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Police Stop! (1994)
The first of a series of police video compilations from Labyrinth Media
"Police Stop!" was the first episode in a series of compilations of Police traffic videos from Labyrinth Media, which spawned a number of follow-up series such as "Police Camera Action". It is presented and narrated by Graham Cole, who appears in uniform as his PC Stamp character from "The Bill". The documentary consists of several long chase sequences interspersed with collections of shorter themed videos, concerning aspects of safety such as dangerous overtaking or bald tyres. There are also videos taken from helicopters showing their role in tracking chased vehicles.
All of the clips are from British police forces, which presumably allowed them to be published in the interest of promoting safer driving and, equally importantly, letting drivers and criminals know that their infractions could now be recorded and played in court.
Although it was commonplace for US police departments to release footage, this was still a rare event in Britain in 1994. Later episodes of Police Stop would become increasingly reliant on foreign footage, suggesting that the UK police had become concerned about video footage being used solely for entertainment.
Some of the same video clips were later used on ITV's "Police Camera Action" and similar programmes, with sound effects dubbed on and, in some cases, the videos' date stamps being blanked out in an attempt to disguise the age of the videos. In "Police Stop!" there is no dumbing down - we see the videos in their original state, complete with in car conversations and police radio traffic, and the only addition is Graham Cole's narration and a little unobtrusive background music.
Ashanti (1979)
A cracking yarn let down by the use of stereotype
There have been far too few mainstream films set in post-colonial Africa, and the ones that have are a mixed bunch. This one, with its altruistic pretensions to expose slavery in the 1970s, shows the best and worst values of Africa, which turn out not to be too different to the values of humanity as a whole. It also has shortcomings, given the undue influence of western pre-conceptions of Africans and, especially, Arabs.
Dr Anansa Linderby, the beautiful African-American wife of the English doctor David Linderby, is captured by Arab slave-traders, along with a teenage Sanufu girl and a young boy. The lead slave-trader, Suleiman, is every bit the stage Arab, with his flowery and sometimes humorous rhetoric, and gestures to match - which would not be out of place on "Carry On Follow that Camel" but are not up the standard this film deserves. Peter Ustinov of course had more than enough skills to address some of the shortcomings of the script, and he rescued what could otherwise have been a woeful one-dimensional character.
Continuing the stereotypical theme, all three of Suleiman's Arab employees are unintelligent and one has paedophilic tendencies towards the boy, which thankfully are not portrayed on the screen.
One of David's first ports of call is the local police officer, a stereotypical pompous and incompetent African bureaucrat. David then meets two stereotypical white ex-pats, an Englishman (Walker, played by Rex Harrison) and an American (Sandell, played by William Holden). Sandell is a mercenary with "conventional" views on mixed-race relationships, who initially refuses to help unless David provides payment up front. Won over by David's love for Anansa, and conscious of his own inability to find love, he agrees to take David up in his helicopter to help search for Anansa. They find Suleiman and his captives crossing the border and are unable to pursue them into the neighbouring territory - as a result of Sandell's hesitation and David's lack of experience with firearms, his helicopter is shot down but David survives.
We then see David introduced to Malik (Kabir Bedi), an African who has lost his family to Suleiman and is now only driven by vengeance. They find the Sanufu girl with a group of Tuareg and know they are on the right track to find Suleiman.
In one of the most heart-rending scenes they kill a party of slave traders only to find that it was not Suleiman's group, and have no choice but to send their captives to the Tuaregs they met earlier.
Later on we discover that the young boy who had been raped is a witch doctor and, in an excellent scene with supernatural overtones, he uses his knowledge to kill one of Suleiman's henchmen. Anansa on her part - and despite the scepticism of the boy - manages to engineer the demise of Suleiman's two other employees.
By this time Suleiman and his slaves are within days of reaching the slave market.
Suleiman, now in no doubt that Anansa is "trouble", attempts to sell her to an obscenely wealthy Arab prince (Omar Sharif) who is corrupt but intelligent. On discovering that Anansa is an American working for the U.N., the prince rather unwisely decides to carry on with the bargaining without considering the consequences. The scene where the two men haggle is one of the best in the film.
At the slave market, the young boy is sold to a middle-aged German paedophile, and we are left to guess whether the boy will still be considered "wunderbar" when his owner is on the receiving end of his witch-doctoring skills.
David and Malik finally confront Suleiman and there is a bitter-sweet ending from Malik's point of view.
Ultimately, David and Anansa are re-united, and Malik, whose life is in ruins, can console himself with having seen the task he set himself completed.
The overall plot of the film is excellent but it loses marks for its stereotypical portrayal of nearly all the leading characters. Credit must go to all the leading actors for addressing many of the shortcomings of the scripting.
