This film laid bare the warlike horror of the Capitol riot
One of the narratives accompanying the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 was that the police didn’t do much to stop it. Mobile phone footage showed officers calmly talking to the protesters. The insurrectionists encountered little resistance as they stormed the building. The police’s fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt appeared to be their first decisive act.
Four Hours at the Capitol (BBC Two) showed just how false that narrative was, through the testimonies of officers who were there and from video taken at the scene. We had seen only a fraction of this on the news reports at the time, and in viral social media posts. The police, it was plain from this gripping, vivid documentary, were vastly outnumbered and afraid for their lives.
Never mind the supposed comic elements – the “shaman” in his horned helmet, or the protester whose main act on getting inside the chamber was to hand out marijuana joints. Jamie Roberts’s film made clear that this was a war zone, and it took us right into the heart of the battle. In a tunnel-like entrance on the lower west terrace, 40-50 officers fought to hold back a crowd of thousands. “It looked like some medieval battle scene,” said officer Mike Fanone, who had turned up as part of the reinforcements. He was grabbed by the mob, beaten and tased, and was lucky to survive.
The anger of the protesters that day was clear but in this documentary they were a variety of calm, smug and deluded. It was the police and politicians who were the angry ones. Fanone’s partner, Jimmy Albright, was incandescent that the mob were calling him a traitor: “I have literally bled for this country in combat in Afghanistan… how f---ing dare you.” It was startling to hear Democrat Congressman Ruben Gallego, an Iraq veteran, say of that day: “I was not going to die on the floor of the f---ing House of Representatives. I was not going to get taken out by some insurrectionist b------. My plan was to stab somebody in the eye or throat and take their weapon. Fight to survive.”
There was no authorial voice interrogating the contributors, so no one to ask the Trump supporters who were there that day if they had any regrets. But they were allowed to damn themselves, whether by declaring that Trump was “anointed by God” or sharing crazed conspiracy theories. A wheelchair-user of the far-right Proud Boys declared that he was “the last man standing” outside the Capitol building. That was only because his fellow patriots had left him behind without a second thought.
Somehow, Shetland (ITV) didn’t appeal to me until now. I think it’s because everyone billed it as Scotland’s answer to “Nordic noir” and that isn’t a ringing endorsement in my book. What does it mean, apart from a dour detective, some scenery and everyone wearing jumpers? But the show is back for a sixth series, so it’s doing something right. And it’s about time I caught up.
If you’re a Shetland fan, you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing the backstory here. Douglas Henshall plays DI Jimmy Perez, which is a name more suited to The Wire than a windswept Scottish island. The case he has to crack this time is the murder of Alex Galbraith (Jim Sturgeon), a popular lawyer on the island. There are plenty of suspects: a drug-addict mother who lost custody of her kids in one of Galbraith’s cases; an ex-soldier angry that Galbraith refused to represent him when he faced accusations of abusing Iraqi detainees; someone linked to the victim’s wife, who is running in a local by-election with the backing of a local businessman (sounds shady).
There is another story about the release of a terminally-ill killer from prison, which may or may not have something to do with this case. Oh, and someone who may have captured the murder in some drone footage. So that’s a lot of motive and plot points to cram into one opening episode. Hang on, there’s also the new procurator fiscal, played by Anneika Rose, who you may remember as the luckless PC Jatri in Line of Duty.
Is there always this much going on in Shetland? Three-quarters of the way through the episode, I was exhausted. But what held my interest was Perez’s personal life. The series opened at his mother’s funeral; Perez has to cope with his own grief while dealing with his father, who is heartbroken by the loss of his wife but also showing signs of dementia. It was delicately handled, in scenes which had the ring of truth. Also realistic: a pathologist (Anne Kidd), who behaves like a normal human being rather than a quirky fictional character. This is a decent drama, but one that needs to thin out the storyline a bit.
Four Hours at the Capitol ★★★★ Shetland ★★★