The highs and lowlifes
DURING the Troubles, broadcasters found ways around the reporting restrictions that didn’t quite do the job. Sinn Féin men were dubbed over with their exact words still broadcast, via the voices of actors.
As a viewer, the device made you acutely aware of the restriction and also how weird it seemed to see Gerry Adams talking and someone else’s voice coming out.
As far as paying attention to the content of what Adams was saying, I’m not sure many people did and in light of that, I guess the Government got what it wanted and the broadcasters didn’t.
They’re also not getting quite what they’re after in BRITAIN’S COCAINE EPIDEMIC (Channel 5), many of whose contributors are sporting papier-mâché face masks, or home-assembled concoctions of ski hats and sunglasses.
Even when you’re watching an alleged kingpin like Grant packing up blocks of the illegal powder in his kitchen, it’s quite hard to take him seriously. Then again, it’s hard to take many of the contributors seriously, whatever they’ve got on their faces. Club promoter Tommy Mac, entirely undisguised, invited the cameras to what seemed to be a drug-fuelled 62nd birthday party.
“I’m on the magic powder,” Tommy said. ‘Which is called the Devil’s Dandruff. I call it Milly Molly.” Later on, his face having gone a sort of emergency-red colour, he waved a proud hand around the room and said, “Birds, cocaine and sniff.”
If you were left confused as to the name of the drug concerned, rest assured, you were never as confused as Tommy Mac. Equally in need of help and possibly a crash course in economics, was the enterprising young drug dealer making hundreds of pounds a night selling his product on the streets of ultra-hip East London.
His ambition, he said, was to “flood the block” which if you understood anything about the laws of supply and demand would have put him out of business long before the police did.
But the prize for Drug Dunces of the Night went to students Ollie and Phil who took to the dark web to order drugs for a big night out and forgot to be in when the postman called. Sourly, Phil went to the sorting office at 7am the next morning, his jiffy bag of party powder mocking him as the dawn broke. We can only hope he sniffed it all and cleaned that squalid kitchen he shared with Ollie.
It’s rare these days to find a programme on BBC4 that isn’t a repeat, often of something not that old. More depressingly, the channel has a nifty line in shows that appear to be new but are just cobbled together from clips. The talents of historian Dr Janina Ramirez were largely wasted in last night’s ART ON THE BBC: THE GENIUS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI (BBC4), although the clips she introduced went back a few decades.
It was interesting to see how the good old mind-improving BBC had struggled valiantly to do art documentaries in black and white in the Sixties.
From broadside attacks on the Mona Lisa on a 1981 Arena programme to headmasterly complaints about Da Vinci’s character flaws to some stomach-flippingly unnecessary autopsies, it was clear, indeed, that the BBC’s arts people had made a lot of programmes about this 16th-century visionary.
That’s a good thing because it doesn’t look like they’re making many more.