Searing eloquence of a father who lost his daughter to a foreign war
The British, we always say, button up our emotions. But there’s no need for tears and howling to express the deepest sorrow, as Anna: The Woman Who Went To Fight Isis (BBC2) reminded us.
On the surface a documentary about the confused guerrilla war in northern Syria that reached a ferocious pitch last year, this was really a film about the intensity of grief.
Anna Campbell and her three sisters, in Lewes, east Sussex, had already lost their mother, Adrienne, to cancer. A close family, the young women each coped in different ways — and Anna’s was to emulate Adrienne’s idealism, by throwing herself into protest politics. Then she decided to go to Kurdistan and help defend the newly formed republic.
The programme’s title was misleadingly simplistic. Anna wasn’t on a mission to kill Islamic extremists. It was the Kurdish commitment to feminism that attracted her.
And it wasn’t an Isis bomb but a Turkish air- strike that killed her. The Kurds were fighting enemies on all sides, as her father Dirk discovered when he flew out to meet some of her friends who survived.
‘These women in their fatigues with their Kalashnikovs,’ he
murmured sadly, ‘they all look like Anna.’ he saw her everywhere.
Another of his daughters remarked that Anna’s death had left a hole in their lives, a hole they ‘kept tripping over’. This family was remarkably eloquent about grief.
Dirk spoke with the honesty of a man who has lost so much he has no reason to hold anything back. But he was never self-indulgent. english restraint ran too deep for that. When one of his girls asked how he was, he said quietly: ‘ I’m feeling fantastically under-effusive.’
he constantly questioned whether his relaxed style of parenting had failed to keep Anna safe. Any viewer would surely see that his other three well- adjusted, articulate daughters are proof of all the things he did right, but of course grief doesn’t think like that.
Sensitive guidance from director Marina Parker helped Dirk to tell Anna’s story without weeping and ‘ letting himself down’, as he’d probably see it.
But there must have been lumps in many throats as he described his last conversation with Anna before she went off to fight. Unable to dissuade her and unwilling to criticise her, all he could say was: ‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you.’
A totally different perspective on close family life was supplied by husband-and-wife comedians Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont: as Jon’s panel show Ultimate Worrier (Dave channel) returned with her as one of the guests.
The couple are also set to star in a six-part sitcom about their domestic travails with a new baby: Meet The Richardsons, co- written with Car Share’s Tim Reid.
Ultimate Worrier is a heavily scripted show, probably because its neurotic host wouldn’t be able to sleep if he thought a genuine adlib stood a chance of sneaking into the final edit.
It’s an odd mix of quickfire gags and anecdotes, and excruciating set-piece items. Guests Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Joe Wilkinson are both veterans of have I Got News For You, and they understand the rapid timing needed to generate laughs on shows like this.
But the segments that saw Jon trying to rollerskate in hotpants, and getting a lovey-dovey portrait photo with his missus, were the comic equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard — the sort to get viewers reaching for their remotes.
GNOMIC WISDOM OF THE NIGHT: Like an oracle, Vogue chief Dame Anna Wintour decreed on Inside The Ritz Hotel (ITV): ‘If everything is always about what is to come, the past will cease to exist.’ And she’d only been asked why she liked the teas.