It may take a leisurely route but BBC4's A303 documentary shows there is still a place for eclectic programming
I've spent enough time driving from London to the south-west to know that A303: Highway to the Sun (BBC4) was in breach of the trade descriptions act. Sunshine is something that no one in Devon ever takes for granted. There again, if Tom Fort had wanted to accurately represent the experience of travelling along the A303 this film would have ground to a halt for 45 minutes somewhere near Stonehenge, so it wasn't hard to forgive him some wishful thinking. If there was much thinking, that is, for it wasn't entirely clear that Fort had any definite shape to his film in mind before he started pottering along the main road from Andover in Hampshire to just outside Honiton in Devon in a ropey old Morris Minor van ? very BBC4 ? and stopping at various places that caught his fancy.
At first it seemed as if Fort intended to show how the A303 has changed the landscape over the years. But there's only so much you can say about a tree that used to be at the side of the road and is now in the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway, so he stopped that and turned into a travel guide instead, pointing out all the iron age and Roman sites of historical interest you can see along the way. Not to mention the 18th-century folly at Stourhead, which he climbed for good measure. And when he had got tired of that he chatted to Oliver who collects and eats badgers from the Ilminster bypass. Oliver's wife is a vegetarian. I'm not surprised.
Like the A303 itself, the film ended suddenly and in no place in particular. But then as both had started just as randomly, you could argue there was a subtle coherence at play. I certainly didn't begrudge a minute of the time I spent with Fort. I would guess that, like roadkill, this kind of programme is an acquired taste but, after the numbing predictability of most factual TV, there has to be a place for the eclectic.
Which brings us to another misnamed documentary, as it would have been far more accurate to call Hunting Britain's Most Wanted (Channel 4), Hunting the Rest of the World's Most Wanted, since it followed Scotland Yard's extradition unit rounding up foreign crims who had legged it to the UK. But there the similarities with the A303 ended. Where Fort's film surprised with its eccentricity, Britain's Most Wanted battered you with its dullness. If the producers had set out to show that, contrary to what the public may think, catching serious criminals on the run from abroad is actually pretty boring, then they couldn't have done a better job.
What we got was a lot of plain-clothes policemen hanging around waiting for someone to ring them with a tip-off before nipping off to Victoria coach station to pick up a man wanted for murder abroad who was saying goodbye to his girlfriend. It was like call-centre policing. There was little real active hunting for villains ? apart from one Keystone Cops moment when the squad car chasing a suspect managed to lose the bus he was travelling on. I'm sure the real work is more taxing and dangerous, but it's not the way it came across. Not least when a detective chief inspector heralded the simultaneous high-profile arrests of Julian Assange and Shrien Dewani (the man suspected of conspiring to murder his wife on their honeymoon in South Africa) as a red-letter day for the squad. As both men had handed themselves in at a police station, it didn't seem that much of a coup . . .
There were a couple of times when the programme tried to lurch into Daily Mail territory with scare statistics of how the number of foreign criminals holing up in the UK had grown tenfold since border controls were relaxed in 2004. But the squad again resisted being stereotyped, insisting this was a price of liberty and that you would need a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for some of the men they are arresting ? who will be separated from their wives and children for many years.
The only real scandal on view was the Polish authorities, who adopt a zero-tolerance policy to any criminal on the run, forcing the squad to spend the same amount of time and effort rounding up men wanted for drunk-and-disorderly offences as murderers. Most of the D&Ds were back in the UK within a couple of days, having paid a small fine. All in all, an exercise that was perhaps about as worthwhile as this programme.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/19/a303-highway-to-sun-review
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