The two most important destinations for a documentary are the place we viewers would be unable to go even if we wanted and the place we could go but prefer not to. At some risk to their makers' personal safety, two programmes took us to one of each. In the first, Undercover in the Secret State, in the Dispatches strand on Monday (8pm, 17 October), the Korean producer Kim Jung-eun went back to the North Korean-Chinese border. Kim has spent the past seven years alerting the world to the scandal of North Korea. Five years ago, she made a Dispatches on a famine in the country, which killed two million but "officially" never happened.
The new film showed more hungry faces and more terror. It opened with astounding amateur footage of Kim Jong-il's regime holding one of its regular pour encourager les autres sessions. A short speech on loyalty was followed by the shooting dead of three men accused of "trafficking" citizens across the border to China (it's a pretty pass when China seems to anyone like the land of the free). Dimly, we watched in the distance a figure being tied to a pole and then shot. The next week, in another town, the process was repeated and also covertly filmed.
The only encouraging element was that we got to watch the video, smuggled out through a network of dissidents. The VHS traffic is not just one-way. With almost equal courage, rebels are importing western films and South Korean soap operas. These, viewed late at night behind closed curtains, with the fear that the thought police may turn off the power and thus trap the damning tape inside the family VCR, are apparently tremendously popular. They are also tremendously seditious, because they show that it is not the south that has been reduced to poverty. As one North Korean woman said: "The beggars are us."
The smuggled footage confirmed her theory. In North Korea, Oliver Twists steal from market stalls and are beaten; bodies are left to rot in the street; women are harnessed to cart logs down mud roads; and dissidents - some 200,000 of them (some of them probably little more than soap opera lovers) - are "re-educated" in wintry prison camps whose welcoming banners read: "Give up your life for the sake of our Dear Leader." Kim, aiding and aided by heroically brave "traffickers", gave us a peep-show view of a nation that disgraces our century. But North Korea has the atom bomb, whereas Iraq had only phantom weapons of mass destruction, so we look away.
The BBC's Lynn Alleway, in her Tough Kids, Tough Love (9pm, 19 October), warned us that hers was a film about the children we cross the street to avoid, the ones the politicians are forever "cracking down" on. She chose two of them: Junior, a hyperactive teenager with a liking for vodka, punch-ups and wearing a chair around his head, and Rebecca, a suicidal, depressive crack addict with greater anger-management issues than even Junior. Several times, Alleway was warned to put her camera away as one or the other turned their little world into a war zone.
Alleway had been challenged to spend enough time with these adolescents to change her mind about them, which meant, of course, changing the minds of her viewers, too. They were the kids from hell, but that, it became clear, was because hell is where they had come from: abusive homes and abusive or neglectful parents. As far as one could see, there was only one chink of light in these benighted lives and she was called Camila Batmanghelidjh, the director of a charity, Kids Company, which helps 5,000 troublesome and troubled children across the capital.
Batmanghelidjh is a big woman (the fat, she half-joked, would come in useful should one of her charges choose to knife her). Iranian by birth, she has the bearing of one of nature's aristocrats. She dresses in robes and turbans and wears little round glasses beneath big bushy eyebrows. She offers these children advice, refuge and order, but most of all love. What is telling is that it is not rejected but embraced. When they are not rowing with her, Junior and Rebecca, as naturally as US sitcom cuties, tell Batmanghelidjh that they love her and, momentarily, seem to forget that she is only supplying the unconditional love their parents refused.
"Everybody wants a fairy tale, a beginning, a middle that is tough-going, and an end that has a good outcome," Batmanghelidjh explained. "It never ever happens like that. But they want love and, for that, they will try to modify their behaviour." As Rebecca returned from another failed rehab and Junior turned up to have his picture taken for the modelling career he aspired to with new cuts on his cheek, you were left to agree with her assessment. There were no happy endings. But a lot of trying was going on.
Camila Batmanghelidjh may be one of the most underappreciated people in London, but that was not the only scandal this difficult but moving film underlined. In order to relocate Radio 5 Live and Match of the Day to Manchester, and sell us a digital future, the BBC documentaries department that made it is in the process of firing half its staff. That is not a disgrace of North Korean proportions, but a disgrace all the same.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
