Gunfire’s the new normal in this chilling look at ‘war zone’ Britain

With his air of impish innocence and Just William freckles, the boy on the huddersfield street might have stepped out of a 1950s comic-book, in the crime documentary Hometown: A

Killing (BBC1).

his name was Macauley and he was about 11. in Macauley’s world, though, catapults and ink pellets have been left far behind. he was talking, with an articulate calm and lack of melodrama, about how normal the sound of gunfire is in his town.

‘ You hear shooting,’ he said, ‘living round here you don’t get scared — you’re used to it. it’s just how it is in huddersfield, sadly.’

this wasn’t bravado. it wasn’t gangland posturing. A lad with a Geoffrey Boycott accent was explaining that, round his way, there were nowt strange about guns and bullets.

hometown was truly shocking, a chilling indictment of how drugs crime has unleashed casual violence on ordinary streets across Britain.

Radio DJ Mobeen Azhar was invited back to the suburb of Birkby where he grew up, to talk to the father of Yassar Yaqub — a man shot dead by police when he apparently pulled a gun during his arrest in January 2017.

this is Gentleman Jack country: Shibden hall, the setting of BBC1’s

presented like rewound videotape, in a bizarre style that went out of fashion with MTV. Mobeen and his ludicrous quiff need to stop trying so hard to be trendy.

But he was the right man for the job. No one but a Birkby lad could have hoped to cover this story. he didn’t want to denigrate the community that raised him, he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask difficult questions’. Every senior officer in the country ought to be made to watch this documentary and realise: this is what happens when the police take it upon themselves to decriminalise drug dealing.

thanks to hometown, The Supervet (C4) wasn’t the most harrowing programme of the evening, but it’s still distressing to see pups such as Barney, a pug- beagle cross whose leg was pulverised under the wheels of a bus.

Professor Noel Fitzpatrick never ceases to work miracles. Gylly the labrador, energetic as a kangaroo, needed a new shoulder. Noel was able to manufacture a plastic one with a 3D printer, and implant it: that’s just incredible.

there are always light-hearted interludes, provided this time by a man mountain called Marek whose job was to lift the bigger animals . . . such as 60lb bassett hound Albert.

‘We hire him for his mental dexterity,’ joked Noel. Marek just stared impassively.