Television
The posters make it look steamier than Sky 1's Westminster Uncovered, but what stays with me from Phil Agland's Shanghai Vice (Channel 4, Sundays) is the virtue. The documentary series' stars are not the oriental Crocketts and Tubbs we meet in the criminal intelligence unit, nor the drug barons and runners, but clean-living Mrs Feng and her lodger, Miss Tang. You couldn't meet two nicer women.
Miss Tang, who is training to be a doctor, hails from the mountain city of Lijiang. She and it will be remembered by the followers of Phil Agland's previous fly-on-the-bamboo-waller, Beyond the Clouds. Mrs Feng is a youthful 65-year-old widow, a bit of an Imelda Marcos in the shoe department, who doesn't know whether to marry her boyfriend, a Japanese language teacher known as the professor, who is a bit too modern for her, believing men and women are equal. Mrs Feng books a private session with the radio agony aunt to whom they listen, giggling together at night. Like agony aunts everywhere, Wei Lan diagnoses the problem as one that lies between the sheets. But it would take more than faked orgasms to upset Mrs Feng. Her generation are survivors of the cultural revolution. In a wonderful restaurant scene her friends demonstrate vocally that they never forgot a single show tune - and that they never received an apology for being told they had to.
In Sunday's third episode, we follow Tang back to Lijiang, which has been obliterated by an earthquake. There are more survivors here, a coven of grannies who sit in the street telling stories from the great quake of '52: "We prayed to the angry fish god. When it jumps it causes earthquakes. We shouted compliments to it," they joked at their own expense. Tang's father, who is a doctor, says when things get back to normal he will not reopen his surgery. Tang is outraged that after his years of service, he cannot afford the rent. But real wealth is learning, her father says. "You have your whole life ahead of you. Remember what I have said." The camera withdraws to frame the scene in the window of the Tang family's new home, a tent in the rubble.
So what, you ask, of the vice? Well, last week there was this severed head found in the Shanghai canal, but by the end of the episode the police were no nearer to finding the perp. Taking up only a third of the programme, this tale was a little disappointing, but I suspect it is a companion piece designed to complement episode seven, which promises major excitement around a headless torso. Agland proceeds this way, in mirror images: the natural demolition of Lijiang is juxtaposed with the redevelopment of Shanghai that destroys 200,000 homes a year; the failed sting operation of the first two episodes, which rested on a heroin dealer shopping his sisters-in-law, is counterpoised with an amateur production of a Chinese "betrayal opera". Sometimes the reflections are surreal. The drug courier in the case goes by the name of "Song".
But the real mirror held up is to us. We see so much we recognise: incompetent police, greedy builders (to the owner of a quake-smashed home: "It'll cost you"), prurient phone-ins, heartless developers - even the buildings on the Shanghai river front could be on the Thames. Yet all is alien as well. Behind the mobile phones and western suits exists a brutally violent police regime backed up by an automatic death penalty. As intelligent people do here, Feng and the professor sit down to the news each night in order to accuse it of bias, but in China their complaint is not of sensationalism but of the playing down of calamities such as Lijiang. Friendship's expressions are different, too. In one of those visual surprises Agland likes to throw at us, the camera pulls back in episode one to reveal Tang and Feng share not only a bedroom but a bed. Yet when they exchange their grief-stricken farewells at the airport, they touch but do not kiss.
This series is the real thing. Next to it, the week's other postcard from the drug front, Modern Times's "Amsterdamage" (Wednesday, BBC2) looked trivial. Nevertheless it had a moral to sell us, about the fatal seductions of the Dutch free-for-all. Its subject was two middle-aged Englishwomen, Dawn and Patsi, who had thrown in their lot with psychedelia 18 years ago. Their problem was not the beatings up and prison terms that seem to go with a career in drug-trafficking but the drugs themselves. They like warp your mind, man.
Dawn wasn't complaining but she had to admit the focus of her life was "a little bit askew". She listened enviously to her son Kris's tales of exotic job offers abroad, like the local shop proprietrix in The League of Gentlemen amazed to discover there really was a Swansea. Eight months on, a caption informed us, Kris was stuck in Amsterdam like his mum, his focus well skewed by all those visits to the local shop, Homegrown Fantasy.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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