Susie Orbach's sober documentary about the sexual abuse of children was horrifying but timely
Analysing the Child Sex Offender (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Mark Steel's in Town (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The Classic FM Interview (Classic FM) | Listen
Lifecycle (5Live) | iPlayer
OK, it's not very festive, I admit, but it is topical? On Tuesday morning, Radio 4 took a sober look at paedophilia in the UK in Analysing the Sex Offender. Susie Orbach, an intelligent and engaging presenter as well as an impressive psychoanalyst in her own right, talked to experts and? well, just experts. What she discovered was interesting, if utterly appalling. Here are some stats to ruin your cornflakes. Around 10% of children are sexually abused, with girls around twice as likely as boys to be victims. Predatory paedophiles such as Jimmy Savile are rare compared with the offender who abuses one or two children, within the bounds of his family or friends, over many years. Between 25% and 33% of child sexual abusers are under the age of 21. Recent research into online abuse has identified a new type of paedophile: hyper-sexualised, within a network of other offenders, owns thousands of indecent images of children, high IQ, married, professional. Someone who is unlikely to go out and physically abuse a child himself, but has no qualms about using the net ? and, of course, pictures of real children being actually abused ? to fuel his fantasies.
And this is a very common crime. One of the experts Orbach spoke to said, early on in the programme, that there is "something that can pull you down about the everyday nature of child sex abuse". Yes, there is. So instead, we focus on the exceptional cases. How much easier it is to spit hatred towards a dead celebrity paedophile than to acknowledge the extreme likelihood that you yourself know someone who is an active abuser.
I can't imagine the contortions the BBC put itself through to actually get this programme on the air. (It wouldn't have been allowed on TV: BBC television is still too tainted by the Savile scandal.) I got the vague impression that Orbach wanted to talk to some offenders ? it was hinted at in the beginning of the programme ? but that, no doubt, was quashed by executives. Still, the programme was strong enough to stand without those voices, and without the voices of victims. It was simply a summary of current facts about paedophilia, about who was likely to offend and how best to treat them. And if we don't know the facts, we can't begin to change those shocking, terrible statistics.
Shall we cheer ourselves up? Mark Steel's back with his Sony Gold-winning stand-up programme, Mark Steel's in Town. And what a lovely show it is: slotting into that Radio 4 6.30pm slot with humanity, humility and, best of all, jokes that genuinely come out of the situation in which he finds himself. On Wednesday, Steel visited Handsworth and managed to engage the locals to such an extent that he could riff about a Rasta weatherman, in full Jamaican accent, and it not be offensive in any way. Good comedy is such an amazing skill, such a balancing act between telling the truth and pointing out faults, between teasing and bullying. Steel manages to be political and make an audience feel as though they've had a great big cuddle. That is a hard thing to do.
Nick Ferrari, a man with so little in common with Mark Steel that if they were put into a Venn diagram together, the only overlap would be "southern accent" and "vaguely industrial surname", has an interview slot on Classic FM. It goes out on Sunday evenings, which means it's tricky for me to review, but anyway, he's talking to Dustin Hoffman tonight. That's quite a balancing act too. Hoffman is warm at all times, but an experienced interviewee. He won't reveal what he doesn't want to: he throws back questions to Ferrari, delays his answers by saying "good question", spatters the studio with his splurge gun of charm. And Ferrari, to his credit, still gets truths out of him.
Post-Olympics, BBC5Live has expanded the sports it covers, and quite right too. Gymnastics got a good run the other weekend and, on Thursday evening, the station gave us Lifecycle, a two-hour special on cycling. the type that wins you yellow jerseys or gold medals, but the ordinary pedalling that gets you to work, like an everyday superhero, dodging death all the way. This was an interesting programme, free of histrionics, but peppered, once more, with sobering statistics: 56% of cycling accidents are caused by a driver, 6% by the cyclist (the remainder are either down to a combination of factors or impossible to specify). Also quotes like this, on the subject of crashes: "If a cyclist makes a mistake, they die. If a motorist makes a mistake, someone else dies." Be careful out there, superheroes.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/16/analysing-sex-offender-susie-orbach
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