Rush - 50 Years Of Drugs In Britain - Channel 4, Monday
Everyman - BBC 1, Sunday
Timewatch - BBC 2, Tuesday
Booker Live - Channel 4, Tuesday
Reminiscing about the drugs scene in 1960s Soho, former pill-head Thomas Hood recalled the "sheer quietness" of a group coming down from an amphetamine high. Users would dance wildly all night until, energy expended, they would just crash out in edgy silence. Back then dexies, black bombers and purple hearts were the street drugs in demand. Speed, having reached teenagers from housewives - whose slimming pills were often pure amphetamine - was in its heyday.
Rush - 50 Years of Drugs in Britain is a three-part, oral-history series looking at the rise in recreational drug use/abuse. Its opening episode blended anecdotes, archive footage and a controlled voiceover to reveal, engagingly, a subculture seldom understood, or even treated without hysteria, by mainstream media. There were cautionary tales here, of course - drugs can and do ruin lives - but there was also an honesty, a non-judgmental, factual tone which neither preached nor patronised.
The Rev Ken Leech, a vehemently non-patronising preacher-man, who hung about the Soho drugs scene, said there were two types of pill-poppers at the time: weekenders and chronics. Thomas Hood, by his own admission, was a chronic. He winced as he remembered the "horrors" and the paranoia that inevitably followed a pill-fest. He spoke of being hospitalised because of drug abuse and, though flickering with nervous tics now, he was believable.
Heroin changed the scene. There had been stories of overdoses from mainlining speed, but the heroin rush was so overwhelmingly pleasurable ("like an orgasmic cocoon") that users soon took to the needle and became addicted. The Piccadilly Junkies, as they became known, were a sort of taboo elite on the Swinging London scene. Liberal laws allowed physicians such as Dr Frankau and Dr Petro to prescribe smack to junkies. Petro was addicted to gambling and his Baker Street tube station "surgeries" were medical and cultural landmarks.
Mind you, Petro hadn't forgotten all medical ethics: he charged one guinea a time for prescriptions, obviously realising that a fee in mere pounds would constitute a deep smear on his gentlemanly and professional standing. "Is there anything else you want?" Petro would inquire of his clients. His arrest in the mid-1960s caused London's 350 or so registered heroin addicts a major problem. Petro passed on to the great casino in the sky soon afterwards. "An era in British drugs history died with him," said the voiceover.
So it did. Heroin became a street drug, controlled not by dodgy doctors but by organised gangsters. The nub of London's heroin scene moved from Piccadilly Circus to Gerrard Street, the main thoroughfare of the city's little Chinatown. A former junkie spoke about withdrawals and cold turkey. He explained the effects of a "bowel bomb" and showed us a photograph as evidence. Anyway, this opening episode was promising. So often with programmes about drugs there is a proselytising, finger-wagging tone which is likely to increase their attractiveness among the young. In Rush, former users tell their stories: highs, lows, disintegrations, escapes. Their anecdotes retain a flavour of the period. One, for instance, remembered the junkies' slogan about the Piccadilly branch of Boots chemist at the time: "Where tomorrow begins at midnight". Addicts, once midnight arrived, would flock to the store with their precious, post-dated, Petro prescriptions.
There is a necessary media-undoing in oral histories like this. The media which covered the drugs scene in 1960s Britain did so with sensationalism and prurience in mind. The alternative press of the period was just too precious and smug in its condescending, counter-culture arguments. Now, however, with the benefit of a few decades' hindsight, it seems clear the 1960s scene - though, of course, it had its casualties - was gentler than the mayhem which would follow.
"In 1964, the newspapers went to war on drugs," said the voiceover. Casting circulation hooks and calling them social responsibility is an old ruse in press publishing. Sure, some of what the papers reported did take place. But all those sermonising efforts to eradicate drugs have failed miserably. Some people simply want to play with the chemicals in their heads. There is a price - sometimes a horrific price - to be paid for that. But the simple honesty of Rush on this point, neither glorifying nor condemning drugs, gives it a seriously cool buzz. It's not brilliant, but it is a TV high . . . lite!
Like drugs, racism in America seems to have worsened in the past 30 years. Despite a growing band of relatively liberal whites, supremacist outfits such as the KKK continue to fuel and feed off the ignorance and hatred of America's white underclass. Everyman: Heart Of Darkness, opened with the hideous murder of a black man, James Byrd. Towed behind a pick-up truck, the victim ended his life in "a two-mile trail of blood and flesh" which included Byrd's head and right arm being torn from his body.
