A blistering, bleak descent into a modern-day hell
Should you ever need to be deterred from committing a criminal act, you could do worse than watch (Channel 4), Paddy Wivell’s new documentary series filmed at HMP Durham. Here was a Hell to make Dante’s Inferno look milksoppish as overstretched staffers struggled to instil any sort of discipline in the inmates who adhered to their own anarchic code.
Durham, which is home to both remand and convicted inmates, was full of men who had been hardened by the system. Many appeared to be terrifying recidivists who knew how to play the game. This blistering, bleak first episode looked at drugs which seemed to be as readily available as sweeties. “Got any snizzle on you?” was the cry, which referred to Spice, a form of synthetic marijuana that is causing havoc in several cities.
The wheeze at Durham was for the top dogs to spike hand-rolled cigarettes with the stuff and force their weaker cohort to overdose – a grim spectator sport that the warders felt powerless to do anything about. At least the victim of this cruel jape, Stephen Lindsay, looked on the bright side. “For a few minutes, I was a free man,” he said, referring to his zombielike spell on a yard bench oblivious to the pointing and laughing hyenas. Durham has to deal with eight or nine such incidents in a day.
The dealing of drugs is a ruthlessly efficient operation, done with the use of mobile phones which should have been confiscated after the baldly named Body Orifice Security Scan. What men are prepared to insert inside their rectums is quite extraordinary. “I’ve seen someone take a 9-inch blade out of his backside,” said one warder, while allowing a grim smile to emerge.
Such men have seen it all (in both a literal and figurative sense), and the idea of prison as a reforming environment seemed alien to them. This is what set Wivell’s documentary, happily free of editorialisation, apart: there was no hand-wringing about inherent goodness or prisoner potential. A bad apple, it seemed, was a bad apple. One was a 30-year-old who had committed dozens of offences since his mid-teens. Wivell asked him about his dreams as a young boy. Didn’t he want to become an astronaut or something?
“No, I was just a little b-----d,” he replied.
For men like this, the chance of leading a good life was always going to be slim.
After the hard-knocks of HMP Durham, Gordon Ramsay’s media-augmented machismo felt a little tame. In Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back (Channel 4), he returned to the United States to try to reverse the fortunes of Bella Gianna’s, an Italian restaurant that’s “literally 60 miles outside New York”. I’m not sure why this was worth mentioning, other than to try to ramp up the jeopardy that oozed suspiciously from every nook of Bella Gianna’s contaminated kitchen. Its owner Vinny, was a loud-mouthed, volatile man-child straight out of The Sopranos, ready to scream at his wife one minute and collapse sobbing into a foetal ball the next. “Maybe I’m disgusted inside,” he said with a certain stentorian thespiness as he considered the collapsing family empire. “But I’m doing my best.” Of course, this family psychodrama was TV gold but I couldn’t help thinking that Vinny’s terrible unravelling should have been kept behind closed doors. I bet the programme makers could hardly believe their luck.
I don’t know this for certain, but I sensed rather too much manipulation. The idea of not only turning around a restaurant but also expecting a broken owner and a passionless chef to undergo Damascene conversions seemed a stretch too far in the space of 24 hours. I’m pretty good with a roller, but I doubt I could change my attitude in the time it took me to stencil a feature wall. I also thought the diners gasped too prettily in unison when shown the mouldy contents of a Tupperware box.
The series has been a hit in the US and I can see why. Americans have long subscribed to the notion that TV can change lives and they must see the aggressive blonde shouty man as some sort of Messiah. I wonder if they know about his restaurant group’s reported £3.8m loss.
Still, here Ramsay achieved redemption for Vinny and his longsuffering family. It’s amazing what a piquant vinaigrette dressing can do – or indeed skilful editing.
Prison
Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back