This first-class programme tackled gang crime without sanctimony
Peckham's Lost Radio 4
Writing in the Daily Telegraph on 28 April, Tony Blair (I still get a childish kick out of such juxtapositions) admitted that he had got it wrong. Being tough not only on crime but on "the causes of crime" - unemployment, poverty, poor education - had not worked. He had recently visited Moss Side in Manchester where employment, housing and schools had all improved, yet a small minority were still causing huge problems, "leaching into drugs and gangs".
On Peckham's Lost (1 May, 8pm), Winifred Robinson proved the PM's point by talking to the lost families of Peckham, south London. Peckham was where ten-year-old Damilola Taylor bled to death on a stairwell, having been attacked by gang members not much older than himself. Almost seven years on, the stairwell and the estates have been demolished and £260m of mostly public money spent on desirable new homes. A town square has been built and a Damilola Taylor Centre founded, where teenagers train for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. And yet the gangs are still there. In February, there were four killings in 11 days.
Robinson's conclusion was that buildings don't kill people, people do; and that the killers are lethally impulsive teenagers or, as she nailed them, "toddlers with guns". She talked to a 14-year-old called Lloyd who may yet turn into one of them. He had already been arrested by the police for walking the streets "bladed". Two comprehensives had excluded him for "backchatting" teachers who were impolite to him. Robinson suggested there might be a fundamental misunderstanding: "You are meant to be polite to your teachers, not the other way round." He was, she said, bored and a bully, and the more bored he was the more he bullied, sometimes stripping the children he mugged for their mobile phones down to their "boxers and socks" and burning their clothes.
She wanted to know what made young men capable of such cruelty. She talked to Tony, the father of Adrian Thomas, a drug dealer who had organised the rape and torture of two teenagers he suspected of helping a rival gang rob him; one, Mary-Ann Leneghan, had died of her 40 stab wounds. What Adrian had done certainly was his own fault, but you couldn't help admit that he was not entirely to blame for who he was. Aged 18 months, he was living in a bed and breakfast with his father while his mother served a prison sentence for fraud. Tony later disappeared for four years "to sort out his head". When he returned, the father-son relationship had come down to Tony fuelling him with crisps.
Adrian was the youngest of Tony's four children, each with a different mother. "Forgive me," said Robinson. "This is an impertinent question, but why do some people bring children into this world with less thought than some people would put into getting a pet?" Tony blustered. He called her "sweetheart". People who used contraception got pregnant, too. So he hadn't, Robinson leapt on him. He didn't believe in "those things". Nor, it transpired, did be believe in writing to his now jailed son. She wondered if her own boy could do something so heinous she would disown him, and thought not. "Is he inside?" Tony asked, innocently. "No," she said, "he is only seven."
Good for Winifred. I haven't seen her for more than a quarter of a century but I briefly trained with her. She was a forthright, lefty Liverpudlian with an original mind; I would never have dared call her "sweetheart". Our tutors once told her off for starting a feature about a brewery with the joke that all beer meant to her was burnt casserole and brewer's droop. Over the years, I have noted how she shed her strong Scouse accent, became an adept fill-in presenter on Today and ended up, slightly wasted, on You and Yours.
In this first-class programme, she avoided sentimentality or sanctimony. She defined the unique property of our black-on-black gang crime as its wildly disproportionate recourse to violence. A sociologist who had helped interview 80 teenage hoods suggested we were too ambitious in looking for a cure: perhaps what was needed was an arbitration procedure for inter-gang disputes. Peckham's Lost may be the best piece of journalism my old friend has ever produced. It is repeated on Sunday 6 May at 5pm.
Pick of the week
The Reunion: the Brighton bomb
6 May, 11.15am, Radio 4
The bomber and the bombed meet in the Sony Award-winning series.
Hippies
9 May, 11am, Radio 4
Julian Carey canvasses the canvas dwellers in "Tipi Valley", Wales.
Dave the Dead Lefty
11 May, 2.15pm, Radio 4
Mervyn Stutter presents a warm post-mortem in the Afternoon Play.
The Shane Meadows season
This British director has come far in barely a decade. Now widely acknowledged to be an important voice in British cinema, he has earned a retrospective at the National Film Theatre aged only 34. Films such as TwentyFourSeven and Dead Man's Shoes (pictured right) are set in his native East Midlands. The season, opening with a South Bank Show special, marks the release of his latest film, This Is England - which should add commercial success to the critical acclaim.
Runs from 4-30 May, BFI, South Bank, London SE1. http://www.bfi.org.uk
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