The true colours of a rock star dictator who ruined a country
Quite by accident, colour TV has created the most important historical archive in human history — and we are only just beginning to appreciate it.
Silent footage from a century ago can be fascinating, as can the faintly comical black-and-white Pathe news filmed for cinema. But these records feel dated and distant, lacking the vivid immediacy of colour.
Revolution In Ruins (BBC2) drew on more recent pictures: Sixties telly travelogues from Venezuela, roving foreign correspondent reports by an impossibly young Michael Buerk in the Seventies, and local TV news from Caracas in the eighties and Nineties. it combined in a compelling account of how populist dictator Hugo Chavez rose to power in the Latin American country.
these clips showed more vividly than any book or drama how Chavez was perceived in his own era — by the poor who adored him and the u.S. neighbours who regarded him with fear and loathing.
We saw first-hand the charisma of the man. if he hadn’t been a powermad megalomaniac, he would have made a great stand-up comedian — his routine at the united Nations was masterful, as he took the podium after u. S. President George W. Bush (at the height of the iraq War), sniffed the air and declared, ‘the Devil has been here . . . i smell sulphur!’
Only colour TV can both reignite our own memories and show us how other people at the time saw current affairs. this documentary was expertly collated, drawing on a wide selection of clips and firing them at us rapidly.
if this technique sometimes gave us the sensation we were watching an MTV video, that was appropriate: Chavez was a rock star politician.
He was also a walking economic disaster of unprecedented proportions. His socialist government, so admired by Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone (both seen smirking beside Chavez at rallies, basking in his popularity), has bequeathed a humanitarian catastrophe to his country.
During just 14 years in power, Chavez took oil revenue that dwarfed even that of Saudi Arabia and stripped the economy of trillions of dollars, in the biggest orgy of waste and corruption on record.
today, six years after his death from cancer aged 58, inflation in Venezuela is running at 200 per cent, and around a third of children admitted to hospital are malnourished. three million refugees have fled the country to find work and food.
thanks to TV, at least we can see how this happened . . . even if it’s hard to believe.
Not all television is quite so educational. Bradley Walsh and his son Barney were larking their way across texas in Breaking Dad (ITV), with a casual disregard for detail that made top Gear look like Open university.
What began, at least halfheartedly, as a show with a mission to explore the relationship between father and son has now become an unabashed holiday. As they visited a NASA space training centre, they might as well have been pottering around a pier arcade — at least until Bradley was strapped into the rocket chair that generated lift-off forces of 5G, making him five times heavier.
‘You look like Nanny Margaret,’ laughed Barney, which was cruel to both father and grandmother. Ah, the tactlessness of youth.
Chatting to a bunch of UFO spotters, they could barely think of any questions. Bradley could have been listening to a family describing Bank Holiday traffic on the A36.
But they did wake up when presented with the chance to fire a World War ii Sherman tank at a car. Now that’s a holiday.