Last night's TV: ‘Damned’ (Channel 4); ‘Storyville: Chasing Asylum’ (BBC4)

Channel 4’s fine comedy is getting old before its time

I hope the ‘Damned’ team have a nice long rest before they embark on the second series

I was sorry to see Damned end its run last night and sorrier still that the bright, sparky, original standard of the earlier of its six episodes hadn’t been maintained by the end. Very sorry. I had very high hopes for this freshly contemporary sitcom – not obviously as vital as those pinned on it by its team of writers, directors, actors and producers I admit – because comedy, while booming, needs all the success and support it can get. It would be a bit mawkish to start on about how the refugee crisis and Brexit made the gift of laughter more important than ever, so I shan’t. But you see what I mean.

Anyway, last night’s finale was a bit flat. Mention of a children’s entertainer named Gerry Donut, who swears at the kids, raised a smile, but not much else worked. There was a storyline about an abandoned baby in a supermarket which, of course, Alan Davies’s arrogant semi-competent social worker Al failed to act upon, and it was all a bit predictable. I didn’t have great expectations about Davies’s acting talent, which seems to have absconded since the glory days of Jonathan Creek, but I was also downhearted to see Jo Brand (also co-writer), Isy Suttie and Kevin Eldon sounding a bit jaded. The abandoned baby, by the way, was a partial consequence of its mum’s sleep deprivation, and it did look as though the entire case missed out on a decent night’s kip before the recording. Nick Hancock was just diabolical, but then he always is. Even Georgie Glen wasn’t her usual commanding presence. Himesh Patel, the office idiot Nitin, was the only one to still be on form.

Like social work, comedy is damn hard work, with little thanks and the constant risk of your career being ruined forever by one mistake. So I realise my judgements may be harsh, and they’re not meant to be. I just hope the Damned team have a nice long rest before they embark on the second series. OK?

By far the most dispiriting documentary I’ve seen all year was on last night – Storyville: Chasing Aylum. It made me cry anyway, one simple anecdote about a little Sri Lankan girl who was given her first soft toy by Save the Children, and who screamed with joy at the (second-hand) present. We didn’t learn her fate, but I doubt it was joyful.

One day, the full story of the abuse and cruelty meted out to asylum seekers by successive Australian governments will be told, and I have a feeling it will be down there with other shameful episodes in Australia’s often traumatic history. Child abuse, sexual abuse, routine violence, inhumanity and suicide is day-to-day reality for bewildered people fleeing torture dumped in rusty tin sheds. I will never believe that anyone who stitches their lips together in pitiful protest is bogus. Or that any five year old deserves to be treated worse than an animal.

Instead or proper treatment required under the 1951 Convention, refugees are taken – shall we better say “transported”? – to various Guantanamo-style outposts specifically and deliberately outside the sovereign territory of the Commonwealth of Australia, so that the Australians can evade their legal and moral obligations. Australia, that is, a nation proudly built on and by immigration. Thus the Aussies have set up one detention camp on the tiny independent island of Nauru, and another on equally remote Manus Island, part of independent Papua New Guinea. They’re starting a new one up in Cambodia, too. Canberra pays these deeply poor territories a few billion Aussie dollars to “host” thousands of asylum seekers whose sea journeys to Australia have been intercepted by the Royal Australian Navy. Sri Lankans or Rohingya people fleeing obvious persecution who think they’ve arrived in vibrant and rich Australia discover that they are instead condemned to a slow death in a place they never even knew existed. It’s like a sick joke.

But why does Australia, a decent nation with fine democratic traditions, do this? And why might Britain have to do something similar one day?

Because it works, in the most brutal way. It is simply because it seems to be the only way to defeat the people smugglers – to disrupt their business model. If it is really clear – through the deterrent effect of these camps and zero tolerance – that your hazardous boat journey is anyway in vain, then the people and the boats will stop coming, because there's no money to be made out of them. That, in turn, means no more innocent people drowned at sea. It is true, too; the boats have stopped heading for Australia and with them their hopeless cargoes.

As the so-called Jungle is cleared outside Calais and the residents moved to, we’re told, more civilised quarters, the situation around Australia may give us an indication about what happens next around the coast of this island. I have the awful feeling something like this will one day prevail in the English Channel, and the world will wonder why the courteous, tolerant, compassionate, freedom-loving British behave in such a fashion. Dispiriting indeed.