You have to laugh, because what else is left? This would seem to be the world-view of a brash new comedy about dicing with apocalypse. The Brink (Sky Atlantic) comes from the US cable channel HBO, which specialises in the unfettered. They gave us liberal lashings of dirty talk in Sex and the City and mercilessly ribbed the office of the Vice-President in Veep. Its new take on America’s recent foreign policy misadventures is not recommended viewing in the White House, the Pentagon, or in any country where Islam is the dominant religion.
The joke of The Brink is that the world’s only superpower is a weaponised farce, a random generator of cultural ignorance. It’s an old gag with DNA linking back to Dr Strangelove, but there’s always fresh ammunition. And The Brink fires it from a semi-automatic blunderbuss with joy, wit and gung-ho insensitivity.
Cocking things up on the ground in Islamabad was Jack Black as Alex Talbot, a lowly diplomatic functionary stationed in what he haughtily dubbed an “anal cavity of a country”. In this first episode he was caught up in a political coup when out on a private mission scoring some wacky backy. When the news hit back in Washington DC, Tim Robbins’s buck-naked Secretary of State Walter Larson was being asphyxiated by a hardworking Cambodian prostitute.
In the war room the president and his entourage chewed over the consequences of Islamists seizing Pakistan’s nukes while pondering what food to order in. Meanwhile, somewhere off Oman, a US aircraft carrier made ready to unleash hell, led by brave aviator Zeke “Z-Pak” Tilson (Pablo Schreiber) who dealt in drugs to supplement the low wage that comes with flying a $65million fighter jet.
America’s addiction to sex, weapons and clueless self-importance is a sitting duck for fraternal show creators Roberto and Kim Benabib. Their idea of satire channels the no-joke-too-low spirit of Airplane! to lampoon brash American exceptionalism in action. It’s way coarser than Armando Iannucci’s war-com In the Loop, as personified by Black, who could have faxed in his turn as a bumptious idiot yet gives this rather standard character a fresh lick of paint.
The Brink is not above phnarphnarring about Israel’s use of drones as a form of birth control, nor Germany’s historic association with gas chambers. So far there have been no jokes about beheadings. Tasteless? Hell yes. But it’s a guilty pleasure.
It used to be just death and taxes that were inevitable. They’ve lately been joined by rising house prices. We’ve all sighed and shrugged about this already, and wondered how future nurses can afford to live within a 50-mile radius of a decent hospital. But there’s always more to get down in the dumps about and here it was in a short sharp shock of a report from Dispatches (Channel 4) which confronted the ticking time-bomb that is the property divide.
Presenter Morland Sanders started in east London, where a development has separate entrances for its two types of resident – a posh door with pot plants for well-off homeowners and a so-called poor door infested with weeds for tenants on subsidised rents. No one knew how the other half lived.
As a symbol of a society with a deep wound in its midriff, it couldn’t have worked better. But such developments, concluded Sanders, seem to be the only way local councils can afford to keep the capital mixed. A Darwinian alternative was up the road in Barnet, where homes on a housing estate had been demolished to make way for more desirable properties. Some of these new builds were designated “affordable”, a euphemism for “barely cheaper than market price”.
It’s not just bad in London. Sanders visited the Wensleydale factory in North Yorkshire. They struggle to find staff because no one can afford to live nearby.
As well as afflicted residents, the talking heads included a geographer, and someone from Shelter. No one was there to put a positive spin on, say, the proposed sale of housing association property, although various statements were read out. Indeed the only person who had a good word to say for the Right to Buy scheme bought her council flat in the Seventies.
This is such a complex area, its roots in vast geopolitical forces, that there was no room to ask how we’ve got here. The developers who flog off fresh housing stock to Chinese investors were not – but one day should be – mentioned in Dispatches. The Brink Dispatches