They could have made a proper job of an ex-kidnapper on the dole
NORMAN Stanley Fletcher himself couldn’t have put it better. As Ronnie Barker’s world-weary old lag so often used to do in Porridge, a Jobcentre counsellor in Leeds was trying to help a luckless convict find his path out of the criminal life.
The bloke on the other side of the desk was looking for work. He was about 40 and heavy set: his neck was wider than some men’s shoulders. And every job application he made was getting turned down.
Why was this, the advisor wondered. ‘Cos I’ve just come out of jail,’ the man said, ‘for kidnapping and threats to kill . . . putting someone in the boot of a car.’ This placed him, he felt, at a bit of a disadvantage.
‘Everybody’s different,’ said the Jobcentre chap with nervous optimism. Fletch would have been proud of that reply.
If we’d spent the rest of The Yorkshire Jobcentre (C4) watching a reformed kidnapper struggling through job interviews, this might have been the documentary of the year. The man clearly had untapped talents, not least for his persuasive qualities. He just needed to learn to temper his enthusiasm.
But we didn’t even learn his name and never saw him again. The producers went for less intimidating characters, such as Karen, a tiny woman in her 60s who had spent much of her working life as a bookkeeper with HMRC.
Karen had no experience of anything but office work, but her eyesight was dodgy, and living on her own was making her lonely. She needed a job where she could chat to people.
And she got one, right at the end, as a cashier at a pound shop. This was meant to be the upbeat pay-off at the end of an hour that was often dispiriting.
But the surprise was wrecked by the montage of clips and soundbites that opened the hour-long show. We’d already seen Karen in her blue shopworker’s overalls shouting: ‘Hallelujah, I’ve got a job,’ as she danced in the aisles.
Did the film-makers assume we’re all goldfish who would forget her in seconds? Or do they have a cynical contempt for their own product, and expect that nobody pays much attention to cheap and formulaic shows like these? Perhaps they imagine we’re watching with half an eye while fiddling with our phones.
The makers of Once Upon A Time In Iraq (BBC2) have treated their subjects with far more respect. Over five episodes, we’ve got to know the interviewees whose lives were wrecked by the Allied invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The final part, picking up from the departure of U.S. troops in 2012, brought us up-to-date with the stories of Waleed Nesyif, the chain- smoking translator who emigrated to Canada but couldn’t bear to be apart from his brothers, and of Um Qusay, a grieving mother who defied Isis to save dozens of lives.
But this was a rushed programme. While the documentary was at pains to explain every stage of how civilisation collapsed in Iraq after the initial surge of hope, it summed up the rise of Islamic State and its obliteration in a blur.
Director James Bluemel seemed more interested in the theme of the earlier episodes, the gist of which, in the words of one eyewitness, was: ‘ The Americans did not bring freedom, they brought chaos.’
What analysis there was of life under Isis was gripping. One captured jihadist, brought before the camera in handcuffs by armed guards, boasted that the sight of women being stoned to death made him happy.
It was strong stuff that didn’t deserve to be crammed into one last hour.