TV Review of the Week: Roots, and The Moorside

It’s an American series, having been shown in the US last year, so when the BBC acquired the rights to it they should have been shouting it from the rooftops, not putting it quietly on BBC4 where the rock documentary repeats live. It seems like an odd choice but maybe it’s just too harrowing for BBC2?

And it’s certainly too long and challenging for BBC1. So BBC4 it is then, even if it feels like a relegation.

The original series of Roots was first shown in 1977 and pulled in some of the highest US audiences ever recorded, with many people citing the mini-series as the trigger for their subsequent studies, careers, activism, revelations and family history projects.

It seemed a bit foolhardy to remake it when the first was so lauded and cherished, and my own misgivings appeared confirmed in this week’s opening section, which was slow and sentimental.

Great effort went into showing how blissful Kunta Kinte’s life was in Juffure, Africa. Yes, there was hardship, and the extraordinarily painful trials of becoming a Mandinka warrior, but he was young and handsome, had a loving family, ambitions to study in Timbuktu, and seemed set to marry a pretty local girl.

The joy of life in his sunny homeland was laid on thick here, and often threatened to turn the drama into the Lion King. This was a Disney version of Africa and it was unnecessary.

There was no need to expound the message “Africa = good and therefore slavery = bad”. The viewers are not children and we don’t need to see happy dancing tribes to know that being torn from those tribes is going to be appalling.

So I was perversely glad when some genuine threat arose. Kunta Kinte was kidnapped by a rogue tribe and sold to British slave traders, and there was no room now for frolicking in the sun and dancing with the villagers.

The story was wrenched clean away from that, and headed straight for horror: being transported on a cramped ship; kept in chains in sweltering conditions below decks; being force fed; being whipped; and seeing women raped, poisoned limbs being cut off.

The show became total and constant horror, and it’s a horror that we all know. We’ve seen it before in Hollywood films, documentaries and novels, and we saw it in the 70s when the original series appeared – but that doesn’t mean the story is told and finished.

It’s right that a new generation is exposed to this, and it’s right that people who may be complacent are exposed to it too. Likewise with other horrors in recent history, such as the Holocaust or the Bomb.

There’s a risk that the appalling facts of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, or of people being reduced to shadows on a wall at Hiroshima, are so horrific that we’re quietly grateful to call them “history” and comfort ourselves by saying it’s over and can’t happen again.

So, even though, as a TV critic, I might say there was no need to remake Roots, as an individual watching the news and despairing, I say tell us the stories again and again. Keep it alive so it can’t slip into the safety of “history”.

THE case of the Shannon Matthews abduction has been made into a two-part drama and some people complained it would be intrusive and exploitative, but they needn’t have worried as The Moorside (BBC1, Tuesday) isn’t about the little girl at all.

Although the star of the show is Sheridan Smith who plays Julie Bushby, a “salt of the earth figure” who organises the community’s efforts to find Shannon, the real star here is Gemma Whelan who plays Karen Matthews, Shannon’s appalling mother.

When Whelan first shuffled on to the screen as Karen, she looked almost comical, resembling a dazed raccoon in a tracksuit, and I thought of Wayne and Waynetta Slob from the old Harry Enfield sketches. But the absurdity slowly transforms into something else.

Underneath the squalor, the mumbling, the incoherence, the scraped ponytails, and the seven kids to five different men, is a truly warped, miserable creature.

And Whelan’s acting was so good that I was thrown around in the episode from despising Karen to suddenly pitying her. I was almost dizzy.

Is she a Jeremy Kyle circus freak or a person who’s been trashed, abused and ground into the dirt?

We were asked to consider the old and endless “nature v nurture” debate: who made this monster in a ponytail? Was it her own parents? Her parade of useless, violent boyfriends? Did the welfare state enable her miserable lifestyle? Or should she get on her bike and get a job?

This was a brilliant drama, asking hard questions about class and community.

Are the locals gathering around Matthews, releasing their balloons and holding their vigils, because they care about the missing child?

Or is it because life on the estate is so bleak, filled with nothing but drugs and daytime TV, that there’s nothing else to do?

When Julie Bushby rejoiced that the media would show everyone that their little estate was full of decent people was she right, or were the viewers following the case laughing at the toothless, baseball-capped mob?

This brilliant drama reaches far beyond the story of a missing child.