Study of homelessness with empathy but no solutions
In 60 Days on the Streets (Channel 4), the explorer Ed Stafford has swapped wildly hostile destinations for the pavements and doorways of the British metropolis. His conclusion? Sleeping rough’s not so bad. Within days you can get used to it. “Being on the streets is f---ing easy,” agreed Steve, homeless for four years. Mark saw himself as a professional beggar who was “good at my f---ing job”. Both were high as a kite at the time so perhaps their perception was skewed.
After tearfully bidding farewell to wife and home, Stafford was soon scavenging from bins, dodging faeces in the street and washing his private parts with toilet water. If the jungle is your benchmark, maybe these indignities are indeed soon tolerable. But they looked horrendous.
The people Stafford encountered in central Manchester had all fallen on desperate times and were powerless to find an escape route. Everyone he spoke to was an unreliable witness. Dina said she was a mother of six, claimed she’d been “born into a drug world” and had modelled for M&S. She was friendly, apart from in the morning before her daily fix, which she believed to be supplied by the government to control the likes of her.
Stafford’s contract with his subjects felt a little hazy. It was rarely clear how he presented himself – rough sleeper or undercover reporter? – to people who presumably had to sign release forms before broadcast. While filming on a mobile, he was also discreetly followed by someone with a camera.
The one person to whom he openly declared himself was Geoff, a young and articulate man whose story had the compelling potential to subvert preconceptions. “I’d love to pay taxes,” stressed Geoff, who told of hard times after a suicide attempt. Stafford, believing he’d found a clean exception to the rule, was crestfallen to discover he’d been duped when Geoff revealed his begging funded a crack habit. “Whatever it is that I need to do to make myself bearable,” he said, “that’s what I’m going to do.” This grim series is an empathetic venture. If only it could also propose solutions.
They seek him here, they seek him there. The premise of Shadow Commander: Iran’s Military Mastermind (BBC Two) is that for nearly 20 years the geopolitical strategy of Iran has been funnelled through a single individual. Its adventures in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon were all controlled by a figure most of us have never heard of called Qasem Soleimani.
At the end of the hour, alas, not much more was known about him than at the start. There is vanishingly little footage of him – the programme managed to disinter one speech to soldiers on the front line, and the only image of him in command came from an Iranian animation. This all fuelled the idea, which the programme had no intention of dispelling, that he is a mixture of Scarlet Pimpernel and a supernatural Golem armed with mystical powers of leadership over Iran’s elite Quds force.
He loitered in the margins of the narrative as the main events were rehearsed, from the Islamic revolution in 1979 through to the rise of Islamic State in 2014. Every now and again the eagerness of the programme to drag him to the centre of the story was palpable, even a bit desperate. It was put to former CIA director David Petraeus, who headed quite a cast list of interviewees, that a bomb which destroyed a British military vehicle “was very calculated by Iran, by the revolutionary guard, by presumably Qasem Soleimani”. Petraeus deftly sidestepped this gaping trap.
The most enlightening revelation did not relate to Suleimani. Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador to Iraq, explained how for months the US were secretly conspiring with Iran after 9/11 to combat the spread of Sunni terrorism. Then President George W Bush, influenced by forces that went undiscussed, made his axis of evil speech. “I really did not like it,” said Crocker. “We moved literally overnight from doing business with Iran on Afghanistan.”
There was an outbreak of sound common sense at the climax of the programme as generals queued up to scotch the premise that Suleimani is some sort of international supervillain. The path to peace lies through understanding rather than comicbook stereotyping built into the fabric of this profile.
60 Days on the Street Shadow Commander: Iran’s Military Mastermind