Breaking the Silence Live (C4) | All 4
One Killer Punch (C4) | All 4
The Missing (BBC1) | iPlayer
Back in Time for Brixton (BBC2) | iPlayer
So many “live” programmes arrive described as groundbreaking, and so few actually are. Britain’s Stupidest Drunk: Live. Britain’s Ugliest Pigeon: Live. At least, with Breaking the Silence Live, and its being on Channel 4, we were spared the bouncy Beeb schoolmarm Kate Humble’s many well-intentioned inanities.
Instead we got seven deaf people having their cochlear implants switched on. Live. Obviously this was tuggy-heart television, and designed as such. There were a couple of moments of genuine joy, swiftly followed here by a couple of gruff something-in-my eye mumbles. If it was wall-to-wall snotty Kleenex C4 were after, however, they fumbled the hanky somewhat. The secret of heart-tuggy TV, surely, is transformative contrast – but too often this showed the patients chatting away to the wise docs of Manchester Infirmary’s Richard Ramsden Centre for Hearing Implants with bubbly insouciance, even before they’d had their implants activated. This confused me much.
Obviously the doctors were typing on a screen, scribbling on a notepad, enunciating VERY CLEARLY with their mouths, or there was a signer in the room, but this wasn’t explained (at all). In a couple of cases this resulted in a distinctly odd shift directly from a doc gabbing to a communicative patient about how all voices would soon sound like chipmunks, to the dramatic switch-on, and the patient just telling the doctor that he sounded, suddenly, like a chipmunk.
I don’t mean to belittle the sensitivity and empathy, nor the loyalty of friends and family, nor the modern miracle that can bring back hearing; one of my oldest friends suffers inordinately and it’s only by the sheerest effort of will that she hasn’t retreated into a defensive cocoon. But groundbreaking television? Cochlear pioneer Professor Graeme Clark, experimenting with a blade of grass and a small turban shell on Minnamurra Beach, New South Wales, in 1977: now that was groundbreaking.
I remain, days later, oddly saddened by a simple, tremendous documentary, also on Channel 4. One Killer Punch told, with an unfussiness other networks might have sneered at, three stories about men who have killed with just that: one punch.
We had one, Ben, who went to a house party to neck a few bottles and maybe flirt with girls. “Bouncers and a marquee – you could tell it was a really high-class party”, and you could also tell from that what kind of chap Ben is. Still, he didn’t deserve the night’s outcome; far less so George, also 17, who died that night. George took a punch in the face from Ben while trying to intervene in an altercation between Ben and a third party, and smacked his head on the tarmac. Ben got four-and-a-half years (it was later reduced by nine months) after he lied about what happened, forgetting the fact that there were witnesses. A second Ben, who had killed a tanked-up ex-squaddie, was cleared after footage revealed it truly had been self-defence, and the victim’s widow, Nikki, movingly and wholeheartedly forgave him.
Most unsettling of all was the death, in the unlovely mundanity of an Asda car park in Biggleswade, of Brian Holmes in a row over, sigh, a disabled parking space. The guilty man was Alan Watts, who’d also lied heavily; again, footage revealed the truth, which showed that nice Brian, 64, had walked away. Watts, having displayed that lunging who-the-fuck-you-think-you-are, punch-in-the-frote righteousness of the older, beefy English yeoman, got five years, deservedly more, I think, than young Ben’s almost-four, though still not enough.
Two obvious things struck me. First, no matter how much we might nominally resent being the most surveilled nation in the world, there’s no arguing with the effectiveness of CCTV in court. Hear two versions of a traffic accident, it used to be said, and you begin to wonder at the very concept of veracity; now, in many cases, there’s a grainy third party to tell original truths. The second point was the extreme banality, laughable in less tragic circumstances, of the original arguments: a taunt about a haircut, an imagined slight being taken about Asda parking protocol. Male hackles, once up – especially those of a certain type of British male – settle with a painful slowness more suited to geological time.
Not all deaths, then, need be more complex than male stupidity and refusal to stand down, but drama demands complexity. The Missing has certainly given us that. There have been, in this second series, enough hairy red herrings and dead-end McGuffins to suit the wildest opiate dreams of Holmes, and I’ll confess I grew restless around the third episode.
But it was back on track this week, thrillingly so, for a grimly tumultuous finale next week, with a last-minute revelation – I jumped up and spilled my soup. The only questions remaining: when will someone begin to pay bloody attention to poor Jorn and his whereabouts? And will Baptiste survive to vindication, even to health?
Writers Harry and Jack Williams have played beautifully with our preconceptions, prejudice and anticipations, to a tortuous extent. In this second series, in inventive contrast to the stark first, they have told our expectations to go to hell with such smart finesse that they started looking forward to the trip. Tchéky Karyo, as Baptiste, makes this unmissable, I pray for a third series, and 9pm on Wednesday is sofa o’clock.
The BBC’s Black and British season has, by and large, been a triumph, but after the many woes of Damilola, Our Loved Boy and NW it was… not a relief, just warming to have the lovely Irwin family going Back in Time for Brixton.
The history of post-Windrush families in Britain is, it unsurprisingly turns out, our very own history; just a bit poorer, and, thanks to racist stupidity, uphill all the way. Giles Coren and social historian Emma Dabiri – does Giles get to pick his co-presenters? In which case: well done, she’s a 24-carat star – did the usual winning job of transforming the flats through the decades, mangles giving way to microwaves. A nicely tricksy touch was having the TV reflect relevant programmes – the first black Miss World, a thumpably stupid episode of Love Thy Neighbour, as if there was any other kind. Unlike other Back in Time… series, there was real heft in the reflections, via (among others) Paul Stephenson, courageous provocateur of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, and via old footage, Enoch Powell being wrong and Harold Wilson being angry and right.
As ever, the stars were the family themselves. As becomes increasingly clear in next week’s conclusion, they’ve learned more about their history than landmark dates could ever tell them. If only all education could be this immersive.
