Are black people utterly useless at everything, and a source of dysfunction, crime and misery in British society? This was the hypothesis seemingly advanced in the BBC drama
Shoot the Messenger (Wednesday, BBC2). At one point, the lead character, a teacher, is so frustrated and aggrieved by the habitually appalling behaviour of black people that he resorts to spray-painting “F*** black people” on the wall of his school in big, red letters. Our sympathy, at this moment, is supposed to be with him.
“Everything bad that has happened to me has been as a result of black people,” announces the teacher. By now, you may be wondering if the Ku Klux Klan have given up direct action, all that stuff with the white hoods and the flaming crosses, and dedicated themselves to pursuing their strange goals solely through drama. But I have neglected to tell you the crucial bit, which is that the teacher is black and the writer is black — and that the dislike of black people and culture is therefore a) okay, really, b) merely evidence of self-hatred or a psychosis induced by the patriarchal white hegemony, and c) is certain to be resolved into a triumphant vindication of black culture by the end.
Shoot the Messenger is one of those terrible and all too frequent instances of the BBC wishing, with Reithian fervour, to explore some biting social ishoos through a popular medium. As ever, its writer, Sharon Foster, has allowed the ishoos to run amok, like a pack of hoodies with Stanley knives; at every instance, one is clobbered over the head by a piece of leftish pop- sociology lecturing, to the extent that the characters aren’t allowed to breathe for themselves. They’ ve become mere ciphers for clodhopping social commentary.
To Foster’s credit, the ishoos identified are relevant and politically ticklish, and she does not shirk them. Why are Afro-Caribbean boys so hopeless academically — and behaviourally difficult? Is it the fault of our schools, society or the culture from which they emanate? Why are there so few black male teachers? And how can teachers enforce discipline in the classroom when the balance of power has shifted so far in favour of the children? All this is worthy of a dozen or so Panoramas, but for it to work as drama, there needs to be light and shade, nuance and subtlety. We get none of that here: despite an extremely likeable turn from David Oyelowo as the teacher, we never truly warm to him because his experience is so comically extreme, so divorced from the real world, that he seems more the embodiment of a third-form sociology textbook than flesh and blood.
The plot is this: black teacher wishes to “make a difference” by giving up his lucrative career in computing for altruistic ideals — to teach (largely) black kids in an inner-city comp. When he attempts to exert control over one particularly dysfunctional youngster, he is accused of assault and hounded from his job with the complicity of the authorities. He ends up an itinerant and a dosser, possessed by a hatred for all things black. His rapid descent into a personal abyss is, like everything else in the piece, hideously exaggerated and thus unbelievable. We were left suspecting that redemption for the black community might come in the form of caring and compassionate black women, to which we might all respond: “Well, sure, whatever.”
But better that, by far, than another series of the wildly overrated The Sopranos (Thursday, E4), which will, I dare say, pull in the ratings by the bucketload. Why on earth does anybody care what happens to this porcine, monosyllabic collection of gangsters, failed gangsters and wannabe gangsters, these remorselessly fat and violent middle-aged men with their stupid, grasping, ultra-chav wives and unbelievably wide-eyed offspring? If there is one clichéd genre to be put to rest, it’s Italo-American gangster chic, with its Ur-language, its moronic and medieval system of morality, its endless parade of shagging and grabbing and maiming. One can just about bear it when the direction is by Scorsese or Leone and we have De Niro, Keitel, Pacino and maybe Ray Liotta to ease our passage. On the small screen, we can pass and move on.
In episode one of the new series, there’s a fat thug called John in prison and a fat thug called Tony, agonising in the manner of a five-year-old child, somehow out of prison. Nothing much happens. The filming — the camerawork, the art direction, the editing and the plotting — is so much more confident and slick than Shoot the Messenger that one is, after a while, almost taken in. But only almost.
The opening dialogue began, straight off, with a cliché, delivered in that predictable, catarrhal, faux-ironic growl. “No one ever went broke under- estimating the taste of the American people,” a fat man said to another fat man in a car. No, indeed; that’s why another series was commissioned, mofo.
For some reason, these days we prefer The Sopranos to the likes of Smiley’s People — which gave you violence and morality, a clear, if nuanced, sense of right and wrong.
Meanwhile, another way of looking at the world for our jaded, over-Palined, Africa’d-out palates.
Equator (Sunday, BBC2) has a nice young man, Simon Reeve, travelling around the 24,000 sweating miles or so of the equator — a chance to experience, therefore, in perpetuity, those staples of the BBC geographical documentary, immense natural beauty and immense human misery. The series began in Gabon, a typically hideous African basket-case economy, ruled over by a man seemingly invented by the late Alan Clark: President Omar Bongo. Though the country is verdant, fertile and extraordinarily rich in minerals and oil, the Gabonese people are nonetheless on their uppers, so skint that, in many cases, they can’t afford a bowl of rice.
We were shown a ludicrous supermarket in the capital, Libreville, where almost every item of produce was imported, at enormous expense, from such places as France and Cameroon. But the typically clamorous street market in the capital wasn’t much better — a bunch of mangy-looking bananas would set you back a couple of quid, dearer than your local branch of Tesco. An equatorial country where the local people can’t afford even to eat bananas — magnificent. Corruption, incompetence and misgovernment seem to explain the problems of Gabon, unless Sharon Foster has any other suggestions.
Equator is presented exactly as it should be, with ingenuousness and, at times, incredulity. It showed me stuff I hadn’t previously known or imagined, and did so without condescending, excusing or lecturing. You cannot expect much more from a documentary, frankly. This is what the BBC does best, a travelogue that sometimes slips from the coffee table onto the floor; well presented and beautifully shot. I felt as though I were there, then, when I came to, was very grateful indeed that I wasn’t.
AA Gill is away
