TV Review: Two real-life dramas dealing with wrongful arrest and miscarriages of justice were aired this week.
The big hitter was Cherished, by Gwyneth Hughes, which told the story of Angela Cannings (Sarah Lancashire), who spent two years in prison having been wrongfully convicted of the murder of her two infant sons. Cannings's tragic story made moving and affecting drama.
Having lost three children to cot death she was subjected to two years of investigation and court hearings, during which time she was not allowed to live with her surviving daughter, Jade, who was then only three years old. Her husband, Terry (Timothy Spall), lost his job, they lost their home, but the worst, most terrifying fear was that they might lose Jade, who was placed on the at-risk register. As Terry said: "We have lost three children - fear of losing the living one is worse than the grief for those who died."
At Angela's trial, child abuse expert Dr Roy Meadows, having never met Cannings, was of the opinion that she was a child murderer. His previous (and wild) assertion that the odds on more than one cot death naturally occurring in one family was 73 million to one sealed Cannings's fate.
She served two brutalising years in prison and, labelled a "child killer", was subjected to violence and intimidation.
Cannings was eventually released after a landmark appeal decision changed British law on the evidence of expert witnesses. Lancashire's frozen terror as her hallucination thawed into reality and Spall's powerful performance as a man whose certainties have been shattered lifted this drama out of televised tabloidism. There was no simple happy ending for the couple, only the will to keep going for their daughter.
Roy Meadows is to face a medical review board for serious professional misconduct. Angela Cannings and her family have received no compensation from the British government, nor will they; 28 more families in similar situations now await retrials.
Thank goodness for the 10 p.m. news, the world's can-opener. Just as one was ready to whack one's head off the wall in frustration at the "system", one was sobered by the shocking and hugely important news that Queen Elizabeth had decided not to go to Charles and Camilla's wedding - one hasn't got a thing to wear apparently. Darn.
"THE RIGHT TO offend is more important than the right not to be offended," said Rowan Atkinson in Dispatches: Holy Offensive. With religion and art snarling at each other like a couple of salivating Rottweilers, this investigation of cultural collision was timely. In the Netherlands, Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic militant for making a film which included passages of the Koran written on the body of a semi-naked woman. In Birmingham, the play, Behzti, was pulled following rioting by enraged Sikhs, and the BBC received an unprecedented amount of complaints following its screening of Jerry Springer: the Opera. Dispatches asked how devout religious belief and artistic freedom can co-exist.
"Art," we were told, "will question assumptions of taste," and "all great ideas, religions among them, prove themselves by being in conflict". The Bishop of Chelmsford, who had invited some of the cast of the Jerry Springer opera to perform at a tsunami fund-raiser in his cathedral, defended his decision by arguing that Jesus's own views were in his time seen as unpalatable and blasphemous, and that freedom of speech was as vital today as it was then. With talk of the introduction in Britain of new laws on the incitement to religious hatred and the worldwide growth of more fundamentalist faith-based societies, this documentary revealed that whatever about the arguments for and against free speech, in practice the religious groups are winning. Several interviewees talked about the growing tendency towards self-censorship among artists who are too frightened or uncertain to take on their opponents, and the sight of a haggard-looking Salman Rushdie, still living in the shadow of the recently re-confirmed fatwa against him, was a reminder of the consequences of fooling with faith or, as one of the Jerry Springer writers described it, of "deifying humanity and humanising the deity".
THE SECOND OF this week's real-life dramas, Planespotting, was a cautionary tale for, well . . . plane-spotters. Plane-spotters are pretty easy to spot. They all look like very big toddlers and get acutely excited by shiny machines that go vroom. Veteran spotter Paul Chopin (Mark Benton) and his libidinous new wife, Lesley (Lesley Sharp), took a bunch of spotters to Greece for "a feast of aviation", their plan being to dispatch the spotters after they had done a bit of quality . . . em . . . spotting, and then to enjoy a late honeymoon.
However, the "awesome array of spotter talent" aroused the suspicions of the Greek military by running enthusiastically around an air show in their shorts (eminently reasonable on the Greek side, who must have thought they'd uncovered a Teletubby espionage ring). Leslie was sent to a crumbling prison in Athens.
"We do not," the woman governor said, "have mices in this prison" (oh yes you do!). Meanwhile, Paul and his mates were imprisoned awaiting trial in southern Greece on charges of distinguished espionage (which in times of war carries the death penalty), and despite sharing cells with some sexually ambiguous and frothily tattooed cellmates, managed to confine their conversation to . . . plane-spotting and their incredulity that Wagon Wheels were available in the prison canteen.
After their bail hearing (refused), Paul and Lesley eventually celebrated their honeymoon in the back of a prison van while their mates sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and looked the other way. Planespotting was sharply acted and beautifully written and should make anoraks everywhere proud to be anoraks. Paul and Leslie and their co-defendants were eventually allowed tell the deeply perplexed Greek court their side of the story: "We are not the fighter pilots, the men of action - we are doomed forever to be on the sidelines, but we are proud to be . . . plane-spotters."
The utterly bamboozled Greeks, who, as the founders of civilisation, could barely comprehend a bunch of grown men and women in ankle socks following aeroplanes around and writing their tail numbers in notebooks, eventually acquitted them. This was the cue for explicit scenes of frumpy people clutching handbags, their spectacles misting with tears, kissing and hugging in the unforgiving white light of a Greek summer's day.
"What is an aubergine?" asked a spotter on the outward journey.
"It's big and purple like a swollen courgette," said libidinous Leslie.
SWOLLEN COURGETTES, THEIR relatives and friends, were sent packing in Jamie's School Dinners. Jamie Oliver's vocabulary is significantly more limited than his repertoire of dishes and as the pukka chef became more unstucka in the face of the intransigent eating habits of a London school, his language would have certainly got him expelled.
"F**king scrotum burgers," he yelled as yet another tray of deadly junk was trollied out to the waiting students. Norah, the irascible Irish dinner lady at the school where Jamie began his campaign to transform school dinners, serves up a quarter of a ton of chips a week, 300 pizza portions a day and countless reconstituted fish fingers, sausages and malodorous burgers.
Some 97 per cent of children at the school are eating an unbalanced diet: they are getting no vitamin C and no iron, and are at increased risk of getting cancer, diabetes and heart disease - and the really frightening fact is that most of them are going home to the same fare.
Jamie's attempt to get these children eating healthy, nutritious food is laudable, but given the evidence of the first programme in this series, seemingly impossible. The budget to feed a school child in the borough is 37p a day, which left Jamie uninspired.
"It's like taking away Beckham's boots and asking him to play football in Jesus sandals," he said in his fast car on the way to a photo-shoot for his new book, where he hoped to see his wife and children for five minutes before rushing back to his restaurant, 15, and coping with some grown-up diners.
After a couple of tense lunchtimes, Norah was dispatched to Jamie's restaurant for a bit of culinary taming by Jamie's head chef, while Jamie was given the run of the school kitchen. Jamie lovingly prepared and kissed some focaccia bread and then, much to the amazement of Norah's co-workers, shaped it into a giant penis and decorated it with a bunch of parsley and two red onions, before cutting it up and baking it. This, of course, was passed over by the children in favour of . . . chips.
As they sat outside the headmistress's office waiting for adjudication, Jamie asked Norah: "Did you get detention and lines and stuff at school?" "Are you joking me?" boomed Norah, 30 years of London life battling with an unmistakably Irish accent. "I got beaten."
You've your work cut out for you there, mate. Lovely jubbly.
