Siberia’s frosty reception
PEOPLE find unlikely niches for themselves everywhere. When I lived in Cambodia, my landlord turned out to be an Iranian called Bill, from Hackney. Forty miles from China, in the far Eastern port of Vladivostok, RUSSIA WITH SIMON REEVE (BBC2) visited the Integrated Entertainment Zone.
This was the somewhat unromantic name for a cluster of big casinos, one of them run by a man called Craig, a former accountant from Dundee.
To survive in such quarters of the world, perhaps, you need to focus hard on your job and not ask too many questions. The first stage of Reeve’s journey provided a good example of what happens when you do. The authorities seemed happy with him meeting the hard-up reindeer herders and having a go at the baccarat tables in the Integrated Entertainment Zone.
The writing on those casino tables was in English and Chinese and it was that, like the first clue in some low-key James Bond plot, that led Reeve’s expedition into bother. A lot of empires just get too big for their own good and Russia, it seems, is no exception. Incentive schemes try to entice ordinary Russians to settle in the empty East, just as in the time of Peter the Great.
Putin the Great has other schemes, however, and when Reeve and his crew started to interview Chinese farmers on Russian soil, they soon found cars following them and a great number of people keen on inspecting their passports.
It seemed to get worse the further west they travelled as well. Siberia’s timber trade seems to be a boggy mire of ruined habitats, corrupt officials and wood travelling illegally to the USA via China.
Just going near it with a camera was enough to see the BBC team held in a police station for a day, then abruptly put on a train.
The whole of Russia’s East seems to be collapsing, trees nicked, permafrost melting, reindeer starving. An unlikely region Russia has no more need for. No wonder they’re giving it away.
In last night’s EDUCATING GREATER MANCHESTER (C4), there were shades of that great 1999 comedy film Election as the star pupils of Harrop Fold’s Year 10 went on the campaign trail.
The sprawling comp may have its unique side (I’ve never seen any public building get away with that awful shade of lilac paint for a start) but at the same time it’s a mini version of everywhere else.
Like everywhere else, even among 15-year-olds, there were the ambitious wolves and the ones just jockeyed along by their pals. Girhan, originally from Afghanistan, ran for the office of Head Boy not, you suspected, because he had dreams of power but because his many friends and admirers told him to. When it got down to the nitty-gritty of a presidential-style debate he bowed out.
Josh and Leon, ‘friends’ in the way Othello and Iago were friends, seemed a very different pair of lads, both possessing the slick charm of many a modern politician and a hunger that will probably carry them far.
I wasn’t sure if it mattered, much, which one of them won and in that sense it reminded me of a lot of recent elections. So, too, did the reply that won Rebecca the Head Girl’s role when asked at the end of the debate to sum herself up in just three words.
“Just like you,” she said. It all boils down to the best soundbite these days.