Glimmers of hope emerge from last year’s nightmare
Banana skins and golliwogs pushed through letterboxes. A woman called “a Polish b---h, Polish druggy, Polish s--g”. A man’s car windows smashed: “I’m the only black person in the area, I don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it.” The opening of Manchester: a Year of Hate Crime (Channel 4) was a litany of horror, the stuff of dystopian nightmares that starkly illustrated the extent to which racism fuels hate crime.
Will Jessop’s austere film continued as such, documenting hundreds of incidents that occured in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing. The headline-grabbing events – such as the Islamophobic attack on Finsbury Park mosque – were interspersed with lower-level incidents affecting far fewer, yet emblematic of dwindling human decency and respect towards minorities. Many of the victims were reluctant to press charges and, although their decision may embolden their aggressors, in this claustrophobic atmosphere of intimidation, you couldn’t blame them.
There were glimmers of hope: the admirable response of the Finsbury Park imam protecting the attacker from retribution, and the absence of wider reprisals; the steady community work of Greater Manchester police; the conciliatory sermons of local imam, Irfan Chishti. Yet these were generally undercut by a soundtrack of growling, oppressive synths and the sort of editing that would follow Chishti’s declaration of a successful vigil after the Arena bombing with a series of phone messages calling for Muslims to be locked up or deported.
This was not a film to inspire much optimism. While it would be easy to dismiss Tommy Robinson and his band of knuckle-dragging acolytes as the lunatic fringe, the truly alarming development was how the antagonists are getting younger. One 12-year-old boy was filmed in custody, “no commenting” a series of questions about an appalling racist assault with an audible smirk.
The bigger picture, especially regarding budget cuts to policing and the knock-on effects on communities, was only fleetingly acknowledged, while ways out of the mess felt more theoretical than practical. “The answer is getting back to a society that offers hope and purpose to all young people at the end of school… that there is something there for them,” reckoned Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, citing conditions created by lack of education, deprivation and inequality.
His was a reasonable analysis, but easier said than done in a nation that is on the brink of change owing to Brexit, and divided due to some of the rhetoric that the debate around it has thrown up. Things, you suspect, will get much worse before they get better.
Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall documentary 24 Hours in Police Custody would have made a great, downbeat procedural, but for one problem: how to improve on the drum-tight storytelling, pitch-perfect casting and awful climactic twist? At its best, this is one of the most compelling series on television: the death of Sharon Fade on Bedfordshire wasteland, her throat slit with a broken bottle, provided a fascinatingly unpredictable and bleak opening to the seventh run.
Suspicion fell on Fade’s partner, Dean Robinson, whose resemblance to actor Steve Pemberton created the unsettling impression that we might be watching Inside No 9. Here was a peculiar character, claiming careers in medicine and law enforcement, demonstrating yoga positions in police interviews, and running a spreadsheet on Fade’s movements. Eccentric, however, doesn’t equal murderous, so the police hurried to build an elusive case against him.
Instead, they pieced together a picture of a dysfunctional relationship, with the fragile Robinson proving out of his depth in attempting to manage Fade’s addictions that had also proved beyond local authorities. One 999 call found him warning her, “Don’t you even touch that phone, otherwise I will be defensive with you,” while police response bodycams filmed her confused, intoxicated and aggressive, or him wearing a stethoscope while spouting medical jargon.
In the end, Fade was deemed to have killed herself in the most horrible manner. Both she and her partner had fallen through the cracks of a system and, frankly, society under strain. Had this been a drama, it would have been one that implicated us all; as it was, we were left to draw our own conclusions, and they were unhappy ones.
Manchester: a Year of Hate Crime ★★★ 24 Hours in Police Custody ★★★★★