A desperately bleak story that needed to be told
Some dramas are made to be enjoyed. Others are more to be endured, because the stories they tell desperately need to be told, and there’s no other way of telling them.
Doing Money (BBC Two) was one such. An exceptionally tough watch, it was based on the real-life experiences of a young Romanian woman snatched off the streets in London and trafficked into slavery to be repeatedly raped and abused.
Commissioned as part of the BBC’S hard-hitting Modern Slavery season, it was the story of Ana (Anca Dumitra), happily working as a cleaner in London one minute, bundled into a car by a Romanian crime gang the next and forced to work in an endless succession of “pop-up” brothels.
Deprived of her passport, clothes and even her glasses, and coerced by a process of continual emotional abuse and starvation, there was little Ana could do to escape. The threat was always there of retaliation against her family in Romania if she didn’t comply. Terror made her and her fellow victims stay quiet even when police turned up to try to help them.
Written by journalist turned screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes, whose recent Vanity Fair adaptation for ITV could hardly have been more different, this was a shocking depiction of how still, in the UK today, an ordinary person with no one to turn to for help can be abducted, brutalised and degraded to a point of near total submission by unscrupulous criminals.
Anca Dumitra’s performance as Ana was exceptionally credible and powerful, but the documentary-like depiction of abuse left little room for dramatic moments to pull us through the bleak narrative. The ordinariness of the world conveyed made it all the more oppressive, and the abuse more repulsive. Hope of rescue flared up occasionally, but only to be swiftly extinguished.
The one note of redemption was that Ana did, finally, escape the gang’s clutches. But it was hardly a happy ending, deeply traumatised as she was by the experience. A footnote told us that her testimony to the Northern Ireland Parliament helped secure the passing of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act in 2015. In that sense, this was a story of the triumph of the human spirit. But what we were mostly left with one was the depressing, inescapable conclusion that women like Ana are still being exploited, day in, day out, throughout Britain and Ireland.
As the centenary of Armistice Day approaches, there’s another flurry of documentaries commemorating the First World War.
WWI: The Last Tommies (BBC Four) was especially affecting as it put the emphasis not on facts or footage but on the direct human experience of the Great War.
The three-part series is the result of a uniquely important oral history project to record the experiences of men and women who lived through Great War. (All the contributors were in their nineties and hundreds when filmed, only two are still alive.) Those featured in this opener came from all walks of life and all parts of Britain, casting their minds back, initially, to a time when Kitchener’s call to arms was seen as an opportunity for adventure rather than an invitation to the slaughter house.
Dick Trafford was so eager that he tricked the recruiting sergeant into believing he was older and joined up at just 15 years of age. Len Whitehead recalled his older brother George signing up in 1914: “I don’t think it occurred to any of them that they might never come back.” A sense of the war as a tragedy not only to those in the trenches but for those mourning lost loved ones at home, of lives unlived and wasted potential, pervaded this film. But the experiences recounted were mostly those of men who, on arrival in France, were confronted with death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.
The extraordinary sense of duty and the stoicism of that generation shone though. As did their courage, and the intense camaraderie of combat. But it was the pain, and its capacity to linger decade after decade, that struck the deepest chord. Never more so than in George Littlefair’s loving recollections of his best pal, Joe, and how he saw him fall in the Battle of Loos in 1915 and couldn’t even stop to help him.
The lost look in his eye and momentary quiver of the lips as he recalled that long-ago moment were as powerfully eloquent as any poem about the tragedy and pity of the First World War.
Doing Money ★★★★ WWI: The Last Tommies ★★★★