Capturing the dog days of a former dictator
Abit like Alan Partridge knocking around the purgatorial Linton Travel Tavern, former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf has, since his ousting in 2008, found himself at a loose-end of soul-crushing proportions. The diminished figure we met in Storyville: Insha’allah
Democracy (BBC Four) was becalmed and quietly absurd, his days spent padding about his Dubai apartment and surfing Facebook.
Broadcast as Pakistan prepares to go to the polls later in the week, Mo Naqvi’s documentary – the title translates loosely as “if God wills, democracy”– didn’t quite deliver on its promise of showing us the good, the bad and the bungling of the country’s cratered political landscape.
There was too close a focus on Musharraf – and frankly too much of the ex-four star general feeling sorry for himself in his Dubai digs – for it to function effectively as an overview of Pakistan’s tumultuous engagement with democracy. But as a character study of a man who once controlled one of the world’s deadliest nuclear arsenals and counted George W Bush as a confidante it was wry and gripping.
Naqvi, in his opening voice-over, framed the film as a personal exploration of green-shoots suffrage in the notoriously unstable nation. Pakistan was counting down to its 2013 general election, the first in which the young filmmaker could legitimately cast a vote. Through his eyes we should have seen Pakistan democracy, in all its bloody, roiling chaos.
But Insha’allah Democracy skimped on essential details. The director had attended a gated school and grown up largely sheltered from Pakistan’s ethnic and sectarian violence (though Sunni extremists had killed his uncle, a Shia doctor, in the Nineties). He also spoke with a twanging accent that was more California than Karachi. Yet beyond vague hints that he was born into privilege no further crumbs were offered, so it was hard to empathise with his existential quandary over where his vote should go or his forlorn faith in Musharraf as keeper of the peace.
The tone changed radically as Naqvi was put in touch with the one-time coup leader and struck up an unlikely friendship. There was a pivot from geopolitical dummy’s guide to thoughtful portrait of a once powerful figure’s descent into impotence (Musharraf was prohibited from running for office in 2013, requiring Naqvi to opt for “naive” Imran Khan instead).
The documentary came with a sting in the tail too. With a peaceful transfer of power, Naqvi concluded that Pakistan was perhaps finally learning the democratic ropes – before a fleeting image of Donald Trump reminded us this wasn’t the only country at the mercy of tectonic ideological divides. Ed Power
TV’s business moguls are invariably hard-headed boors. Lord Sugar, for instance, or most of the Dragons. They’d nick the last chip off your plate and then slap you for asking for it back. Perhaps the time has come for a nicer entrepreneur.
One such less boorish chap is Dave Fishwick, a minibus magnate who was previously seen on our screens launching a kindhearted lending bank in 2012’s Bank of Dave. His new series, Channel 4’s How to Get Rich Quick, began last night, and while the name conjured seductive visions of spendthrifts and pyramid schemes, the reality was, sadly, less titillating.
Fishwick’s aim was to help savers multiply their money through entrepreneurialism, and last night’s beneficiary was Tahira, a 34-year-old council worker from Reading. She wanted to build an extension, a non-urgent predicament that deprived the show of any jeopardy. As Fishwick bounced around making dad jokes, I caught myself longing to swap him for one of the aforementioned boors, someone who could at the very least deliver a caustic word to a wrong-headed participant.
Tahira, disappointingly, was perfectly competent, doubling her money by setting up a food stall with her mother and two sisters. Elsewhere, Fishwick began teaching “Granny Mags”, a clueless pensioner from Warrington, how to invest. This week they bought some gold, the value of which, she learnt, can go down as well as up. It would have been patronising if she’d known a single thing about money, but alas.
The ensemble could make for some extremely gentle daytime TV, if only for viewers who find Bob the Builder too economically complex. Bring back the boors. Storyville: Insha’allah Democracy How to Get Rich Quick