Untold: Britain's Slave Trade (Channel 4, Sunday)
Living With The Enemy (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Arabian Nights And Lilywhites (RTE 1, Monday)
War Of The Century (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Julia Elton lounged on an antique sofa. Behind her, portraits of her ancestors stared down from panelled walls. Julia, a descendant of Abraham Elton, explained how "admirable" Abe had made enough loot to have the Eltons' big house, Clevenden Court, built. "He was," she brayed, "a self-made man with a strong entrepreneurial flair." So, he was a Richard Branson of the 18th century? "He was a trader who had slaving interests," said Julia, which is like describing General Motors as a trading outfit with an interest in cars. Abe, quite simply, was a slave-trader and Julia's pile was built, albeit not exclusively, on slavery.
Treating black people like livestock (holding them in pens, buying and selling them at marts, practically farming them) is the source of much of Julia's wealth. Well, so be it, such is history and few humans - at least in the wealthy countries - can be entirely guilt-free of profiting from exploitation. But Elton's brazenness was breathtaking. Anyway, among a number of programmes for Black History Month, Channel 4 is screening a four-part series, Untold: Britain's Slave Trade. Given that, at least in terms of its major thrusts, there was little new in this opening episode, the "untold" seemed suspiciously sensational.
Still, that's television marketing itself - showing "strong entrepreneurial flair", I suppose. The raw story, even in the retelling, is sensational enough. An estimated 12 million Africans were sold across the Atlantic Ocean and the biggest player in the early years of the slave trade was the British royal family. The Royal African Company was not interested in the Mickey Mouse coastal trading prevalent in Africa for centuries before any Europeans arrived. No, the RAC wanted to be the multinational corporation of the day and consequently concentrated on the much more lucrative transatlantic business. Clearly, their highnesses had strong entrepreneurial flair in shiploads.
Mind you, the Royal African Company was helped out by African royals - black kings being more or less as avaricious and primitive as white ones - so a right royal profit was assured. In the business ethics of the times, it was clear to the slave-traders and their royal executives that God had surely ordained black people for use by superior creatures like themselves. Otherwise His will would have been made known, wouldn't it?
As ever in trade though, there were new sharpies on the prowl. Mining around Bristol allowed local blokes to make metal implements - much prized by the African Ansbacher class of the day - and canny yokels were able to supplant the Royal African Company as the main profiteers in the human livestock trade.
So, Bristol on the river Avon became rich through slavery. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam - and boy, did it gather steam! - the slave trade became, as the animal livestock trade has since become, industrialised on a grand scale. Vast fortunes were made through the "triangular trade" of shipping metal goods to Africa, slaves to the New World and sugar back to Bristol. Then, as is customary in such adventuring, huge houses (in the Palladian style, of course, to show you were a person of culture who understood the classics) were built and patronage of the arts became de rigueur as philanthropy was practised to hide the slave roots of the cash. Hence people like Julia Elton - an Avon Lady with attitude.
The programme mostly interviewed academics. Its balance between white, British historians and black, African ones was reasonable, albeit clearly designed to allay any criticisms of imbalance or excessive Eurocentricity. Well, that's fair enough and for the most part, the academics, black and white, told the same story. There had been a tradition of slavery in those African countries which had no prison system. But it was mostly seasonal and people sent off as slaves almost always returned to their home places. The industrial-scale, commercial version changed all that, of course.
One black history professor spoke of "the limitless anger of some black people" over the entire enterprise. There is nothing new in telling us that royal families and their cronies, ruthless Bristol and Liverpool (this Sunday's subject) traders and New World plantation owners got rich through slavery. There is nothing new either in realising that many of the descendants of such profiteers are still living off slave fortunes. But the arrogance of punters like Julia Elton did suggest that black people might think, as many Jews have understandably done, about reparation for crimes against humanity. It has never been a few fly-boys or cowboy builders who have made the real killings from the black economy.
The builders featured on Living With The Enemy weren't so much cowboys as bullshitters. This week's offering, subtitled Feminists V Builders, featured two young women - Gemma Mitchell and Lorna Russell - who work for a feminist mag, going labouring for a week on a site in central London. On site were Mark Shaw and Shaun Denyer, with whom the women also had to share a two-bedroom flat for the week. Wolf-whistling, belching, farting and making puerile sexist comments ("women are only good for cooking and shagging, mate") the men - Denyer especially - moronically overplayed to the cameras.
The impression given, of course, was that the women were playing away on the men's home ground. But the media-savvy of magazine workers meant that, on television, the blokes would be gormless and all at sea on a London building site. So it proved. The lads blathered on with infantile guff about feminists "looking like Russian shotputters". Cut to Lorna using her two hands on a clawhammer to drive home an inch and a half oval nail. It certainly wasn't Olympic-standard carpentering but neither was it Olympic-standard shot-putting.
