Lady Fortington-Smythe. That there were Twitterers (first, second and third, no less) in the cast list says it all about this adaptation. Dishwater dull with a couple of silver spoons.
Omid Djalili's Bloody Foreigners (Channel 4, Sunday) is the kind of documentary that those who viciously carp on about asylum seekers should be dragged away from their Oswald Moseley shrines and forced to watch. Travelling from Hull to Dover, Djalili's exploration of life for asylum seekers was uncompromising, emotional and powerful stuff. Aside from the slightly dubious Let's Pretend To Be An Asylum Seeker ploy - which still revealed stark and unpleasant truths about their plight - this was a mature, thoughtful programme. By detailing complaints that Turkish refugees are "all perverts", then showing pictures of a delightful Hull resident flashing her breasts, Bloody Foreigners exposed Britain's institutionalised, ingrained racism and hypocrisy, for which we are all responsible. (It's not as if Britain was built on the bones of people in the developing world, or that we sold weapons to dictators, or are happy buying goods made in the third world now, is it?) It was sickening and shameful and should be compulsory viewing.
