A thoughtful take on the thorny topic of Empire
‘Idread bringing up the subject of Empire,” said Sathnam Sanghera, which must be tricky because first he wrote a book about it – the wellreceived Empireland – and now he’s gone and made a television series about it, Empire State of Mind (Channel 4, Saturday). But you can see what he means. It’s a touchy subject, which either ends in raging arguments about statues, or people getting offensive or defensive, or someone saying: “But we gave them the railways!”
Quite possibly you harrumphed at the very idea of this series and tuned into Blankety Blank instead. But Sanghera was worth watching. He delivered a thoughtful film, both personal and political, about imperial history and how it has shaped the British psyche.
Sanghera’s central thesis is that the Empire left a legacy of racism – an internalised belief, honed through centuries of colonialism, that black and brown people are inferior. It was only 250 years ago – not very long in the span of human history – that British plantation owners listed slave children among their possessions. The Scottish writer Alex Renton looked through one such inventory, compiled by his ancestor. A black child was worth a quarter of the price of a horse.
Of course, society has moved on since then. And nobody, you’d like to think, would appear on a news bulletin today declaring that immigrants make their “blood crawl”, as a woman did in footage from the 1960s. But footballers are still greeted with monkey chants, and a mixed-race mayor in Penzance was bombarded with racist hate mail for taking down some Union flags that were flown on the seafront without council consent.
Sanghera traced his own story, swapping stories with his brother about the abuse they received as children in Wolverhampton when the National Front was at its peak. And he delved into the history of Empire – in this episode, looking at the treatment of Sikh soldiers in the First World War. Wounded Indian troops were tended in relative comfort at Brighton Pavilion, but a historian suggested this was simply a propaganda tool to keep the recruits coming.
Defenders of Empire will be able to pick holes in Sanghera’s analysis of centuries past, because history is up for debate. But who can argue with the fact that racist attitudes are alive in Britain in 2021? At one point he remarked to his nieces that “things we find dehumanising” are viewed by some white people as mere banter. He made the programme before the scandal engulfing British cricket. But you need only have listened to Azeem Rafiq’s evidence to MPS this week about his experiences at Yorkshire to see that racism hasn’t gone away. Anita Singh
Weeping Angels in a Devon village circa 1967. A World War Two veteran helping the Doctor fight them off, armed only with a cricket bat and old-fashioned British pluck. What’s not to enjoy?
Yet, this atmospheric episode of Doctor Who (BBC One, Sunday) began brilliantly before disappearing up its own time vortex. The six-part story
Flux continued with a pacy period piece. A 10-year-old girl had gone missing. Somebody was leaving notes telling residents to leave before it was too late. In the churchyard, there was one gravestone too many. It was a pleasingly creepy horror film set-up.
When a Weeping Angel hijacked the Tardis, the Doctor and her companions were catapulted to 54 years ago. After a spooky moonlit encounter with a “scarecrow”, Dan (John Bishop) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) were flung further back to 1901, where they found missing schoolgirl Peggy (Poppy Polivnick). Meanwhile, local boffin Professor Eustacius Jericho (the superb Kevin Mcnally) was conducting psychic experiments on the enigmatic Claire (Annabel Scholey, equally excellent).
The wheels came off at the half-hour mark when the Doctor entered Claire’s mind to find out why a rogue Weeping Angel was in there. The convoluted answer involved those shadowy Gallifreyan timecops called The Division. If you could make sense of the exposition dump involving burial sites, “quantum extraction” and stolen memories, you’re a geekier geek than I.
When Yaz and Dan discovered that the edge of “the cursed village” fell away into space, it was a stunning special effect for a needlessly confusing reason. We ended on the arresting image of the Doctor transforming into a statue herself, as she was “recalled to Division”. I was also left with a familiar nagging feeling of frustration. Yet again this had the makings of a vintage episode until a messy third act.
Empire State of Mind ★★★★ Doctor Who ★★★