Brainless hyperbole ruined this underground odyssey
Any presenter proposing insights into a “land of secrets”, “Britain as you’ve never seen it before” or “unknown Britain” instantly makes themselves a hostage to fortune. Dallas Campbell announced he would be providing all three. In the first of two-part series, Britain Beneath Your Feet (BBC One), Campbell sacrificed coherence to breadth and speed, rattling through almost a dozen landmarks inside the hour with no narrative thread to tie them together, unless you counted the relentless one-upmanship. Campbell rushed from one phenomenon (manmade or natural, it didn’t seem to matter) to another that was, unbelievably, even more ancient/ spectacular/extraordinary. Our host was nothing if not enthusiastic, but this was television wide-eyed and empty of brain. Everything, to coin a phrase, was awesome.
It didn’t take long to become wearying. Driven along by a would-be epic soundtrack that even Cecil B DeMille might have rejected as a bit over the top, Campbell broke up fatbergs in the London sewers, followed the trajectory of the River Mendip from the hills to Bath’s thermal springs, abseiled into Yorkshire’s underground waterfall of Gaping Gill (once believed to be the gateway to hell) to witness its “raw, elemental power”, and went 140m underground to experience a little of life as a coal miner. The latter, incidentally, is open to the general public, which rather undermines the sense of pioneering discovery.
Frustratingly, there were some segments which deserved expansion, perhaps at the expense of a sequence on cricket in a slate mine that would have shamed The One Show, or of yet another sweeping shot of England’s green and pleasant land. The idea of scientists exploiting old mine shafts in the search for dark matter was an intriguing one, while the analysis of the roots of an ancient oak for once made good use of that crutch of the desperate documentarian, CGI.
With a little more scientific and historical rigour it could have worked, but this slapdash approach underestimated the intelligence and attention span of its audience. Frankly, Campbell’s ever-burgeoning use of superlatives made me want to throw myself into the depths of Gaping Gill.
Is there a police force in the country that hasn’t invited the cameras in? After The Met (London), The Detectives (Rochdale) and 24 Hours in Police Custody (Luton), the slightly unusual nationwide charm offensive continued with Channel 4’s Career Criminals, in which offender manager PC Stuart Lewis played cat and mouse around Dudley with wide-boy Benjamin Winkett.
Their relationship was akin to Officer Dibble and Top Cat or Mackay and Fletch, and made for engaging television. Winkett, who was 19 but seemed far younger, slunk around in a hoodie, cracking wise (“You borrow stuff off people and don’t take it back”) while the dogged, ever-exasperated Lewis (“We don’t give up, we just keep coming back at them”) attempted to pin a series of burglaries on him.
Winkett’s brother, Tom, meanwhile, an ex-con gone straight thanks to having a stable relationship and kids to look after, attempted to steer Benjamin back to the straight and narrow while looking for an elusive job. He also demonstrated how to make apple pie and curry in a kettle. Chirpy miscreants, long-suffering establishment figures, unorthodox approaches to domesticity – clearly this was Channel 4 trying to bring a hint of humour to breadline Britain, having drenched the screen in despair and anger with Benefits Street.
Yet there were darker shades to all this beyond Dudley’s slate-grey skies. Lewis suspected that Winkett was being exploited by someone higher up the criminal food chain, while Tom’s experiences suggested his brother’s future could get very bleak, very quickly: firearms, drugs and bullying behind bars. When Ben was finally nicked and sentenced to a month in prison, it felt like a pyrrhic victory, one more likely to represent the first step towards harder crime than a full stop to it. For all the shrugging, grinning and scowling, this was a vulnerable young man.
It was an appealingly low-octane, low-key affair, but left one side of the story curiously untold. Who owned all the bikes, boilers and fencing that were “borrowed”? Winkett’s misdemeanours, while petty, were hardly victimless and the failure to explore their impact on the majority of law-abiding locals was a major omission. They may not have been “characters”, but their voices deserved to be heard.
Britain Beneath Your Feet ★★ Career Criminals ★★★