Long hair, loud guitars and a song for Saddam — yes that’s Iraq’n’roll
Growing up in Baghdad in the 1990s, heavy metal fan waleed neysif’s band played a headbanging tribute to Saddam Hussein at every gig.
if he’d been British, waleed could have gee’d the crowd up with: ‘Awright Bir-ming-ham! Are yer ready to rock?’ But he was iraqi and the dictator’s secret police were at every concert, so he yelled: ‘This song, The Youth of iraq, is specially dedicated from our band to the President, Saddam Hussein.’
Long hair and loud guitars are all very well but, as the documentary Once Upon A Time In Iraq (BBC2) made obvious, what really mattered were moustaches. The more voluminous the hair on a man’s lip, the more evident his adoration of the Butcher of Baghdad.
one former palace adviser sported white fluffy handlebars like twin cumulus clouds. He mourned his lost leader every hour of every day, he said, stroking his rampant sideburns.
Facial hair and guitar riffs are not the obvious emblems of the Allied invasion of iraq in 2003 but this five-part film directed by James Bluemel is using the testimony of ordinary people — civilians and common soldiers from both sides, rather than politicians — to trace the history of an international catastrophe.
The format was pioneered by Ken
Burns and Lynn novick with their 15-hour exploration of the Vietnam war in 2017. That comprised interviews with more than six dozen witnesses, from the villagers whose homes were napalmed to the American students who came under fire from the national guard on U.S. campuses — if you’ve never seen it, seek it out on netflix or DVD, because it sets a new standard for documentary TV.
Despite its epic title, echoing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, once Upon A Time in iraq is not as ambitious. But the interviewees are well chosen, particularly the young woman who was six when the bombing began. She remembers her mother throwing her body over her and her siblings, to protect them from the blasts.
only the former U.S. Marine, Sgt rudy reyes, struck a false note, flexing his bare biceps and swigging theatrically from a bottle of tequila before he began to talk. He loved the memories of combat: ‘it was godlike,’ he said.
i don’t doubt his war stories, but i don’t doubt either that they have been retold many times. Even his angry tears for a family killed at a roadblock, because none of them could read the stop signs, felt a little rehearsed.
it was no surprise to look up Sgt reyes and discover that he played himself in a TV mini-series called generation Kill. This type of documentary is best when history is being heard for the first time, not when subjects are polishing their own mythology.
A-level student ollie, 18, was experiencing history first-hand as he signed up to be an nHS call handler for the 111 service at the height of the pandemic.
Paramedics: Britain’s Lifesavers (C4) watched him sail through training by applying the diligent study techniques that, weeks earlier, he had been using to prepare for his exams — now cancelled. But nothing could prepare him for his first real call, from an older lady who did not have symptoms of Covid-19. She was ‘experiencing pain Down Below’.
it was a rare moment of amusement in a programme that lacked spark. BBC1’s series Ambulance does this much better, with countless fixed cameras running constantly to capture glimpses of the 999 crews and phone operators.
getting a show like this right is much harder than it looks.