Television: Blindfolded, chained and tortured: a personal story
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Your support makes all the difference.Until we all have interactive hyper-TV sets, no documentary series can dig as deeply into its subject as a history book. Television can't offer footnotes or a glossary. It won't let you re-read a sentence you didn't understand the first time. The narrative has to be so uncluttered that the viewer can absorb it all in one sitting, and remember it well enough a week later to pick up the story where it left off. Watching a documentary series is not so much reading a book as skimming it, slowing down only for the underlined passages.
Hostage, Channel 4's admirable three-part crash course on the Beirut hostage crisis, has had to fit a decade of international and internecine wrangles in a little over three hours, and so, as with most documentaries, the more you learn from it, the more you realise you still have to learn. In tonight's final instalment, for instance, Terry Waite's bodyguard says that he warned the Archbishop's envoy to keep to Beirut's safe zones just before he was kidnapped. "This will make me Man of the Year," Waite allegedly replied. "My photo will be on the cover of Time magazine." The anecdote is not followed up.
The series could have been many times longer, with an episode or more on each hostage and on each domestic campaign for his release. But as a refresher course Hostage is hard to fault. It untangles the crisis into one long strand, and stretches it neatly across the continents and through the years. First comes the Israeli invasion of Beirut, then the arrival of US troops. In response, the Shi'ite Muslims form Hezbollah with Iranian backing. They start taking Western hostages and demand the release of 17 Lebanese Shi'ites who are interned in Kuwait. America, France and Britain insist that they won't deal with terrorists. America is fibbing.
As well as simplifying things, the other concession TV has to make for the viewer is to film its stories from the human interest angle. And so, without neglecting the Frederick Forsyth political chicanery, the series focuses on the feelings of the prisoners and their loved ones - not to mention the distress and the fumbling kindnesses of the kidnappers. For all the power of the shocking archive footage and the artful restraint of the moody reconstructions, they're window-dressing next to the series' testimonies. Perhaps the producers' most surprising achievement was to secure interviews with people you wouldn't expect to appear in a Channel 4 documentary. I don't know if it was more of a jolt to see a Hezbollah leader giving his side of the story, or to see Oliver North, sitting in front of an American flag, giving his. The only people missing were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
But the essential material comes from Brian Keenan, John McCarthy, Terry Waite and Terry Anderson. The fact that these men are journalists, writers and people with years of practice at dealing with the media makes Hostage unique. Some documentaries have had interviewees who were as skilled at talking to the camera; some documentaries have had interviewees with such horrific experiences to talk about. But how many have had both?
TV being TV, of course, there is room enough only for snippets from each man, scraps of the horror and redemption that unfold in Keenan's purgatory memoir, An Evil Cradling. But to hear these men's accounts from their own mouths, to see them laughing as they describe four or more years of being blindfolded, chained up and tortured ... it's as headspinning as seeing somebody climb out of a grave. And it certainly puts those "true life", my-car-went-over-a-cliff-and-I-survived programmes in their place.
By the end of the series, you're left thinking that maybe television is just as suitable a medium for this surreal episode as a history book. Maybe the events are not sold short by being adapted for the small screen. Because at bottom, the story is simple and personal. The weirdly straightforward situation was that Hezbollah wasn't going to hand over its captives until it got something in return. And it was a weirdly personal situation, too, because it revolved around a few men who wanted a few hostages released, and so took a few hostages of their own, leaving a few other people to make decisions.
It's this stark, personal nature of the story which Hostage puts in the foreground, unclouded by discourses on fundamentalism and diplomacy. As Brian Keenan writes in An Evil Cradling: "The immensity of our kidnappers' conceit was beyond belief. They had murdered, maimed and taken hostage a handful of men, how many exactly we did not know, but we reckoned possibly fifteen. With these fifteen men, some like ourselves chained to walls in apartments, in prisons, or in underground cells, they hoped to hold the world to ransom."
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