Hands up if you want to Taser Ed Balls on the backside . . .
The sly grin on the face of the Louisiana cop said it all. he’d just Tasered former Labour MP ed Balls on the backside ... and he’d hit where he was aiming.
Many of us have wanted to administer a hefty boot to the backside of a politician.
But it took courage for ed to volunteer for ‘ a fivesecond ride with the lightning,’ as the deputy sheriff called it, on the second part of his American adventure Travels In Trumpland (BBC2).
The jolt from the supercharged zapgun is a ritual that all rookie police must undergo in this Southern state. ed proved his mettle further, as he spent a night in an orange jumpsuit on a bunk, with inmates at a town jail.
he even managed to sleep, which takes nerve. When he was woken at 5.30am, his new friends had emptied his locker, leaving him with not even a toothbrush. he was surrounded by crooks — it must have reminded him of his days in the Commons.
Out on patrol and chasing villains with the deputies, he flung himself over a chain link fence, panting: ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
But he cleared the fence, and generally made a much more confident job of his ordeals and interviews
AWFUL AD OF THE WEEKEND: Tony Robinson promised to reveal treasures from the air, in Hidden Britain By Drone (C4). Instead he turned the show into a giant plug for warehouse shop Argos. Sounds like one of Baldrick’s cunning plans gone wrong.
than in the opening episode. Though ed is still feeling his way, he managed to win the trust of people he met, and sometimes got them spilling their secrets.
One jittery beanpole of a guy, leaning on the stoop of his dilapidated wooden house, forgot his reluctance to speak on camera and started explaining how he’d shot his neighbour dead in a row over a $100 debt.
ed was baffled to be having this conversation in the open, rather than back in jail. The deputy patiently explained that no charges were pressed: it’s legal to kill a man in Louisiana, if you can convince the police it was selfdefence.
To celebrate his 51st birthday, ed danced the night away at a gay bar with a black talkshow host, who had an obsession for handguns and shouted slogans such as: ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!’
But he stopped short of treating the Deep South as a freak show, as too many British TV documentaries fronted by celebs tend to do. Meeting a family who lost a child in a school shooting, ed was moved to real emotion. The paradox is that such a friendly country can harbour so much wanton violence.
There’s little that’s friendly about the Canadian wilderness. It’s spectacular — aerial shots of its forests and lakes on the crime serial Cardinal ( BBC4) are breathtaking. And it’s unspoilt, with vast, pristine stretches unlike anywhere else in the Western world.
But it’s not exactly welcoming. The opening scene of this dark thriller, with a wounded girl stumbling into a biker bar that reeked of drugs and testosterone, was chilling.
We’ve seen bikers and backwoods before, of course. Cardinal would be straightforward detective noir, if the murder victim were actually dead. But she isn’t — that redheaded girl in the bar has a bullet in her brain and no memory of who she is, but otherwise she’s fine.
It’s an intriguing start. By the end of the first double episode, this original twist risked being buried under layers of cliche: the cop whose daughter is too damaged to live with him, the female sidekick who won’t face her own emotions, and the devilworshipping weirdo chopping up corpses.
But I’m hooked and I’ll stick with it.