People trafficking a bit of a lark? Tell that to the 39 dead in Essex
Telly documentaries can’t often be accused of downplaying a crisis. But the makers of Smuggled (C4), probing how easy it is for illegal immigrants to evade UK border checks, seemed to suggest human trafficking isn’t such a big problem.
Their experiments treated people smuggling as a bit of a laugh, with game Brits testing the system by travelling under false passports or hiding in vehicles on ferries bound for the UK.
Meanwhile, the voiceover assured us comparatively few asylum seekers actually head to Britain, with the vast majority finding a safe haven in Germany, France or Italy.
But when I interviewed former police superintendent Bernie Gravett, an international expert in human trafficking crime, in the wake of the deaths of 39 migrants in a lorry at Purfleet docks in essex last month, he warned that the sheer scale is beyond counting.
The numbers trafficked from Asia and Africa, many brought here to work in conditions of virtual slavery, are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands every year. This trade is worth billions to organised crime gangs.
With more than 100 ports around Britain, police — already overstretched by knife crime and anti-terror ops — are powerless to halt this modern slave trade. This two-part series, completely fails to convey how deadly a business it is.
A chap called Khurrum borrowed a mate’s passport and travelled from Amsterdam under his name, even though they looked nothing alike. A nice lady called Carolynne hid in the loo of her holiday motorhome on the way back from France. Neither was rumbled.
But compared with the industrial scale of human trafficking, that’s about as serious as bringing in a couple of bottles of plonk without declaring them at customs.
The producers were hampered by their own naivety. They encouraged the participants to express sympathy for anyone desperate enough to leave home and family, for a better life in Britain.
But this crisis isn’t about individual immigrants. It’s a ruthless criminal business, run in tandem with the international hard drugs trade. Chinese and Russian mafias are making huge profits, at an untold cost in lives and misery.
Shutting a well-meaning, middle-aged woman in the WC of a campervan is no way to address the issue.
Organised crime of a more appealing kind was under way in Meet The Bears (BBC2), a compilation of clips from wildlife documentaries. One brown bear was caught on camera wheeling a dumpster away from the back of a supermarket, so he could pick through the contents at leisure. A holidaying U.S. family gasped in excitement as a bear tapped on the window of their car, hoping for a hand-out.
Giggles turned to screams when the animal hooked a claw over the handle and opened the driver’s door.
Narrator Hugh Bonneville didn’t tell us whether this narrow escape occurred at yellowstone
National Park, but I’m betting that rascal’s name was yogi.
He was definitely smarter than the average bear.
Fans of the BBC’s peerless natural history shows will have recognised many of the segments, such as the polar bears emerging from their nest under the snow for the first time, or the grizzlies catching salmon in their open jaws under an Alaskan waterfall.
But the editing was pacy, and Hugh’s voiceover was full of fun facts. Did you know that an alpha bear’s strut, known as the ‘cowboy walk’, is designed to grind his scent into the ground with every step? So that’s what Paul Hollywood is up to.
HOME GUARD OF THE NIGHT:
Archive footage of Cold War preparations for nuclear attack, on A British Guide To The End Of The World (BBC4), featured an interview with a retired colonel in an Essex village. He was all set to shoot ‘townies’ fleeing the A-bomb. Really, sir, do you think that’s awfully wise?