Recalling a horror show
WHERE TV anniversaries of tragedies are concerned, not every viewer is going to be happy with the results. Where the tragedy involves the deliberate slaughter of children by a deluded killer, no one’s going to be happy in any case.
It’s perhaps a little pointless then to say that MANCHESTER: THE NIGHT OF THE BOMB (BBC2) tried hard to tick every box and failed as a result. As a record of what the survivors experienced, it was remarkable.
Girls and young women who’d attended the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena spoke of their excitement in the days before the event, the electric atmosphere inside the hall. Later, they described things no young person should have in their memories, snapshots of an outrage that lingered with us long after the end credits had rolled. “I looked down and saw my legs on fire.”
“I felt something in my hair, an ear or a finger.”
Police officers and passers-by who rushed in to help captured the sometimes bizarre aspects of the aftermath. One man gathered armfuls of Ariana Grande T-shirts to mop up the blood. A policeman found that his handcuffs served as a good tourniquet. In the absence of ambulance staff and stretchers, victims were carried out of the arena on crash barriers.
On that point, though, the programme veered into a Panorama-style inquest, arguing that the emergency response had been woefully inadequate. Lack of information, clearly, was the issue, rather than unwillingness to help.
Nevertheless, it meant firefighters were ordered to stay out of the area, leaving the immediate response to a handful of transport police and helpers.
We were also presented with a biography of the bomber, Salman Abedi, although it offered little more than the standard tale of teen tearaway turned killer zombie after a spell in the Middle East.
Given the bravery of the young victims in revisiting their ordeals on camera and the courage of those who helped, it seemed shoddy to bring the nobody with his rucksack bomb into it. Who wanted, either, to see mud slung at emergency services when they save lives every day?
GEORGE CLARKE’S AMAZING SPACES (C4) had George and a crack team of build boffins recreating “a 600-year-old legend” in Snowdonia. I was intrigued and confused about the ty unnos, a kind of house that can be erected on common land, provided it’s all built in one night.
These makeshift squats possibly never existed or if they did, they turned into official houses pretty soon afterwards. George could have given us a bit more detail I’d have thought, especially as he only had to do his building work in a night.
In fact, though, he gave himself a generous 24 hours, not to mention quite a few days getting bits of timber and slate prepared.
I’m being churlish perhaps because I couldn’t erect a house in a decade let alone a few days but it did seem as if the concept, myth or not, had been abandoned early on.
Instead of pondering how to make a hearth and a smoking chimney from the stuff on site, George got all architectural and started trying to create a wall of water that distorted people’s perspective as they stepped out of the house. Why anyone would make a wall of water in Wales is beyond me. They have rain for that.