Dispatches: Bankrolling Mugabe
Channel 4
The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron
Channel 4
It’s a mystery how some people get away with it. How does Robert Mugabe, for example, cling to power in impoverished Zimbabwe, given that a third of the population is starving? How does he pay the wages of that oddly loyal army and police force protecting him, despite having lost the general election? Well, dig down into the slagheap of this political crisis – as in so many others, past and present – and you may find something British at the bottom of it.
In this case, according to Dispatches: Bankrolling Mugabe, it turns out to be former England cricketing star Phil Edmonds and Camec, the British mining company which now employs him. You couldn’t make it up, could you? Not even Jeffrey Archer could knock out a storyline like that.
This plot thickens, it seems, around concessions for platinum mines, multi-million dollar payouts and the services of a smarmy blond fixer called Billy Rautenbach, who is currently wanted by Interpol. Calm down, Jeffrey – there’s more.
Rautenbach’s alleged offences include hoovering up vast tracts of land in exchange for bankrolling Mugabe, even confiscating local crocodile farms and driving off their black owners. So much for Mugabe’s crusade against white landowners. While preaching reconciliation and power-sharing, he is still buying the loyalty of his supporters, black and white, with stolen land and lucrative mining concessions. As for Camec, the programme informed us, it operates freely from luxury offices in London’s Park Lane, helping to finance Zimbabwe’s corrupt regime with its beatings, murders and repression.
Here was documentary-making at its most dynamic – ferreting out a scandal and getting stuck in at ground level, the television crew having to film secretly and even make its own escape from the attentions of a gang of drunken Mugabe thugs.
In The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron, truth was no less stranger than fiction. However romanticised Byron’s famous poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage may have been, it could never match the real life shenanigans which inspired it. Travelling to Europe aged 22 in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, shagging his way through underage lovers of both sexes and becoming the toy boy of Albanian tyrant Ali Pasha, Byron certainly put the drunken antics of today’s young Faliraki crowd in the shade.
As our guide to this TV travelogue, actor Rupert Everett was clearly in his element, warming to this subject matter much more playfully than in his previous documentary on Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton.
Here Everett was effortlessly camp and skittish, making risqué jokes about sodomy at a party in the British Embassy in Istanbul, skinny-dipping in the Hellespont, thumbing through ancient catalogues of Turkish rent boys and performing a giggly striptease for the camera.
Not everyone was amused (the faces of the embassy guests were a picture), but Everett patently couldn’t give a toss and his larkiness was hard to resist for long. True, he was revealing as much about his own ego as Byron’s. True, he looks like he’s been working out with Madonna’s over-zealous personal trainer. But the modern parallels he was striving to create were legitimate – Byron really was the first international celebrity and sex symbol. Ask a bunch of Albanian street urchins and they still know all about him. I shouldn’t bother canvassing our Faliraki kids, however.
Helen Chappell
