How cheesy Eighties pop soothes Syria’s chinless, psychotic dictator
Pity Phil Collins. At one time the biggest pop singer on the planet, a star of Live Aid in 1985, he’s now marginally less fashionable than a Casio calculator wrist watch.
the final indignity for Phil must be to discover that his music is the favourite listening of the Middle East’s most psychotic dictator, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. No one wants a mass murderer in their fan club.
it’s no surprise that Assad likes his outdated, synthetic soul music. it reeks of the Eighties and, as we discovered in A Dangerous Dynasty: House Of Assad (BBC2), the entire demented family is trapped in that era.
take their coastal palace. Outside, it has all the charm of a comprehensive school. inside, the decor is inspired by the cheesiest five-star hotels, all marble walls and gold taps, as if someone allowed Sarah Ferguson to redesign the bathrooms at the Vatican.
the Eighties were when the Assads had a real grip on power. these days they are Russian puppets, accused of bombing their own cities with chlorine gas in their desperation to stay in government. But, 30 years ago, they were unrestrained megalomaniacs.
Bashar’s father, the ghoul-like Hafez, was a monster who liked to watch squads of his elite Republican Guard slaughtering small animals. the men stabbed puppies to death, and the women bit the heads off snakes, under his hollow-eyed gaze.
in contrast to his skull-headed father, Bashar is a chinless beanpole who looks like he has wandered out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. As a young man, he trained to be an ophthalmic surgeon in London.
if his playboy brother Bassel hadn’t died in a car crash, Bashar might never have turned into Psmith, the Psychopath of Psyria. instead, he’d be doing cataract operations in Godalming. Funny how life turns out.
this documentary had no special access or great insights, but it delivered a thorough and efficient account of how this Mediterranean country, so close to the holiday beaches of turkey and Cyprus, has become a bloodbath.
Part of the reason, suggested experts including former Mi6 chief Sir John Sawers, was Bashar’s inner weakness and insecurity. Determined to be worthy of his dead, mad father, he followed ruthlessly stupid policies. these included an attempt to spite the Americans by releasing all the Muslim fundamentalists from his prisons, giving them guns and sending them off to iraq to set up an islamic state.
Even Bertie Wooster wouldn’t need Jeeves to tell him that was a bad idea.
Paul Hollywood spent the whole weekend in The Great British Bake Off (C4) scowling and sulking over what he regarded as the stupidest idea in the show’s history — a trio of vegan challenges.
Paul, who does slightly look like he lives on a diet of bread and profiteroles, doesn’t have much time for fruit and veg.
He plucked a decorative tomato, complete with a sprig of its stalk, off one bake and snarled: ‘One thing that really winds me up, green on the top of a tomato.’
His judgments were savage: ‘Looks good, tastes awful,’ ‘Not a good cake at all,’ ‘tastes hideous,’ ‘Looks like a disaster’.
it was left to fellow judge Prue Leith to inject a positive note. She called shy Rahul’s chickpea tart-filling ‘poetry’.
in fact, you might think Rahul is looking like a runaway winner, even though he’s more likely to tiptoe apologetically.
With the field now down to five contestants, Bake Off is at its best and most exciting. Back to butter next week.
INVERSION OF THE NIGHT: Ben Fogle found himself upside-down and hanging by the ankles as he learned athletic meditation moves with a Buddhist hermit, on New Lives In The Wild (C5). That’s what you call a sudden rush of blood to the head.