Boyd’s TV Land
Sky 1, Sundays, 9pm
For many, Ross Kemp is a bit of comedy figure: the thespian who went from playing a hardman on a soap to actually becoming one in TV documentaries like this one, now in its sixth series, believe it or not. He’s so ruddy, bloody brave, as Alan Partridge would say, but it’s a bit like Michelle Keegan thinking she should go into battle in Afghanistan, because she plays a soldier in Our Girl. And yet, to be fair to Kempo, he really is good at this stuff. In the opener of this new run, Ross immerses himself in the race hate currently causing much misery in the US. He meets actual members of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom regards black people, including Barack Obama, as sub-human animals. His understandable reaction to this monster is one of controlled anger and bewilderment, while trying to engage in rational discussion. But there’s nothing rational about being a Nazi, and he smartly gives all of the extremists enough air time to expose their basic stupidity. Then, in the second episode, he investigates the even more dangerous world of a drugs den in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, where a new substance called Hydro is wreaking havoc on the locals. To watch Kemp chatting amiably to a vigilante who explains how he rounds up drug dealers and breaks their arms and legs if they defy him, is quite something to behold. In the end, it is easy to make fun of Ross Kemp, as he gamely did himself back in that classic episode of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Extras, when he played an exaggerated version of himself as a total doof, but Extreme World is a consistently revelatory series all round.