Botschaft der Götter (1976)
One of the 'standard works' for anyone interested in Ufology and the ancient astronaut theory
I purchased 'Mysteries of the Gods' and a number of other UFO-related videos more than ten years ago and considered this one worth transferring to from VHS cassette to DVD.
The documentary is a fascinating glimpse of 'new age' thinking, a full two decades before it would reach its zenith in the mid to late 1990s.
Interspersed with material by Eric von Däniken (of whom, more below) are interviews with employees of NASA who clearly acknowledge the statistical probability of life somewhere else in space. The documentary pre-dates the first U.S. Shuttle launch and we see mention of the idea that the Shuttle could service earth-orbiting observatories together with more ambitious projects further from the Earth. In later years, of course, we would see the Shuttle being used to launch the Hubble observational satellite and then to send a team to effect repairs.
A great deal of the material draws on the writings of von Däniken, a major proponent of the 'Alien Astronaut' theory that extra-terrestrials visited Earth in the distant past and raised the technical level of humanity. His views are now treated in a much more critical, that is to say, sceptical manner.
Also in the documentary, there is an interview with the late Anna Mitchell-Hedges concerning the eponymous crystal skull. This is worth viewing in its own right, particularly her anecdotes about the skull, the most frightening of which involved a student who allegedly joked about the skull and died shortly afterwards. (Ms Mitchell-Hedges, whose respect for the skull was presumably unquestioning, lived to the ripe old age of 100.) Again, there have been questions raised about the provenance of this and other crystal skulls.
It would be easy, but somewhat unfair, to describe the documentary as pandering to "true believers". Although Shatner could have asked more searching questions, he and the editors did permit the interviewees to leave a lasting record of their opinions, and the viewer was left to form his or her own conclusions. Something that documentaries on more factual subjects often fail to do.
Even a sceptic will still enjoy the discussion of various ancient archaelogical sites, mainly in South America and Europe, at a time when many were still well off the organised tourist track.
As an avid but sceptical student of Ufology and related fields, I have often been struck by the number of low-brow 'docutainment' programmes which just re-hash old material, interspersed with a lot of music and repetition to make the documentary last an hour. "Mysteries of the Gods", and the contemporary Arthur C Clarke documentaries, contain original material, which is often dipped into by many subsequent documentaries. In the case of "Mysteries of the Gods", not a minute of the one hour and 25 minute running time is wasted.
Bobby Thompson: The Little Waster (1982)
Glorious nostalgia
The late Bobby Thompson was an all-round actor from Co. Durham but became most famous for his stand up routines, consisting of a series of anecdotes and monologues by "The Little Waster", closely based on his own life, and "Private Bobby Thompson", a second world war conscript. The Daily Mirror's Andy Capp cartoon character was modelled on Thompson's Little Waster.
His humour is very self-deprecating, and satirises, in quite a trenchant manner, the poverty and debt of inhabitants of former coal-mining areas of north east England. Unlike Harry Enfield's "loadsamoney" character that insulted and belittled many northerners, he gains the sympathy of his audience due to being drawn from the same background as them. One example is his story of a visit to what he calls "Giro City" - Consett, a town hard-hit by the decline of the steel industry - where he goes into a pub, asks for a tonic water and is given a whisky. On enquiring why, he is told that he is their "first foot" - in other words, he was their first male visitor since New Year.
His "Private Bobby Thompson" goes to London and meets the likes of Montgomery and Queen Elizabeth, which would never have taken place in reality, and in this way he mocks the class divisions of the time. Needless to say, it is always Bobby who comes off best from these encounters.
The ITV programme, which I recorded from Tyne Tees TV in the late 1980s, consists of a performance in Percy Main Working Men's Club by both of his characters, followed by a biography of his life - his becoming an actor in the 1950s on radio programmes such as "Wot cheor Geordie", his descent into alcohol abuse and his recovery from it, to become a performer who earned more than many nationally-known celebrities.
If anyone manages to find a recording of this performance, they will get an insight into a now-disappeared north-eastern working class culture in which working men's clubs were the centre of every mining community. This was a time before multi-channel satellite television, themed pubs and the renaissance of cinema-going all of which, along with the social changes and upheaval caused by the decline of our industries, resulted in the decline of the working men's club. As a member of a working men's club in Blackpool (Lancashire), I am struck by the sight of the crowded, smoke filled Percy Main concert room where Thompson performs. My own club sees such a situation only rarely.
His performances are entirely in dialect, which is difficult for outsiders to understand. For me it only adds to the enjoyment of his comedy, but it also served to limit his television career and his ability to reach a national audience, as actors were expected to avoid the use of dialect - he quite rightly said he sounded unconvincing when instructed to say "go" instead of "gan". For these performances however, dialect is critical to their success.