Angry, White and Proud (C4) | 4OD
Cyberbully (C4) | 4OD
Girls (Sky Atlantic) | Watch trailer
Togetherness (Sky Atlantic) | Watch trailer
There has seldom been a better advert for the far right, other than 7/7, 9/11 and other such unconscionables that I would with all my soul have preferred to denote unplayable time-signatures, than Angry, White and Proud’s Colin. Wise, wiry, funny, prone to self-examination, he gently mocked his own Italian-born mother in their kitchen as they prepared pasta (again). “Bloody foreigners, coming over ’ere, taking all our…” and they dissolved together into sweary laughter.
What Colin did hate was Muslims. “The so-called religion of peace that’s destroying the fucking world. Yeah, I’ll admit it. I’m racist against Muslims. Fucking hate ’em. More than West Ham.” Despite his category-error of confusing race with religion, one in which he has been far from alone these past two weeks of 24-hour cross-channel Hebdobabble, Colin was rightly the cornerstone of Jamie Roberts’s brave film, over a year in the making, which charted the right’s new campaign against the new enemy: radical Islam. It aired with hideous serendipity a week after Paris.
Colin was a member of the south London Infidels, one of the half-hundred splinter groups that have sprung up since the death of the English Defence League and made it their duty to out, without benefit of Intelligence, or in some cases intelligence, the enemy within, in the form of murderous Islam. So they marched on the streets of Rotherham, after the child-grooming scandal, to applause from many ladies outside the bingo, and sought to expose an alleged al-Qaida fund-tunnel in a ratforsaken part of north London.
Two surprises. The first was the bright good humour of some – I stress some – of the ex-EDL activists. They had not only fun but a remarkable grasp of geopolitics. A small few of them were, indubitably, not racist. Second was the superhuman tolerance of the police. Even with their passive-aggressive silly wee iPhotos and bristling squirrelly Jodrell Banks of shoulder tech, and “if sir would step this way”, they are a different and kinder force than 20 years ago, and remarkably even-handed: now they dish it out, with kid gauntlets, to both right and left. Actually there was a third surprise: Colin. He ended the programme fed up, and growing up. Having earlier admitted that there was little difference between radicalised Islam and the radicalised white right – “both brainwashed, innit, it’s going into a tribe” – he later drew the logical conclusion. “It’s not so much because of my hatred of other people. It’s because of my hatred of myself.”
What the programme didn’t manage, despite its intense import in this or any other month, was to answer the question: is the new fractured right now simply targeting Islam in the way it has always targeted vulnerable minorities? Some of them very yes, but a few of them, assuredly, no. In the few, we saw a certain raucous British yeoman spirit which will always defy sharia – not in the way of the French, stylishly unsullied as they are by royal or much other deference – but in their own rough effective ways.
Personally, I can’t see any way forward – if the gleeful “sectarian war” prediction of the utter dick Paul and others who, with knuckle-dragging inevitability, sported “Fuck Islam” badges, is to be averted – other than this: drawing the thorn. Thwarting the power of medieval fantasy to thunder the glee of glorious life today. I would suggest a march somewhere on the streets of Britain, depicting the prophet: benignly, but depicting him somehow, with a placard or two, and peace be upon him, and they couldn’t shoot us all. “Je suis mohammed”: that would do. “Je suis mo”. If six, 10, marched, it would be a victory. If a thousand, a revolution.
Cyberbully. I couldn’t, daren’t, pull myself away from the screen. Nor could Casey, the phenomenal Maisie Williams, last seen in Game of Thrones, here seen in basically a one-woman one-hour drama, her face on-screen throughout, sneering and arrogant and tech-savvy and, after she was hacked by a higher tech-savant, snottily fearful and tearful.
It will be said that it’s a parable of our times, but it was also a remarkable insight into the way teenagers’ minds work today. She is challenged by an anonymous cyberstalker – who has inveigled his webcammed way into her bedroom, and subtly banished her father with threats of Casey’s ill-advised selfies and breast-shots being Twittered.
Casey has, though she didn’t quite know it, started a Twitter storm by ridiculing a classmate who sings badly (really badly, btw), and self-posts it online. Challenged to defend herself against cyberbullying, she in turn accuses her stalkboy of being, simply, old, ie over 30. “You just don’t get it. Of course it’s nasty, but it’s normal, and you deal with it.” Turns out Jen, the classmate, ended up hanging herself. Casey collapses into tears, some of them real. Her cyber-assailant urges her to do the same, with pills: he has every feed imaginable, her best pal’s selfies, her father’s porn sites, and uploads them with every pill Casey doesn’t swallow.
Casey finally walks – no, crawls – away from her computer, daring the worst. If her life was to be over, it was better that it was over in cyberspace – wherein purely exist many teenage lives now – than in reality. Brave Casey: and gripping, worrying, viewing, and a one-woman stage show yearning to be created.
Lena Dunham’s Girls, back for a fourth season, underwhelmed. Despite promises of her move to an Iowa writers’ course, with all the clever backchat that promises, this was just a recap of all the witchy New Yorken bitchery seen before. But there is hope. Dunham is Marmite, and her $3.5m book advance inexplicable, but there were some glorious moments here, not least Marnie’s deserved if sadly only figurative mauling at the two words any musician knows to avoid. Jazz brunch.
I’ll watch again, and now eagerly. I happen to like Marmite. But far better this week was Togetherness, a kind of thirtysomething 30 years on, but less preachy. And with better sex jokes. And actors. Win-win?