Baddiel’s slick anti-semitism film needed more balance
In 2019, Dawn Butler gave a speech to the Labour Party conference in which she promised that a Labour government would value you “if you wear a hijab, turban, a cross, if you are black, white, Asian…” The list went on. But there was one minority that did not get a mention from the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. This speech featured as a prime example in David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count (Channel 4).
Anti-semitic crimes hit a record high in the UK last year. But Baddiel’s programme was not about racism as blatant as the Muslim men who drove through London last year in a propalestinian convoy, making rape threats against Jewish girls, or the more recent attack on a bus full of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street.
Instead, in this slick, well-argued film, Baddiel went after Left-wing liberals, who are forever speaking up for other minorities but remain curiously silent on anti-semitism. “There is a sacred circle of minorities that the progressive Left are prepared to go into battle for,” he argued, “but Jews are not in it. Why?”
He deftly explored the reasons. There is the belief that Jews cannot be counted among the oppressed because they are rich and powerful and secretly running the world. But there is also the question of Israel. Baddiel filled the programme with famous Jewish people who mostly agreed with his arguments, but on Israel he came up against Miriam Margolyes. Baddiel said Israel had nothing to do with him. Margolyes told him it was wilful of him to deny a connection.
Baddiel pointed out double standards in the arts world: no outcry when Radio 4 broadcast a reading of TS Eliot’s lines from Burbank with a Baedeker: “The rats are underneath the piles/the Jew is underneath the lot.” Some other double standards were not mentioned, such as Sarah Silverman appearing here as a contributor with no mention that her own comedy has offended the black and Asian communities.
Things went awry when Baddiel attempted to head off critics who bring up his mockery of the former Nottingham Forest player Jason Lee on Fantasy Football League – a recurring “gag” which involved Baddiel in blackface and on every occasion involved playground-level bullying. The comic huffed that he had apologised countless times but it was only here, 25 years late and in service of his own documentary, that he bothered to apologise to Lee himself. The air is thin up there on the moral high ground.
You can imagine the Netflix meeting that led to Our Universe. “We need to make something like the BBC’S Planet Earth. But bigger.” The result is a weird mash-up of natural history and space science, and it doesn’t work.
We’re introduced to some elephants – this is the kind of wildlife programme in which the cute baby animals are given names – and follow them on their annual journey away from the Okavango Delta in search of watering holes. But a few minutes in, narrator Morgan Freeman (last seen at the World Cup opening ceremony) informs us that water may be rare here in summer but “if we search beyond the shores of our own planet it’s rarer still – deserts are nothing compared to the rest of our solar system”. And then we’re off to the frozen moons of Saturn.
Penguins in South Georgia are linked to an explanation of gravity. There’s an episode connecting cheetahs and nuclear fusion. It’s as if we’re watching two entirely different shows that have been spliced together. Here’s a lesson on how the first raindrop was created four million years ago; now back to the savannah, where one of those adorable baby elephants is about to become a lion’s lunch.
The natural history bits are nicely shot – the series is made by BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm – and the science bits are done with expensive CGI. There’s a stirring soundtrack and, thanks to the Netflix subtitles which my children always have on and for this viewing I couldn’t be bothered to switch off, we can tell exactly what emotions it’s supposed to stir. The captions spell it out: there is pensive/melancholic/tranquil/solemn/ dramatic music playing, to signpost how you should be feeling about any given scene.
Just when you’re thinking, hmm, I wonder which one of those wildebeest is going to get eaten, Freeman switches to the science bit and informs us that the Sun will run out of fuel in five billion years and devour neighbouring planets. So that’s Netflix trumping David Attenborough and his warnings about climate change disaster.
David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count ★★★
Our Universe ★★