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New UK Reality TV
Uses Actual Torture
By Damien Love
The Sunday Herald
2-29-5
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
http://www.sundayherald.com/47945
 


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