Exodus: Our Journey to Europe (BBC2) | iPlayer
Shades of Blue (Sky Living) | Sky Go
Man Down (C4) | All4
My Worst Job (C4) | All4
It was entitled Exodus, and for once the biblical grandiosity was wholly justified. It was also the most spellbinding documentary of the year. I can almost guarantee that if you’d encountered even a third of the first episode, you’d have sat through the two subsequents. For what else might you have been so vitally doing? Tuesday pub quiz? Moonpigging for the goldfish’s birthday? Blithely signing online petitions?
Yet for me to come across as so insufferably pious is to misrepresent the marvels, for these were a far from preachy three nights. The series simply filmed – and asked the participants to camera-phone the few encounters it couldn’t record: the meetings with people-traffickers, the rafts across the Aegean – the stories of a pocketful of immigrants. Fleeing, in most cases, war or tyranny; in one, grinding poverty. So often, via the news, we get the tales of tragedy, of the Med swallowing criminally dodgy joke-boats, and the obligatory portentous pause before moving on to a “story” about bloody Top Gear or somesuch… I don’t know, Kim Kardashian’s tweeting bumcrack. But this was about the ones who made it, and it was also tremendously life-affirming.
Because they were, to a man, woman and child, refreshingly cheerful, cynical yet non-judgmental; also, in most cases, fiercely bright. The young star was undoubtedly 11-year-old Isra’a, whose father, restaurateur Tarek, fled Aleppo after a twitch too much shelling from both Assad and Isis. Sold his nice house. How much might you actually get for even a “nice” house in Aleppo these days? Enough to get the family, after arguments, to Turkey, across water to Greece and, eventually, to Sid, in Serbia.
Had the documentary been sponsored by Migrants’ TripAdvisor, Austria would have got a full 10. Britain – well, no show basically, as few made it, though everyone wanted to. The Turkish port of Izmir, where most Syrian migrants stop, a welcome 8, excepting the greed-scum who sell “lifejackets” that feature no buoyancy, simply great weight. Deathjackets, then. The rainy pighole Sid, in Serbia – a rank zero. This was where the impossibly upbeat Isra’a finally lost it, after watching two children die on the road from cold; finally, after two months on the go, she wept endlessly, and hopelessly.
Cut to businessman Ali and his sister Karima, who had fled the Taliban in Kabul – Karima dared to work, which left her open hourly for murder – for Ankara. Karima’s face, on that Turkish hotel balcony, was like someone discovering Middle-Earth, or Croydon. “The boys and the girls… walking together!” Then there was Hassan, lovely Syrian English teacher, who eventually made it to Calais – “fine place, does not seem too bad, lovely squares” but, after a couple of months in the Jungle, trying to swim to the anchors of ferries, could declare, “I fucking hate Calais.” He’d had half his bones broken in Damascus, for carrying a flag, and on a clear day he could see England.
I’m not telling whether they all made it – watch the blithering thing on iPlayer, please. There was tremendous subtlety; even some people-smugglers came out of it, if not well, then honest-thieving. And it didn’t batter you over the head with statistics. Though I shall.
For every 10,000 members of the population, Sweden last year took in 160 refugees. For ditto Britain took in six. Five million have fled Syria since 2011: that’s the population of Scotland. The attraction of the UK is that it processes (unlike Germany or France) family ties very quickly; the problem is that you cannot claim asylum unless you are, literally, standing on its shore.
For all the wonder of this documentary, I could not help but think of the 3,771 who died crossing the Med last year: if even a tenth had been as bright-buttoned as Isra’a, Ali and Hassan, we have lost a cruel amount of young-old wisdom to the exigencies of the EU and to the prejudices of the British press. Is the UK really that full of clever?
Enough already, and off to distractions, chief among them new drama Shades of Blue, in which corrupt American cops continually harangue and shoot each other.
It has all been done before, often, mainly in the novels of James Ellroy and the films of Martin Scorsese, but few of those featured simplicity. We have, for the moment, a Jennifer Lopez and a Ray Liotta, with a simple plot of simple corruption – she’s corrupt, he’s even more greedily corrupt, but she gets fingered by the FBI and agrees to rat him out – and, after 20 years of trying, I can finally understand a mumbled American cop-plot. The acting raises it to substantially different levels, yet the dilemma is: better to corruptly reduce the amount of drugs sold to kids, or to stick with the “war on drugs”? Oddly enough, the sane option – not giving too much of a dick about drugs or kids, they’ll surely all work each other out by 18 – doesn’t get much of a look-in.
It’s quite good. It could be on in the afternoons in 20 years’ time.
Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, on the other hand, is and remains glorious. Sometimes it can be a touch too slapstick. Think George Formby walking into an open manhole with a cheese-eating grin. Carrying a large cheese. But Greg Davies somehow manages to inhabit the soul of pratfall without making it too… cheesy.
He’s a big man, unafraid to be big or to let us smell his socks. Most of the lines I cannot print, even in the Observer. It is winningly, tragically, funny.
Which I cannot say, at all, for the lazy piece of under-the-sofa furze which was My Worst Job. Various celebrities spoke about their bad jobs, uninterestingly.
This is the second time in two weeks that Channel 4 has got it screamingly wrong – see last week’s Stripped Bare. We had Bill Bailey, Stephen Mangan, Will Self, people I immensely like, talking utter dong about their first jobs. Soon as this aired, I am convinced they wished they were in Aleppo. There are another two episodes to come. I cannot advise you more harshly to do the thing with the not watching.
