Hate Males

An exploration of far Right prejudice finally failed to show the conviction of its courage, but a return to Rwanda revealed a mindless loathing which turned peaceful farmers into merciless child-killers

England Expects BBC1
Unreported World C4
Footballers' Wives ITV1
Panorama BBC1

Facial hair is the great signifier of extremism. Father Christmas, God in heaven, Islamic fundamentalism: they're all far-fetched ideas that come dressed in long beards. There were no beards in England Expects; nor among its cast of Bangladeshi east Londoners were there any Islamic fundamentalists. There was, however, a moustache, a scrappy, shapeless thing that sat like a neglected animal beneath Steven Mackintosh's nose, bristling with wounded rage.

With the news dominated by religious nihilism, here was television that focused on another, equally poisonous, hatred: racism. That the two feed off one another was alluded to in passing, but was never the subject of the piece. Instead, the two-hour drama, written by Frank Deasy, aimed to get inside the mind of Ray Knight (Mackintosh), a security guard whose latent fascism erupts when his life begins to collapse around him.

The concentration on Knight gave scope to Mackintosh's intelligent and edgily restrained performance and was, as a result, the film's considerable strength. But it was also its most frustrating weakness, insofar as the other characters, in particular those with brown skin, managed by comparison to evince all the depth and animation of damp cardboard.

Though it was a bold move to depict a racist who was not simply a cartoon, how much more challenging it would have been if there was even one Asian portrayed with the same authenticity and ambiguity as the errant Knight.

Instead, underwritten and poorly drawn, they often seemed to inhabit not just a different world to him, which was the point, but a different genre. With his detailed, complex characterisation, Mackintosh was reminiscent of a younger Gary Oldman from an era when state-ofthe- nation television drama was almost commonplace. Everyone else could have walked into an episode of The Bill without attracting comment.

It started promisingly in a financial firm in Canary Wharf, where Knight, a diligent security man, took rather too much interest in the wellbeing of a female trader. As long as the action stayed within the confines of the office, it remained psychologically taut, undefined, realistic. But as soon as it strayed into what a touchy-feely Muslim drugs counsellor called the 'community', the tension fell victim to a series of urban clichés that never really fitted together.

Knight's teenage daughter was a petty thief hooked on heroin and entombed on a sink estate with her feckless, lumpen mother. Her cohort in crime was a young Bangladeshi lad, alienated from his religious mother and sister. His sister also worked as a trader, but lived, for reasons best known to herself, with her family in the same council slum.

There was the obligatory drug dealer in a BMW, like all the main British-Asian characters, a man of fierce pride and unusual eloquence. And also a reformed BNP-style politician who, in case we mistook him for a moderate, explained his sinister secret agenda in a scene of such clunking exposition that it would not have been any less subtle had he been wearing Nazi regalia and clicking his jackboot heels.

Inadvertently, Knight became the 'lone wolf' terrorist that the far Right party was looking for after he was sacked for sexual harassment. He then shot the Asian trader with a crossbow and was accidentally killed by one of his own thuggish acolytes. The story ended neatly, but unsatisfactorily, with Knight seen as a martyr and the Bangladeshi lad, who had given up heroin for Allah, falsely accused of his murder.

England Expects started out with the unexpected but developed into the unbelievable. For all its faults, this was still powerful television that, had it shown the conviction of its courage, could have been great television.

Racial or, more accurately, communal hatred was the theme of the week. There was a fine Unreported World from Kashmir, where Sandra Jordan forced her way between the Indian authorities and the Pakistan-backed militants to reveal a battle of lies, attrition and terror. It was urgent, shaky-camera stuff that may have lacked cool analysis, but made up for that with its chilling portrait of winnerless war.

Also, of course, it was 10 years since the genocide in Rwanda and Fergal Keane returned with Panorama to interview the survivors and, still more disturbingly, the killers. You are either moved by Keane's sincere manner and 'under a salmon sky' descriptions or you find them off-putting. In normal circumstances, I'm in the latter group. But these were the most abnormal circumstances the world has seen in the past 20 years and Keane, to give him his due, dealt with them without fuss or invasive sentiment.

He first visited the country a decade ago when the corpses of hundreds of thousands of slain Tutsis still despoiled the landscape, so he knew of what hell he spoke. How more than half-a-million people came to be murdered inside three months is a tale that remains largely untold. Only recently has the shameful negligence of the West and the United Nations come to public attention.

This was not a documentary that sought to unearth the causes of the genocide - perhaps that's an impossible task because no cause can measure up to the effect. Instead, it aimed to find out what motivated normal Hutus to take part in such vicious acts against their neighbours. What turned peaceful farmers into merciless child-killers?

Keane interviewed a number of the murderers. They spoke of the lakes of blood and the need to wear rubber boots during the slaughter but nothing they said came close to an explanation. 'It was a time of hatred,' said one. 'All of this came like a madness,' said another.

One man recalled hunting down a 10-year-old boy for a week, clubbing him as he begged for his life, then burying him alive. Though haunted by the atrocity, he spoke as if he did not know or understand the person who committed it.

It was not until the end of the film that the context of the interviews was revealed, an omission that was unnecessarily misleading. The men were all prisoners in Rwanda whose freedom depended on their admission of guilt and contrition. Soon, they will be returning to their villages to live alongside their victims' families and the scarred and brutalised survivors. It's hard to see how that policy can work, but if it does there must be hope for bridging even the most unforgiving divide.

After Rwanda, almost anything falls within the elastic realm of the possible, except perhaps the plotlines of Footballers' Wives. Only in television can you move from the subhuman to the ridiculous and not suffer a reality crisis. That's the medium's gift and its curse.

In recent months, the soap opera of Premiership football has put in a strong bid to move above the scriptwriters of Footballers' Wives in the fantasy league, but the writers have stood firm and ground out some difficult results, despite the fact that key members of last season's cast sustained career-threatening injuries and a new team has had to settle in.

The build-up to the final fixture of this season saw an inspired performance from the Beckhams and a promising young lass in Madrid in a last-ditch effort to wrest the title for the professionals. But the fictional side came back with an awesome display of preposterousness.

The lass Tanya - she's put in an absolute blinder. She's been playing one-twos with the boy Conrad and she's received a firm pass and then she's taken on Amber, her opposing number in that vital creative bitch position, and she's nutmegged her, left her for dead, ridden some hard tackle and scored a stunner, a peach of plottwist, a shot that goes straight into the womb. Yes, she's having a baby. One-nil. Game over.

But, wait. After the action replay on the monitor, it turns out Conrad didn't supply the assist after all. Would you believe it? The girl's obviously gutted. But what can you say - that's football.

One has to admire Footballers' Wives, rather like one has to admire Manchester United, but it's difficult to love it. Nevertheless, people say they do all the time, in that knowing, ironic, isn'ttrash- TV-fabulous? kind of way. But, actually, it's too camp for its own good. Bombarding us with melodramatic kitsch, relentlessly demanding that it is undemanding, it never allows us to do any of the work.

When Amber asks Conrad of Tanya: 'What kind of mother do you think she's going to make? Changing nappies with those nails?', it's a line whose humour is directed so blatantly at us, rather than Conrad or Tanya, that it could almost come with a laugh track.

The final episode of this series did not have anything to match the cliffhanger of the last one, but there were plenty of unresolved storylines for a third season. It would be wrong, though, to say that we were left in any kind of suspense. That would require us to want to know what happens next, when we already know the answer: exactly the same as before, only more so.

If the producers really want to surprise us, they should add something to change the unending smooth surface of outrageous glamour. Perhaps some facial hair - if that's not too extreme.
· Kathryn Flett is away

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