- Earlier this year, in an anonymous building in east London,
Channel 4 set up its latest reality show house. This one did not require
a hot tub or chickens, but the spirit of the original, Orwellian, Big Brother
hovered around it. No-one was voted out, but three of its seven voluntary
inhabitants left before the 48-hour shoot was over.
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- In that time, the volunteers, all men, were, to varying
degrees, lightly tortured: stripped, slapped, subjected to extremes of
temperature, screamed at, touched, blindfolded, shackled, forced to soil
themselves, deprived of food, disoriented, isolated, intimidated, humiliated,
threatened, deprived of sleep, and then put through it all again.
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- The first to leave was taken out after 10 hours, suffering
stress and hypothermia. The last, one of the first to vomit, finally asked
to be let out because he couldn't take what was being done to him anymore.
Earlier, he had become so distracted he'd failed to notice his handcuffs
had cut off the blood to his hands. Interviewed later, he seemed shocked
numb.
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- What to make of The Guantanamo Guidebook? This one-off,
which recreates inside a Hackney warehouse procedures used at the US prison
camp in Cuba, where "enemy combatants" have been detained without
charge since 2002, is the centrepiece of Channel 4's week-long Torture
strand.
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- The season explores a post-9/11 acceptance of, even appetite
for, torture - or, to use the Newspeak euphemism, "enhanced interrogation
techniques" - within the US and UK administrations. An acceptance
this has led to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and to the situation where Britain
will happily use information extracted from captives in Uzbekistan, whose
intelligence agencies (according to Craig Murray, our former ambassador
to that country) boil their prisoners alive.
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- Murray discusses our Uzbek allies in The Dirty Business,
a documentary by Andrew Gilligan which concentrates mainly on America's
"Special Removal Unit," a covert team specialising in kidnapping
suspects then transporting them to countries where they will be tortured,
Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan among them.
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- The details of the techniques replicated in The Guantanamo
Guidebook, meanwhile, came to light via declassified internal documents,
official investigations, leaked memos, and from detainees themselves. Since
being released without charge, these men have testified to undergoing everything
from being chained and beaten, to being nearly drowned, to being threatened
with dogs, to being raped.
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- Clive Stafford-Smith, the British lawyer who represents
Guantanamo detainees, has heard this testimony first hand, and gives the
Torture season's opening, keynote address, Is Torture A Good Idea? His
horrified, impassioned film argues that the policies and paradigm shifts
currently being pushed through are not simply greasing a slippery slope,
but actually ripping democracy and law apart beneath our feet, in a way
that will return to haunt us.
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- It is The Guantanamo Guidebook, however, that will be
the talking point. There is a danger about the programme. The intentions
- to confront us with what is happening - seem clear, but it could shoot
itself in the foot. It requires a lot from a viewer. In a sense, you have
to bear in mind that it's a TV show while forgetting it's a TV show.
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- You must remember that these techniques are only the
mildest of those actually employed; that these volunteers can leave at
any time. Then, for it to work, you must imagine this is not the case.
It teeters between documentary experiment, and some hardcore reality revival
of Endurance, the famous Japanese gameshow, whose contestants won for being
able to stand having their nipples burned the longest. It is easy to imagine
someone watching thinking, "I could handle that". Indeed, the
original adverts for volunteers asked prospective entrants how "hard"
they were. It unwittingly runs the risk of introducing the idea that light
torture might not be so bad. But it is grim, genuinely unsettling watching,
and maybe constructive. If all The Guantanamo Guidebook manages is to force
us to glimpse the tip of the iceberg, then wonder more about what enormities
lie beneath, it's worthwhile.
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- Since The Fast Show came skidding to a halt, Paul Whitehouse
has shown a unique determination to make strange tragi- comedies with one-word
titles, beginning with the letter H. First Happiness, in which he rarely
looked happy, and now Help, which is less sitcom than exorcism.
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- The show is at once is simple and possessed by a fiendish
complexity. Confined within a psychiatrist's office in a sunny suburban
sidestreet, all we see are snippets of his sessions with his various clients.
Chris Langham, who has been lanking marvellously and modestly around Britain's
comedy scene since the 1970s (so modestly that, when starring in his own
series, People Like Us, he was never actually onscreen), plays the psychiatrist.Whitehouse
plays his clients, all of them, with all their problems.
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- At first, as a quick succession of gag-filled snippets
of Whitehouse in various, often unrecognisable guises flits past, it's
like a Fast Show with its needle stuck, and looks like it has no chance
of working, even though his work is remarkable. Johnny Depp compared him
to Brando, but the Peter Sellers who disappeared into Dr Strangelove might
be nearer the mark.
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- Then though, something extraordinary: Whitehouse stops
the programme in its tracks and turns it on its head with a long monologue
as an elderly Jewish cab-driver called Monty. For a while, Help leaves
any notion of comedy behind, to become a small, devastatingly poignant
one-man play.
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- Whitehouse has done this before, notably in the final
Fast Show, when he somehow managed to bring tears to your eyes as Rowley
Birkin, the rambling old QC who was always very drunk, a piece that recast
all of Birkin's previous mutterings in another light. When Help continues
after Monty, everything seems changed. You notice Langham more, as elements
of the psychiatrist's character begin to emerge, and you want to see more
of his relationship with one patient, Gary (Whitehouse undisguised), which
looks like being the spine of the series.
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- Help exemplifies an abiding characteristic in Whitehouse's
work: the relentless desire to push something (say, shouting "Arse!")
that shouldn't work until it works, then keep pushing, until it stops working
- then, to push on, until it starts working again. He has a lot of emotion
in his eyes, and it leaks out. He's too smart to accept the crying-clown
cliché, but he's like an ice-circus performer, pratfalling and prancing,
fully aware that the surface is beginning to crack beneath him, and an
ocean waits below.
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- http://www.sundayherald.com/47945
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