ROBERT BECKFORD’S The Empire Pays Back (Channel 4) frequently felt more like stunt-TV than documentary; like Dennis Pennis with pretensions. What obligations does modern Britain have to the descendants of slaves? What is the culpability of 21st-century corporations which have, in the past couple of centuries, unknowingly acquired companies that may once have earned some of their profits through servicing some aspect of the slave trade? Slavery was clearly morally repugnant, but broke no laws of the time: so does that mean we should respond to it any differently to, say, the Holocaust, which contravened international law? These are intriguing questions which seem worthy of more grown-up investigation than Beckford’s prankish approach.

“I believe African slaves were ripped off by the British Empire,” Beckford began, punchily. “I’m going to track down some heirs to Britain’s slave past and ask them to pay reparations for the slave trade. To me, there’s no doubt that we African-Caribbeans are owed for our unpaid labour.” Of course, he never really got to ask anyone. He did stalk the Queen one night as she attended a banquet in the City of London, aiming to dun her for the £7.5 trillion he reckons that descendants of Britain’s slaves are owed, but he didn’t even catch a glimpse.

Beckford is a lecturer in the School of Historical Studies at Birmingham University, which makes his extravagant leaps of logic feel even more dispiriting. When he appears on a London radio programme to goad Londoners to pay up, he interprets their scornful response to his demands as postcolonial shock, rather than to dismay at his intellectual flabbiness.

An example? Try this: “Every day, African-Caribbeans in Britain experience the economic legacy of slavery: African-Caribbean men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white men; black workers earn up to 16 per cent less than whites; and more African-Caribbean men enter prison than university. To me, black people are still paying for slavery and should be compensated. But some people just don’t get it!” These statistics may all be true, but what is the link? We ’re not doubting that there is one, but couldn’t Beckford have taken a moment to detail it for us? Women still earn less than men; more men go to prison than women. And so? Statistics are meaningless unless anchored to something more solid than passion and polemics.

When Beckford asks passers-by if they think it would be a good idea to have some kind of permanent memorial to Britain’s slave past, and the passers-by say that they do, their response convinces Beckford that “British people do have a sense of fair play and want justice done.” The implication, given that this was the culmination of the film, is that the justice they want done is the trillion-pound reparations that Beckford had been demanding for the previous hour. But what the passers-by backed was Beckford’s worthwhile suggestion for some kind of memorial.

There is certainly a fascinating programme to be made about the history, and the moral and social legacy of Britain’s slave past. But this wasn’t it. This was Speakers’ Corner TV.

The Week The Women Went (BBC Three) was a lower-budget version of Channel 4’s new US blockbuster drama, Lost; only instead of a bunch of passengers stranded on an island after a plane crash, there is a bunch of men stranded in an ancient Nottinghamshire village after they’ve been abandoned for a week by their womenfolk and left to fend for themselves.

Of course, the programme-makers’ idea was evidently that when the men’s wives announced: “When we are away you’re going to have to do all the cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, and look after the children,” these undomesticated men would look back helplessly and start blubbing about how they couldn’t cook even a slice of toast on account of not being able to operate any machinery that doesn’t come with its own remote control handset; whereas the men just looked at their wives with a bold air of adventure and said: “We have children?” The menfolk’s first decision? To order in 28 tonnes of concrete. Now there’s something that those flighty women never thought of as they selfishly busied themselves raising the children, finding schools, cooking meals, washing and darning, booking holidays and paying the gas bill.

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