A rare chance to gasp at Iran’s many splendours
Samira Ahmed was granted a rare opportunity to journey into the heart of Iran for BBC Four’s Art of Persia, and she didn’t waste it. At many points in this first of three instalments I found myself gasping at the sheer magnificence of the sites she was showing us, and the beauty of the objects found there. The vast, desert ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, relic of a lost world; the ruins of Persepolis and the grand tomb of its ruler, Darius the Great. These are sights that few Westerners will get to see in real life.
A lesser presenter would have been content to make this into a travel programme, with the occasional observation about the Iranian people. But Ahmed is clever and curious, and you sense that this is one of the great projects of her career. Her ambition is no less than to introduce us to 3,000 years of Persian history, art and culture, deferring to experts where necessary but acting as an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide. Seeing a presenter’s eyes shining at the thrill of what they’re seeing is infectious.
The name “Persia” has romantic connotations that “Islamic Republic of Iran” most definitely does not. Most of us know the latter from news reports, and the programme stayed away from the country’s recent history. It was more interested in demonstrating the ways in which the history of Persia remains part of modern Iranians’ cultural identity.
Ahmed has a gift for description: showing us the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, she explained that the Elamite people who constructed it attached great spiritual importance to mountains and “where there were no mountains they built their own”. The most bizarre location visited in the programme was a cod-medieval castle constructed by a Frenchman in the 19th century, using ancient bricks from the site he was excavating: “A fitting example of how colonial-era archaeologists saw themselves as superior protectors of civilisation, while desecrating ancient sites.”
How odd it must have been for Ahmed as she took the BBC to an employment tribunal over equal pay last year, listening to the corporation’s lawyers refer dismissively to her as a mere news journalist, in the knowledge that she had made this series. Instead of fighting losing battles, perhaps the BBC could concentrate its energies on making more programmes that add to the sum of our knowledge. A fter Murder in the Outback, which examined the 2001 disappearance of Peter Falconio, Channel 4 brings us Murder in the
Car Park. Both true crime serials, but very different beasts. The Falconio story had a deep mystery at its heart: what really happened that night? This latest documentary is concerned with the death of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator killed outside a southeast London pub 33 years ago, and from the first episode it seems pretty clear that the film-makers think there is no mystery here: plenty of people know what happened, but the perpetrators have escaped justice. Morgan’s family believes he was silenced because he was about to expose police corruption.
The killing of Morgan was introduced as “the most investigated unsolved murder in the history of the Met Police”. The first detective on the scene provided an unforgettable description of the victim’s body: “He had two packets of crisps in one hand, car keys in the other, and an axe sticking out of the side of his head.”
We were taken methodically through the evidence. The programme was four years in the making, and the quality told. We learned the details of the case through a combination of interviews with those connected to it, including police officers, and dramatic reconstructions. Often, reconstructions are the weakest part of programmes like these. But here they did a fine job of conjuring a shady world in which private detectives propped up the bar with CID men, and detectives moonlighted in security jobs alongside dubious characters.
The central character was Jonathan Rees, Morgan’s partner in the investigations business who soon became a suspect. The film played with unreliable narration here: events shot from different viewpoints, Rees’s version of events challenged. When they interviewed Rees and Sid Fillery, the Met detective who was involved in the investigation and just happened to be a close friend of Rees, the cameras lingered on them for just a second too long after they’d finished speaking, inviting us to draw conclusions about the reliability of their testimony. Both were arrested for Morgan’s murder, but no one has ever been convicted.
It is a murky tale, on which this series throws a great deal of light.
Art of Persia ★★★★★ Murder in the Car Park ★★★★