aryland A justified howl of rage against the men who lurk in the dark
M(BBC Two) is a short film about the dangers faced by women going about their everyday lives. The opening moments illustrate this perfectly. A young woman walks home after a night out. We see her entering an underpass. Watch this scene as a woman, and your insides clench. It is an instinctive fear.
And then: “Don’t be so stupid!” you think. “Don’t go through there. Never walk alone at night.” It is advice wheeled out every time some terrible story appears in the news. When my daughter becomes a teenager, I will teach this to her. She will have to learn that men may be lurking out there to rape or murder passing strangers. This shouldn’t be something that society accepts with a sad shrug. It should make us furious.
Lucy Kirkwood wrote Maryland a “howl of rage” at the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. It was originally a 30-minute play at the Royal Court, and transfers to television with Hayley Squires and Zawe Ashton in the lead roles. They play women – both symbolically called Mary – attacked by the same man. Their characters have little in common – Ashton is middle class and reserved, Squires working class and forthright – but to an attacker they are the same thing: a lone woman to be sexually assaulted.
Daniel Mays plays a PC who accompanies the women to the police station. He makes clumsy jokes and doesn’t seem threatening, but there is a point at which he tries to give the women a lift home and Sarah Everard’s killer flashes in your mind. I know, I know, not all men are like that. You may be a man feeling defensive and offended by this. But would you let your daughter walk home alone in the dark? Of course it’s not all men, but it’s a lottery in which none of us knows the odds.
As a piece of television, it is highly theatrical. The dialogue is stagey, and I wished it had been modified for the screen. The words “rape” and “murder” are replaced by a metallic shriek. A chorus of modern-day Furies reel off the things that have become as normal to them as remembering bin collection day. “When I’m walking from the Tube to my house, I put my phone in my bra and my keys in my hand.” “I have Googled how to kick out a tail-light from inside the boot of a car.” This stylised approach will not appeal to everyone. But everyone should feel Kirkwood’s level of rage.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Someone at the BBC decided that one way to demonstrate the corporation’s commitment to impartiality would be to make a programme featuring people who have declined to have the Covid vaccine. But the result was so patronising that they shouldn’t have bothered – and I say that as someone happily triple-vaxxed.
Unvaccinated (BBC Two) saw seven strangers invited to share a house, as if this was Big Brother sponsored by Pfizer. Prof Hannah Fry was the host, there “to discuss the issues and their views”. What this really meant was that Fry would try to change their minds by explaining to these people, in a lovely, soft tone of voice, that they were wrong.
Fry made sympathetic noises and said she understood their fears. Yet towards the end she went to a London hospital, where a consultant said that 95 per cent of Covid admissions to intensive care were unvaccinated. “When I hear facts like that, it feels like such a slam-dunk,” said Fry. If the motive was to persuade people to get the vaccine – people who presumably have heard these sorts of statistics before but rejected them – then that description wasn’t going to help.
The programme did at least feature a range of reasons for not getting the vaccine. Chanelle said the black community has a long-standing mistrust of the medical establishment. Luca believed in 5G conspiracy theories. Mark worked in a care home and believed that he should not be forced to have the vaccine under threat of losing his job.
Then we had Nazarin and Vicky, who were zealous anti-vaxx campaigners. Vicky was one of those people who aggressively pressed her point, to the discomfort of more polite members of the group. But if you disliked her manner or her views – she was also vehemently anti-lockdown – it was still hard to disagree when she scoffed at Fry’s attempt to explain the statistical probability of serious side effects by playing “jelly-bean roulette”, as if the contributors were six-year-olds. And Nazarin was quick to pull up Fry for bringing up Luca’s conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, which was an unsubtle way of suggesting that he would fall for any misinformation that came his way.
Nearly four million adults in the UK remain unvaccinated. I doubt this programme changed any minds.