TV review, Drugsland (BBC3): Why the war on drugs is worth fighting

Plus; Motherland (BBC2)

Neighbourhood officers PC Ben Spence and Sgt Chris Green do their best to counter the drugs trade in Bristol in ‘Drugsland’ (BBC)

“I’m hoping one of them’s got 50 wraps down their pants.” Such are the ambitions of policing the streets in the Britain of 2017. “Them” are the drug dealers; “wraps” are the little packages of crack cocaine, heroin and other adulterated substances they sell to the addicts.

In Drugsland, we slummed down to the St Paul’s area of Bristol to check out business and consumer confidence in the urban British drugs trade: it’s thriving. The drugs are dealt openly, with the used/infected needles and other paraphernalia of drug abuse ready for the council cleaning team in the morning (who’d have thought that that job could ever be life-threatening?).

The cops have an even more difficult job cleaning up the place, and after a few frustrating days at least one slippery and prolific street dealer was detained and in due course banged up for four years, which was a good enough result for me. He had his wraps in his mouth, and the police had to force him to the ground, spray him and beg him to disgorge the half-swallowed, semi-chewed lethal mess of saliva and mixed narcotics onto the dank pavement.

It was hard to watch humanity in the depths of its depravity, and the scenes showing how some random “vulnerable” user in Bristol had had his flat taken over by dealers from London were some of the most disturbing. It was almost like something you’d see in a nature documentary, and I suppose it is appropriate that the phenomenon is known as “cuckooing” by the authorities and the dealers alike.

In return for the use of his front room as a commercial dealing base, the hapless addict receives drugs for free, and it was an overwhelming stink of skunk that alerted police to the existence of this particular example of the illegal sub-letting of social housing. That and the mugged local drug dealer at the bottom of the block of flats, a victim of the London incomers who are now turning their attention to the regions, in what they call the “county lines” trade. By the way, so sophisticated are the London invaders that they will recruit a network of “cuckoos” to constantly keep a step or two ahead of the police.

Drugsland is, thus, a meticulous chronicle of how grim and dehumanising the trade is (this was the first of four episodes). It was told without a commentary, the voices of the police, dealers and users speaking for themselves, and they did so more eloquently than any scriptwriter could manage.

As for the “war on drugs”, if anything you felt that the battle against abuse in this country hasn’t really started, given the lack of resources available to councils and police to fight it, and the unreasonably high levels of proof required to successfully prosecute a dealer, large or small. The drugs trade is a lucrative, lively and innovative industry with a buoyant market of addicted users who will do anything, as we saw, to get the cash to buy “two Bs and a white” (whatever that means). That makes it hard to disrupt, and probably impossible to eliminate – but not impossible to control and contain, and there is much more that could be done to achieve that.

So in this particular BBC documentary, I was relieved to see, there was no tedious attempt to ram the usual “war on drugs has failed” message. There is still no sensible answer from the pro-drugs lobby (and certainly not the dealers) as to why such addictive, destructive and poisonous substances would suddenly be OK if they were sold like cigarettes or alcohol, which do enough harm already. You really can have too much of a bad thing, you know.

Anna Maxwell Martin and Diane Morgan reflect on parenthood in ‘Motherland’ (BBC)

“Middle-class comedy” is a phrase that usually makes me reach for my critical revolver. What could be worse than, for example, a half-hour of unutterable smugness with Zoë Wanamaker? Well, firmly middle-class as it is, Motherland doesn’t do that, because – and I’ve worked this out for myself, you know – it tends towards the richly satirical. Because we all know, don’t we, that there’s nothing that intrinsically funny about an Aga that doesn’t work. Well, not that funny. Although, long ago and in a tellyland far away, Motherland in fact reminds me very much of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the late David Nobbs’s great masterpiece, and the last, if not the only, middle-class comedy that wasn’t an oxymoronic exercise. (That’s a middle-class joke, by the way, with middle-class paretheses following shortly thereafter).

Motherland is a Nobbsian meticulous portrait of the pretensions of contemporary middle-class-manners and mores – a send-up the whole sourdough-sangria-SUV lifestyle of the comfortably off gentrying their way through the inner suburbs. The writers (Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan, Holly Walsh and Helen Linehan) observe with exquisite, excruciating intensity the petty (in all senses) gradations and snobberies of the various substrata of the British class system.

Thus, we have the wealthy, capable, beautiful, vain alpha-mum (and anti-hero) Amanda (Lucy Punch); the vulgar, northern, boozy, gobby slattern (Diane Morgan, the princess royal of comic timing, to Jo Brand’s Queen); idiot token dad Kevin (Paul Ready); and the deeply flawed hero-mum Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin). Julia, poor self-loathing Julia, is only just managing to contain a nervous breakdown, Reggie Perrin-style, which is funnier than it might sound.

This week new self-made self-absorbed beyond-alpha mum Caroline and her musically gifted kid arrived to upstage and usurp Amanda at the school fundraising, which was just as satisfying to watch as it sounds. I for one ask for nothing more after a jolly busy day among the middle classes.