House of Saddam (BBC Two)

If Burn Up failed last week as a drama based on real events because the speechifying around oil and environmental destruction felt unwieldy and silly, House of Saddam was the flipside: convincing and chilling, this had the pace of real drama and the advantage of being – dramatically – unexplored territory. It was soap (the feeling of Dallas was heightened by the late-1970s/early-1980s tacky glam: check out Saddam’s glass lift), it was reality, it was cheeky and it was terrifying. Saddam’s reign was one of such excess and terror, it was hard to see where reality ended and fiction began.

This compelling drama began in Saddam’s Baghdad palace, on the day George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. A woman we presumed to be his wife (which one?) packed glasses away, as if readying herself to move house. As his grip on power faltered, we switched back to 1979 and the moment he seized power. The night of his daughter’s birthday, he held a party. Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, then President, came to offer his good wishes and then, in an anteroom, was forced to give up power. The threat and menace of Saddam was made immediately clear – you sensed that, not only did al-Bakr not have any choice in the matter, but if he in any way made trouble he would be killed. How Saddam had risen to power was a frustrating omission but maybe another drama.

Saddam ruled brutally from the off, claiming to have found spies and conspirators within the Baath party. This seemed farfetched. He wanted to eliminate anyone who didn’t agree with him and we watched one minister bloodied and flayed, ribbons of blood on his shoulders and fear etched across every feature. Eventually 22 people were sentenced to execution for treason, and the drama showed them being shot by trembling colleagues.

The paranoia of Saddam’s reign was powered early on by Iraq’s war with Iran: any enemies were friends of Ayatollah Khomeini. He demanded loyalty but that wasn’t enough – if you were out of favour you might be excommunicated (lucky) or killed (usual). We watched him take one of his younger sons to Tikrit – Uday? Qusay? – where he was born and raised, and teach him how to shoot.

Bombs, power struggles and a large, sprawling family make for great drama, but much was hinted at and not explained. For instance, Saddam had a formidable mother whom he told bitterly on her deathbed: “You gave me nothing.” Why? Their relationship, his anger, wasn’t unpacked. His wife in these early years of power, Sajida, was shown bemoaning having to hole up in a tent outside Tikrit when she could be in Paris and London. But was she flighty or principled and what did she think of him? We don’t know, although we did see her unable to mourn with the wife of one of the men Saddam has killed – one of his closest associates – because of the bloody hypocrisy of it. “A man who can sacrifice his best friend is a man without weakness,” he tells her.

This seems to be shaping into a family saga rather than dry biography, so a rudimentary who’s who would be useful. For instance, we see Saddam’s troubled relationship with his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim – but this was too thinly sketched to be enlightening. Barzan Ibrahim protested his loyalty but at that point Saddam favoured Hussein Kamel, his son-in-law and second cousin: what lay behind this was mysterious and unexplained. You would never know the significance of the massacre Barzan Ibrahim oversaw in one scene unless you knew Iraqi history.

Igal Naor’s performance as the dictator was brilliant: he looks like him, and, in a split second, went from father to murderer. He is vain. He has affairs with women under their husbands’ noses. He likes to humiliate. Absolute loyalty is not enough for him. He will kill without thinking, and the terrible thing, as with any dictator, is to watch not just the masses hailing him, but the bowing and scraping of his supine – and most likely terrified – inner circle.

Dangerous Jobs for Girls (Channel 4)

Three professional women learnt to be cowboys in South America in Dangerous Jobs for Girls. It was beyond stupid: they started a bit badly, were patronised by the sexist cowboys, then won their respect by driving some cattle across a deep stream. One had a problem with a horse being castrated, another lost some cattle. The programme kept harping on that these women were powerful in their lives back in Britain, but here were learners, an emphasis that seemed to assert that women are getting terribly above their stations and should be bought down to size, as humiliatingly as possible.

In the end, the macho cowboys said they were brilliant, the women wept with gratitude and so a supposedly feminist exercise was predicated on male approval. It’s a dangerous job, watching formulaic, contrived reality shows.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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