By far the best television of the weekend was Ursula MacFarlane’s powerful BBC3 film One Deadly Weekend in America. But there’s already been a column about it, so I’ll shut up about that one, apart from to say: watch it on iPlayer; it’s a serious, powerful, numbing piece of work.
So Ross Kemp: Extreme World (Sky1, Sunday) then. On a related subject to the above, it’s less subtle, more one volume (loud), more Ross Kemp. But just as depressing.
Ross is investigating racial inequality in the US. If you’re a young black male in America, you are nine times as likely to be shot dead by the police than anyone else. Consider then, the rage of last year, the protests and the response of white supremacy groups. Now throw in a president who’s hardly dousing the flames, he’s trumping on them (I’m not sure enough Americans know that trump means fart over here), and every schoolboy knows what happens when you fart on a flame. Yup, whoosh!
Ross, never one to underplay a situation, asks a big question: “Is America on the verge of a race war?” A little historical context to begin with. This, says Ross, is the street in Dallas where, more than a century ago, Allen Brooks was dragged by a mob and hanged from a telephone pole.
No, I’m sorry, I don’t mind him talking about recent events, such as the deaths of, among many others, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and Walter Scott, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and then Micah Johnson’s shooting of five police officers, but I’m not convinced that the best person to deliver a lesson in history and race in America is Grant Mitchell. Go and do what you’re good at Ross: act tough, go somewhere dangerous, find some dudes with big guns to hang out with.
And he does. He goes to east Dallas to meet the girlfriend of Mike Morgan, another unarmed black man to be shot (not fatally) by police, during a traffic stop. Then he goes to jail to meet Mike. And to be fair, he is very good at this – talking to people, getting them to talk back.
He drops in to the police station, to hear their side of the story. For many of them, going in to some neighbourhoods is “like going into a war zone,” says Ross. He’s not going to let you forget it’s a WAR, and that he is a WAR REPORTER. “Nowhere are battle lines more clearly drawn than in neighbourhoods where street gangs fight for territory,” he intones.
He visits a gang – of course he bloody does, try to keep that man away from a gang. The location is “the heart of a well-known drug-dealing area”, just in case you thought they were meeting in a tearoom. And they’ve all got guns – big guns – and I’m guessing they wouldn’t have been discouraged from bringing those big guns along. Then Ross goes out of town, to a secret training camp where a black militia group is practising shooting, preparing themselves, says Ross, for “a war they believe is coming”.
And he crosses those battle lines, gets embedded with White Lives Matter (yes, really), who describe themselves as a civil rights group and are described by a lot of other people as a white race-hate organisation. They’re having their own demonstration, in Austin, Texas, demanding civil rights for whites. And they’re certainly exercising their second amendment right, packing some serious weaponry. “They have little trust in the mainstream media, but they have agreed to allow me to come along,” says Ross, who, don’t forget, is working for the little-known, fringe organisation Sky.
“This is your RV point for the day?” he asks the leader. “Your meeting point, yeah?” he adds, perhaps suddenly worrying they don’t speak the same military lingo, or remembering that in America RV means motorhome.
The White Lives Matter protest is met by a load of counter-demonstrators, including a Marxist revolutionary group called the Red Guard, who are also armed to the eyeballs (not that you can see their eyeballs, they’re wearing red masks). So there are two sides, men armed with assault rifles, staring each other out, hating everything about each other. You wouldn’t think it would take much for it all to kick off. Here in Austin today, it really does look like the verge of warfare. Certainly it’s the ugliest, most disheartening thing I have seen on television this weekend.
Thank God, then for even the tiniest glimmer of humour. They, the counter-protesters, (most of whom didn’t watch EastEnders in the 1990s, I’m guessing) think Ross is one of them, a White Lives Matter protester! Because he’s with them. And because of his hairstyle. Ha! Boo, white scum, Nazi go home, Ross Kemp go home!
