A privileged look at what it’s like being Muslim in Britain
Given its intriguing concept, My Week as a Muslim (Channel 4) was always going to be an interesting film about one woman’s willingness to have her prejudices overturned. Then fate stepped in and made it something special.
At the outset Katie Freeman, a fortysomething white British mother from Winsford in Cheshire, admitted she would be scared to sit beside someone wearing a burka, and reckoned they should be banned. She moaned about Britain losing its way, and of “other people’s rules being imposed”. Still, she gamely agreed to live with a Muslim family for a week to see if it dispelled her fears.
Welcomed into the house of Manchester-born Saima Alvi and her five children, Katie spent two days getting her head round big ideas like how the family were, yes, British despite the differences in how they dressed and ate. Then the real novelty began as, aided by a team of make up artists, Katie was superficially transformed into a British-pakistani woman, and went out undercover with Saima to experience what life was like in Manchester’s Muslim community.
As fate would have it, that was the night the Manchester Arena was targeted by a suicide bomber, killing 22 concertgoers and injuring 250.
Understandably, Katie had severe doubts about continuing, but Saima convinced her that, because of the tragedy, this time more than any other would give her a sense of what it was really like to be a British Muslim. When the backlash and suspicion was at its height.
What followed felt like a privilege as over the next few days Katie moved invisibly through a community reacting with horror and outrage to the bombing and a deep sense of charity toward the victims.
“They’re just normal people like me,” Katie said at one point as if she still couldn’t quite believe it.
In the end, Katie’s discovery was what everyone in this country should know to be true anyway. But played out against the tragedy at the Manchester Arena it had added urgency and impact, and heavily underscored this film’s central point: that ignorance really is the breeding ground of prejudice and hate.
It wasn’t until the tease for the first ad break in Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV) that it became clear why Kim Cattrall had been picked to kick off Morgan’s latest series of dips into the lives of the famous. She’d been indiscrete. Cattrall is an interesting and entertaining actress, who gained a phenomenal level of fame thanks to one role – that of the sex-obsessed PR agent Samantha Jones in the hit HBO sitcom Sex and the City. But that series finished 13 years ago, and though two movies followed, it is hardly in the cultural vanguard these days. It’s not as if Cattrall ever really been “one of the most acclaimed actresses in the world” as Morgan put it in full-on, oil-dispensing mode.
A talented woman, and an engaging guest, certainly, as proved throughout this enjoyable hour-long interview. Her description of how her parents moved from Liverpool to Canada in the Fifties and struggled to put down roots was engrossing. As were her anecdotes of her early career and eventual rise to fame with Sex and the City.
Cattrall certainly knows how to tell a yarn. Her story of Morgan’s old pal Donald Trump insisting on a walk-on part in return for permitting filming at Trump Tower in 1999 spoke volumes, and brought the house down. She wound Morgan up nicely by refusing to name a famous lothario whose prowess she’d claimed to be unimpressed by. Her three marriages, the impact on her career of her father’s death, and her positivity regarding turning 60 last year were all dealt with gracefully.
We might have remained convinced of her determination to keep Morgan’s more intrusive questions at bay if it hadn’t been for the insistent hints at every ad break that said had, in fact, said something naughty about her former Sex and the City co-star Sarah Jessica Parker.
And eventually it came out: the row over Cattrall’s refusal to do a third Sex and the City film, her undetailed “toxic” relationship with her co-stars, and how, above all, she “wished Sarah had been nicer.”
That was about as revealing as it got, but Morgan looked like the cat that got the cream – and a bonus ticket to gossipmonger’s heaven. Such, it seems, are the things that matter most in showbiz. The things that get you pushed to the front when it comes to kicking off a new series.
My Week as a Muslim Piers Morgan’s Life Stories