| Undercover on a Rolls-Royce budget |
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Well, in theory, anyway. It turns out that quantity, and even quality, doesn't always make for a riveting hour's viewing, and both TV One's Body Butchers, and TV3's Parents Under Attack last night were a shade disappointing. Current affairs exposes only work when we are told about something we didn't even know the half of, or when a phenomenon we did know a bit about is not just presented to us, but explained and analysed. JANE CLIFTON The Body Butchers was a letdown, because we already knew the half of it, if not the whole of it. MacIntyre went undercover to expose the body parts market in India, and found exactly what we knew he would find: that poor people sell their organs to rich people with the connivance of crooked medical professionals, and that sometimes the donors get murdered afterwards to prevent their making trouble. We already knew why this happens, and had a fair idea of how it happens, and the programme didn't take either the facts, or the ethical debate much further. The parental abuse programme was a letdown because, while MacIntyre presented a slew of shocking stories about mothers living in terror of violent and even homicidal children, it never really explained this apparent epidemic. It was an appalling and depressing depressing programme, but not terribly empowering. The most arresting thing about the pair of them is how MacIntyre's career is developing. The older of the two programmes, Parents Under Attack, was a straight investigative interview project. But Body Butchers presented a whole new reality TV gimmick, the eternally-undercover journalist. It's the first in a series called MacIntyre's Millions, in which the star reporter is given £1 million to investigate one outrage each programme, wherever it takes him in the world, and however he sees fit to disguise himself. It's enough to make a New Zealand TV current affairs reporter weep. Forget about Heath Robinson muffled concealed cameras up your jumper. Every sting in this programme was crystal clear, technically artistic and eye-wateringly expensive. MacIntyre posed as a British millionaire interested in getting into the organ traffic market, and thus got to buddy-up with some prominent Indians who help arrange and perform this ethically dodgy surgery. He even got to watch an operation, and fairly easily established that it was, in contrast to what he was told, an illegal operation, despite being performed in a mainstream, fully-licensed, respectable hospital. It was interesting to see up-close the sanguine surgeons, and the grieving relatives. But as with much of what MacIntyre does, it was all somewhat over-egged. Every significant development was confided in endless repetitions to the hidden camera, and harped on in the narrative. At times, MacIntyre himself becomes an irritant. As with one of his earlier exposes, the overblown sting on racism within the British police – in which he again went undercover, the average viewer's response to his breathless outrage would have been, "Well, what did you expect?" Poor people in Nigeria are selling body parts to rich people in India. Yes, it's terrible. But it would be more interesting to concentrate your sleuthing on why officialdom isn't on to it, or to elucidate how difficult it would be to eradicate, even if officials were willing to try. There was also the germ of a compelling debate in there, in favour of legalising the trade, and regulating it. Parents Under Attack was the more surprising in content. It turns out there are so many abused parents in Britain, that support groups are swamped with desperate pleas for help. Mothers live in terror of their children, who become like over-dominant Rottweilers, snapping into violent frenzies, in between ambient bullying. Girls as much as boys. In some cases, children witnessing normalised violence by their fathers was a pretty obvious contributing factor. But in other cases, it was a scary mystery. The first boy interviewed, a slight, normal, bashful-seeming young teen, had been going into rages, as if a Mad switch had suddenly flicked on in his brain, since he was seven years old. These mothers sounded like they were describing a sudden pit bull attack, rather than their own children's daily routines. You longed to get the little devils in for a brain scan. But they can't all have neurological problems. This seemed a step on from the normal rebellious teenager thing, to something quite different in origin. But we never heard much about that. MacIntyre interviewed an expert who said the usual things about children witnessing violence and adopting it. She also postulated that behaving dominantly, taking aggressive control of others around you, could be rather a buzz, and certainly more reassuring than withdrawing and giving in to anxiety. Disturbing, but not terribly satisfying. Even so, this is current affairs on a budget we here can only dream of, so we should probably make the most of perpetually-outraged Donal. After all, within a year or two, he'll be too well-known to go undercover any more, and some other journalist will get those millions.
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What could be better than a BBC documentary by hunky Scots journo-sleuth Donal MacIntyre? Two documentaries by hunky Scots journo-sleuth Donal MacIntyre.