In fairness to the women, they did get stuck-in as best they could. "They're middleclass girls," said one of the blokes. "They think they can cut it here but they can't." Aha, this was not only true but crucially revealing. The men, not only admitting to, but regularly revelling in, their own ignorance, were none the less trenchant about their own worth - their own sense of identity. They cooked big fries (sausages, burgers, rashers). The women prepared a vegetarian risotto. At home with the quarrelsome foursome, we were deep into cliche country.
Then it was time to go to a strip show in a pub. The nudity of the female strippers (there were no male ones) looked bizarre in such a conventional setting. Still, the lads clapped while the women's eyes seemed to attempt to gaze into the far distance. Afterwards, there was the predictable debate about exploitation or choice. But one anecdote was disturbing. Lorna recounted that Shaun had told her about a bloke who heated 50 pence pieces to burn a stripper, whose party piece you can imagine for yourself. Freud might explain this sort of gender savagery. But it was still savagery, reminiscent of the sort of gratuitous brutality endured by many black slaves.
And so it went. Clearly, there was a gender issue involved but there was a class issue too. The women, who in this case were better educated, seemed to have an intimidating effect on the men, who, in turn, sought self-worth through what they hoped would be an intimidating brutishness. As ever then, people played to their self-perceived strengths. In the wider picture of all of this, you were left with the interminable problem of deciding whether or not society exploits middle-class women more than it often brutalises working-class men. In terms of personal responsibility, the women won easily. But in terms of the societal responsibility, which underpins the ability to be personally responsible, issues of exploitation were not so clearly resolved.
ISSUES of exploitation were pretty well dismissed by Arabian Nights and Lilywhites, one of the most shameless pieces of PR in quite some time. Ostensibly a celebration of the contribution of former Kildare vet, Michael Osborne, to the horse-racing and horse-breeding ventures of Dubai's crown-prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, this was a lilywhite promo for the good life to be had by Irish people in Dubai. The unimaginably wealthy sheikh, who, in fairness, appeared personable, was portrayed as just one of the lads, out for a bit of crack. Indeed the whole gig was such fun that you'd wonder how feudalism ever got such a bad name.
"All the barns are built as if they were good enough for the maternity ward in Holles Street," said Ted Walsh approvingly. Fair enough - they did seem spotless. The sheikh and his three brothers own about 2,000 thoroughbred horses worldwide. Back in Dubai, they have also promoted camel-racing. Young boys, mostly from India, it seems, are employed as camel-jockeys. "They have a great career structure," said Michael Osborne, adding that he has never seen them unhappy. Some of the boys are as young as seven years of age.
We also saw Charlie McCreevy, the crown prince of our Department of Finance, at Derby Day in the Curragh. Sure 'twas all a grand sight altogether - wimmin in hats as big as coffee-tables and horsey men wearing splendid suits and shirts (mustn't forget the shirts!). Now, this is all very well and people have every right to enjoy themselves. But in the current climate of Ansbacherism and Charvet shirts, this sort of ostentation begs questions. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Dubai, Irish emigrants played Gaelic football. Among the crowd watching them were native women dressed even more strikingly than the women at the Curragh: all you could see were their eyes - the rest was shrouded in black.
It's hard to know what to say about a programme like this. Certainly, Michael Osborne appears to have done an excellent job for the sheikh and it was never intended to produce a political or social commentary on life among the mega-rich in a feudal society. But there's got to be some context. Even Alan Whicker, who used to do this sort of stuff a generation ago, occasionally supplied an edge. Not here though - this was the most lilywhite portrait imaginable. It's a pity too, because there is a worthwhile story - the good and the bad - to be told. Ultimately though, this was no fly-on-the-wall effort. It was thoroughly lick-on-the-backside.
Finally, War of the Century. The opening episode in a four-parter about the cataclysmic conflict between Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union was excellent. With more than 30 million people killed in the war, the title is factual, not hyperbolic. The scale of the carnage is scarcely imaginable (in October, 1941, 150,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in five days - more than the British lost in five months on the horrific Somme!) and the series uses footage to chill the blood. Scenes of German soldiers throwing scraps of food into a pit seething with captured Russians - like feeding time for seals in a zoo - reminded you that white on white racism can be just as vile as any other combination.
Former German officers were interviewed. They said that so long as they believed that the Soviet Union was a threat to western civilisation, they could condone their actions as moral. Old Soviets told of cannibalism among the captured. Freshly dead prisoners, they said, were sometimes eaten. Because their skins might be diseased, human livers and even lungs were extracted for sustenance. We know that Marshal Zhukov and the Russian winter will eventually destroy German fascism. We learned that Stalin wanted to sue for peace. Indeed, in a television week featuring race, gender and class conflicts, there was, for once, much to learn.