Yes, sex slavery is horrific, but did this brutal drama help at all?
You know you’re watching a BBC drama of howling bleakness when the one barely likeable male character is a Belfast terrorist in a balaclava.
Doing Money (BBC2) was unrelenting. From the moment Romanian cleaner Ana (Anca Dumitra) was bundled into a car in broad daylight on a suburban London street, to her final encounter with detectives who refused to say whether her best friend was dead or alive, this was brutal viewing.
Writer Gwyneth Hughes and director Lynsey Miller did not take a charitable view of men. They didn’t blame the Romanian pimps and people traffickers alone for selling Ana into sex slavery and threatening to kill her mother if she attempted to escape.
At the pop-up brothels across Ireland where she was kept prisoner, sleazeballs paid extra to rape, beat and torture her. When one did help her to flee, he was only interested in forcing her to sell her body again — to ‘do money’, in the slang of the film.
Her next Sir Galahad was the masked boss of a paramilitary crime gang. Then it seemed that every man she encountered, in cafes or shopping malls, was a former ‘client’. The script repeatedly claimed that all married men use prostitutes whenever their wives aren’t looking.
For any woman trapped in Ana’s miserable existence, the world might really seem this utterly cruel. For the rest of us, struggling through a 90-minute narrative with no sub-plots or distractions, it was unrecognisable — a nightmare scenario, written to make us feel guilty about a life we didn’t know existed.
It didn’t help that Ana did nothing but suffer. Her only emotion was sullen hatred.
She endured the months of horror because the kidnappers knew where her mother lived back home in Romania.
It might have been easier to comprehend Ana’s resentful resignation if we’d had some glimpse of an earlier life, and understood how unbreakable the love was between mum and daughter.
Instead, there was just an invisible character labelled ‘Mother’ — who, when she finally spoke to her daughter on the phone, couldn’t wait to disown her.
Sex slavery is too important an issue for television to ignore. But nightly schedules don’t exist to punish viewers. This show took a vital message and turned it into a monotonous rant.
This embittered view of life — and of men in particular — was countered by the deeply moving interviews with old soldiers in WWI: The Last Tommies (BBC4). Most were in their 90s, as they recalled joining up to fight the Kaiser in 1914 — some lying about their age, including a miner who was just 15. There was also a 17-year-old debutante desperate to be a nurse.
Some could still smile at their own innocence. A Glaswegian insurance clerk was urged by his manager to join up — ‘It’ll be a nice six-month holiday for you!’
Army officer Richard Hawkins explained why he volunteered for the front, aged 21: ‘It was our duty, nothing out of the ordinary, it was obvious. We went, to stop our country being taken over by a foreign country, to defend it against all invaders, for the people who come after us.’
His words should be replayed on Remembrance Sunday — a message from a generation that sacrificed everything a century ago, for our benefit.
It’s a pity that these interviews, done towards the end of the 20th century, were not supplemented by other accounts filmed for the BBC back in the Sixties.
Those fascinating testimonies are available on iPlayer, if you rummage around.
BEEF EXTRACT OF THE WEEK: Sylvia, 102, aced all her health and mental agility tests on Old People’s Home For FourYear-Olds (C4). She had a theory why she was named ‘star performer’: ‘I must have been taking Bovril.’ I’ll have a mugful of that then!