Byrd's killers had sprayed the face of the disabled, 49-year-old father-of-three with black paint before hitching him to their truck. A coroner decreed the sight of the remains would be "unbearable for the family". Still, the Klan in Jasper, where the mutilation took place, continues to burn its crosses and plan for the future. Charles Lee, the Grand Dragon of Texas's White Camelia Knights of the KKK, no less, sat back and explained the differences between "positive hate" and "negative hate". Basically, it's positive, so long as Charlie says so.
It appears jails and the Internet are prime recruiting grounds for racists. The Aryan Brotherhood love-bombs lonely criminals in the nick and recruits a proportion of them. Most of the recognised 474 hate-groups in the US at present are using the Net.
It's the purity of the madness of many of their leaders which is particularly distressing. How have they come to think as they do? On the nurture side, there are cultural, social, racial, political, historical, geographical, economic and gender factors which can be identified. But how can a man such as Pastor Richard Butler, with busts of Adolf Hitler in his church, preach that "the only thing which comes out of Africa is destruction"? And he's so sure. He does not express this lunacy as a suspicion or even, in the sermon tradition, as a revelation. No. He just states it as a given - an acknowledged fact from which there can be no deviation. The "kingdom of God" of another holy man, Pastor Neumann Brytain, will be realised on Earth as "an all-white America". No wonder Jesus wept!
This kind of programme, in reflecting the apocalyptic hopes of racists, lends itself to sensationalism. Even Everyman, normally a tempered series, was excessively ominous in the gravitas of its voiceover. But it did interview a shower of frightening racists, among them Dr William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, a tome becoming seminal among hate groups. Timothy McVeigh, one of the Oklahoma bombers, read Pierce's poison before the bombing which killed 168 people.
Likewise John Bill King, one of the three arrested for the murder of James Byrd. He is said to have told police: "We started the Turner Diaries early." For his part, Pierce is not just a dodgy doctor - no John Petro he - he's orchestrating a consciousness among thicks that allows them to believe they are soldiers in the army of Christ. Oh, by the way, Christ is returning in the next millennium, so the army is busy with preparations. In historical terms, they really just want a rerun of the American Civil War.
The underclass racism of the American South was mirrored by the upper-class, apparently racist comments of a British don on this week's Timewatch. In an edition titled The British In India, historian Andrew Roberts explained the "manifold blessings" the British bestowed on the fortunate Indians. In full pin-stripe, Alan B'Stard suit, Roberts looked like he must surely be taking the mick. But no, the prat was serious.
The British, you see, did not arrive as conquerors, but as traders (albeit traders with an army to protect their interests). Once in India, the good fairies turned a medieval society into a modern one, equipping it in the process with the English language. Then there were railways and a legal system and democracy. But the ungrateful bloody natives continued to want their independence. Oh well, being misunderstood by their inferiors is the curse of the white officer class.
After Roberts's 20 minutes of propaganda, there was a studio discussion. Opinion was divided: between Roberts on one side and everybody else on the other. An Indian professor, Mani Shankar Aiyar, pronounced Roberts's film "sneering, snivelling, supercilious and silly". Aiyar, like so many Indians, was too gracious. Roberts's film was ignorant and dangerous or, as another panellist, Patrick French, proclaimed: "a grotesque caricature". Look, Roberts, economic benefit to Britain was the main force behind the takeover. Whatever else imperialists were, they weren't complete fools.
Finally, a good spat at this week's Booker Prize. Will Self, a studio guest of Melvyn Bragg, said the award to Ian McEwan "stunk". Self, never shy about Self-promotion, accused the Booker judges of an unworthy "compromise". Earlier, while fitting a detonator to his oral equivalent of a bowel-bomb, he had asked why Douglas Hurd was involved. "What does he know about writing?" asked Self, a sensible, if too-seldom-asked, kind of question at award gigs. Melvyn twittered.
Anyway, in spite of the spat - whether deeply-held, PR-generated or, most likely, a bit of both - this 30th Booker seemed dull. Auberon Waugh, in defence of literary awards, had argued that the English "are much better at writing than at football", adding that there's much more about football than about writing on television. Waugh didn't bother with trivia such as the fact that football offers spectacle in a way reading fiction does not. But then, why should common sense ever spoil a line from a professional polemicist? The Booker Prize "is OK, so long as it doesn't make writers too pompous," said Waugh. Right, say no more!