A riveting look at Hugo Chávez’s destructive legacy
Venezuela is the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. It’s practically floating on the stuff; its people should be as rich and happy as Norwegians with suntans. Yet when Hugo Chávez ran for president in 1998, inequality was rife. His ticket, running against a former Miss World, was therefore a simple one: for the many, not the few (as one might coin it). He won. Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story, BBC Two’s razor-sharp documentary, told the story of what happened next.
It was a fascinating study, depicting Chávez as both a genuine socialist revolutionary and yet the ultimate populist despot – an amalgam of two seemingly contradictory types with which we are currently more than familiar. It showed, with an unjaundiced eye, how politicians aren’t divisible only into left and right – there are clear lines connecting Chávez to Donald Trump, including an understanding of the media that amounted to government by reality TV (Chávez took calls on a daily phone-in called “Aló Presidente”).
It put Chávez in the context of Leninist Russia but also of Corbynist Labour. Chávez, Jeremy Corbyn was pictured saying, “showed us there is a different way and a better way to be doing things”. Quietly, devastatingly, this programme showed that Chávez’s “way” was neither “different”, nor “better”.
Under Chávez’s rule and in the six years that have followed his death, Venezuela has imploded. Years of underinvestment in the oil industry, with money siphoned off for Chávez’s headline-making welfare and social programmes, have halved production. Corruption is rife. Inflation is now running at over one million per cent, if you can even conceive that. Nine out of 10 families can’t get the food they need. Three million have fled. This, in the country where the streets are paved with oil.
Yet to its credit, Revolution in Ruins came neither to praise Chávez nor to bury him. This was dispassionate analysis, and it was all the more riveting for it, because it showed that you can change the cast list and the setting but in history the old adages still apply: absolute power corrupts absolutely; all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others; and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
No one does emotional unravelling like Sheridan Smith, and episode two of Cleaning Up (ITV), the story of a contract cleaner and single mother working at a stockbrokers who dabbles in a bit of insider trading to pay off her debts, gave Smith plenty of woes to work with.
It was as if the writer, Mark Marlow, was stabbing pins in to a Smith voodoo doll. Ha, take that online gambling addiction Shezza! Stab! Just when you thought it was safe to pay off the gambling debts, here comes a shifty loan shark! Ha! Now see if you can deal with your daughter falling in with the wrong crowd while your trading scam implodes and your youngest child starts playing up and you’ve sold out your only friend and so on and so forth, all inside 40 minutes.
If it was exhausting it was never tense, because every turn for the worse was so clearly signposted. The reliance on mobile phones to bring in new information that changed the direction of the plot was just lazy, as if the writer was on the other end of the line Whatsapping unwelcome surprises straight into the script.
Smith, of course, handled this turducken of gloom with as much subtlety and ease as any actor could, shifting downwards through the gears of desperation as she inched inexorably towards the precipice. But unfortunately for Cleaning Up she’s the only believable thing about a show that purports to be a slice of real working-class life. The plot is lamentable, the depiction of a stockbroking firm laughable and the dialogue utter twaddle.
“The chances of us getting caught are, like, a billion to one,” said Smith to her co-conspirator, as the irony klaxon sounded long and loud. Highly confidential information was conveniently left on desktops (it should have been marked “only to be opened by a series in desperate need of a plot device”). One absurdity led to another: how to clear the room of brokers so that Sheridan could snaffle the vital intel? She set off the fire alarm, just like they used to do in Grange Hill.
I could go on. Cleaning Up certainly did. I suspect most viewers won’t.