TV Review:A young man calls his wife from an airport departure lounge. "I love you," he tells her. He says it again. And a third time. "I love you." Then he hangs up. Here was a drama about the 9/11 hijackers; but it had begun with love, not hate.
The Hamburg Cell approached 9/11 from the terrorists' point of view. It is not a film likely to have been made in the United States, where only the actions of the passengers on Flight 93 have received some sort of dramatic treatment. This, though, was a film that approached the darkness of the hijackers' intent rather than took comfort from heroes. The result humanised a group of men who have been, and always will be, demonised. It showed that it was ordinary men who brought extraordinary horror upon the world.
Ronan Bennett's script focused particularly on Ziad Jarrah, a Lebanese student, who was schooled in a Catholic college and arrived in Germany as a lapsed Muslim, but who developed into a committed jihadist. Played by Karim Saleh, he was a quiet, gentle figure caught between the demands of his religion and the temptations of the modern world. It was most evident while attending flight school, when he brought his conservatism to bare-fleshed, uninhibited Florida; a place portrayed almost as a waiting room for the Paradise the hijackers believe awaits them.
If The Hamburg Cell strained in any way it was in solidifying the motives behind Jarrah's conversion to jihad. The steps were large ones, bringing him swiftly from tolerance to fanaticism. Yet, perhaps it is asking too much to expect such a closed mind to be easily prised open here.
Instead, under the direction of Antonia Bird, it linked together snapshots, gradually gathering pace towards the inevitable climax. It dealt skilfully with a complicated cast. It made you realise how few of their names we know.
They were promised that they would be "the men who changed the course of history", but they have remained relatively anonymous to many of us, in the West at least. The best-known of them, Mohammed Atta, was played, by an actor named only as Kamel, with subtle but frightening intensity.
This was a fine film, of rare importance. It found the humanity in these men, but it did not excuse the desperate inhumanity of their acts. It listened to their moral certainty but recognised the self-delusion at its core. And it did so delicately and dispassionately. The film ended with Ziad walking the gangway towards Flight 93. The screen turned bright white, but he was entering only profound darkness.
FICTION, THOUGH, SELDOM has interest in the bland realities behind horror. Instead, it occupies much time trying to manufacture ever more terrible events, regardless of the weakness of their foundations.
In this week's Messiah, the murders came thick and fast; each more ingenious than the previous. How many ways are there to kill a person? Messiah accepted the challenge.When was the last time you saw someone done in by a hospital's MRI scanner? In which a wrong kidney transplant did for one victim, or a hospital superbug for another? In Messiah, death piled upon death. Over the two episodes, victims arrived at a rate of roughly three an hour. Someone was pushed down a lift shaft; another had his face sliced off with a buzzsaw. It went on. A victim's vital signs were slowed by a poison so that he appeared dead, but only actually expired under the scalpel of a post-mortem. A doctor was put in an airless box. "A criminal who was capable of such a thought is a man whom I should be proud to do business with," Sherlock Holmes once said. Of this felon, it is a wonder the cast of detectives weren't reduced to admiring applause in honour of such dastardly brilliance.
Messiah gives the appearance of being deeply serious. It is coloured in glum ochre, so that the world appears to be quite run down. Its music is lush with portent. Smiles are checked in at the door. Yet, in its deaths it seems to be knowingly comedic; its writer Lizzie Mickery perhaps finding great amusement in repeatedly toying with credulity.
And yet, it really does seem to be playing it straight. Ken Stott takes the role of DCI Red Metcalf, whose entire career is based on chasing down killers for whom a simple stabbing or straightforward garrotting would be a betrayal of their artistic integrity.
Stott tends to enter scenes from the shadows. His nose catches the light, before the rest of him is revealed. This particular plot involved the aftermath of a prison riot, and the steady demise of each of its main players over a few days in the one hospital. Corpses piled up with impudent regularity. Murder after murder happened on his watch. Witnesses bought it. Suspects croaked.
Stott's face became an increasingly strained visage of quiet bewilderment. Perhaps he was wondering why he hadn't yet been sacked.
The most blindingly obvious suspect, for reasons not worth troubling you with, was his colleague DS Kate Beauchamp (Frances Grey). So it was never likely to be her. Instead it was a previously charming young doctor who turned out to be one earpiece short of stethoscope, and his back-story ultimately unravelled at about the same time as the script. But by then, Messiah had fulfilled its duty to give us death in ever-decreasing circles of grisliness.
For the climax, the murderer was killed by a single bullet from a policeman's rifle. Where's the imagination in that?
Rude Girls did not have to recreate a sickly environment. Morgan Matthews documentary on girl gangs in London and Luton found them in a familiar landscape of concrete and high-rise, of decrepit shopping centres and run-down estates. It was the latest in a glut of documentaries that lift the rock from British working class wastelands to see what's crawling around beneath. Last week, Channel 4 broadcast the controversial but compelling Edge of the City. This week it is Rude Girls. You wonder if film-makers increasingly pass by each other on the mean streets.
Rude Girls was undoubtedly troubling. These were young women already drowning, although their behaviour did not encourage you to want to rescue them. Sherry, for instance, was a 14-year-old waif under a distressed beehive haircut, who would intermittently erupt with aggression. She would hang around outside the local Jewish school, abusing Hasidic kids and their parents, making jokes about Hitler. Her mother, as insolent as her daughter, laughed along with her as she screamed at a couple of elderly Jewish women.
Elsewhere, there was Stacey, who had managed to get herself pregnant and quickly began to resent how her infant daughter interfered with her crime sprees. She only began to right herself when her new boyfriend moved in a week into their relationship, and set about teaching this habitual joyrider how to drive and smoke cigarettes at the same time.
Matthews's programme was filled with middle-class concern for these girls; each of them lacked a father figure, for instance, and it was genuinely unsettling to see the bloody wounds along one girl's arm as she reluctantly showed him the results of her self-harm. It showed the viciousness of which young girls are capable, although that it is not a lesson we are unfamiliar with on either side of the Irish Sea. But ultimately, the questions revolved as much around the film-maker. When a BBC camera follows around girls who are desperate for attention, isn't it likely they will oblige? They showed Matthews off to their mates, they robbed cars, they argued, they stole. He wanted to observe them, but may have inadvertently encouraged them.
And finally, on Wednesday, TV3 News took an opportunity to announce its autumn schedules. This season it will feature movies and imported dramas and Ursula Halligan presenting a political show. Hold on to your hats.
Six years on from its birth and TV3 confirms that it is stuck on a diet of British drip-feeds and American junk. It might argue that it shows so many ITV programmes not simply because it is part-owned by the largest ITV company, but to service those viewers who don't have the British channel. But the fruits of that policy are yet to be diverted into home-programme making. It has developed few skills for making its own television, but it has shown itself to have a meagre appetite. Its website still promises that TV3 "continues to challenge established broadcast practice". In that it is a television station that continues to make very few television programmes, it might have a point.
