The Beeb sends their girl to face ISIS and the result is unmissable

CLARE Hollingworth, the first correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II, was also the last London journalist to leave Poland as the Nazis advanced in 1939.

Aged 27, she was determined to describe the horrors she saw — how Luftwaffe fighter planes were strafing crowds of refugees on the roads, while dozens of men and women suspected of spying were being rounded up daily and shot.

Hollingworth, who died last week aged 105, worked from her car: ‘When it grew too dark to drive, I took a pull of whisky and curled up for the night with my electric torch and my revolver beside me.’

Stacey Dooley is also in her 20s and reporting from a war zone in Stacey On The Frontline: Girls, Guns And ISIS (BBC1). But that’s where any similarities with Hollingworth end.

When she reached the Kurdish HQ outside Mosul in Iraq, where troops armed with AK-47 assault rifles and little else were fighting ferociously to oust ISIS forces, Stacey was wide-eyed and white-faced.

The grinning commander who had survived two years under fire, and who insisted she’d be in greater danger in the kitchen ‘making a salad’, did nothing to reassure her.

At the first sound of gunfire, she sat down as though her legs had given way — even though it turned out to be her own side’s defences.

‘I thought that was mortars,’ she gasped. ‘You have to tell me when you’re gonna do that!’ And when machine-guns opened up on the ISIS lines, less than half a mile away, Stacey was adamant: ‘I think we’re going to have to get out of here quite quickly.’

That was it. End of documentary. She had taken two weeks to get there, and apparently stayed for just two minutes.

But along the way Stacey achieved something even the fearless Hollingworth might not have managed. Living at a training camp for female Kurdish soldiers, some of them survivors of the mass kidnaps and rape that are a common ISIS tactic, she won the trust of the young women.

Many were just 17. They had seen their families butchered and friends beaten to death, during the genocide of 2014 on the border between Syria and Iraq. For two years, they had been unable to speak of it.

Stacey got them to talk. It isn’t only that she’s confident and gregarious, the sort of character who makes friends easily. She has a talent also for asking difficult questions without embarrassment — which makes it easier for interviewees to answer honestly.

One teenager told how she’d seen a woman cut her wrists rather than be raped (ISIS men threw her corpse to a pack of dogs). Another young woman, trying to explain what had been done to her neighbour’s children, broke down repeatedly and could not speak.

Two of her fellow soldiers rushed from the room sobbing, unable to listen to the story.

This documentary, originally made for the online BBC3, was frustratingly flawed. Because Stacey didn’t hang around on the frontline, we didn’t learn what happened to these brave women. Barely armed and scarcely trained, they were desperate for revenge. Did any of them live through the battle? If they did not, it is even more important that their voices are heard.

For all its failings, this was essential television.

Stacey was a Trojan warrior compared with the female celebs on Sugar Free Farm (ITV) who were wrecking their two-week diet plans by sneaking downstairs at night to cook themselves omelettes. Alison Hammond and Gemma Collins are serial offenders on reality TV, both veterans of Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity. You might suppose they’d know well enough to stick to the rules, lest these brainless bits of schedule-filler become even more irrelevant.

But they weren’t bright enough to cover their tracks. The producers soon noticed the eggs and milk were missing in the morning, and that while on her strenuous regime of hard labour and no sweets, Gemma had put on 4lb.

Their weak-willed cheating had one positive outcome — it exposed the show as a complete waste of everybody’s time.