THERE has been a row about the decision to re-release the Band
Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", 30 years after the
original fund-raiser. Bob Geldof and colleagues have done so (at
the request of the UN) to raise money for the fight against the
Ebola virus. The lyrics have been tweaked, and the song
re-recorded; it is selling well. But there has been an angry
response from some in West Africa, who argue that the song is
patronising.
The promoter Harvey Goldsmith was on BBC Radio 4's
Today programme last week to defend the decision. He cited
a recent edition of Panorama, Ebola Frontline (BBC1,
Monday of last week), as evidence that inaction in current
circumstances was indefensible.
It is hard to disagree with his response to the programme. At
the time of filming, the outbreak was responsible for more than
5000 deaths. Hundreds of volunteers are working to help treat
patients. One such was Javid Abdelmoneim, a 35-year-old A&E
doctor from London, who spent a month at an Ebola treatment centre
with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Sierra Leone. The
Panorama team went with him.
Abdelmoneim was one of four doctors, 52 nurses, and more than
200 support staff at work. Day after day, a seemingly endless queue
of patients arrived. The MSF team, wrapped in bio-hazard suiting,
tested people for symptoms of the disease. Sometimes, half a family
was clear, and could be sent home. Others were not so lucky.
People do recover from the Ebola virus. But the trouble is that
the illness is so rife, and burials are so haphazard, that it
spreads quickly. And the dying stages are horrible. If patients
recover, they might be moved to the convalescent wing, but even
here they are not always safe. We saw a father leave his
one-year-old daughter for a few moments. He never came back.
Another convalescent woman, unrelated to the family, took on the
child before her own sister died, and she left the centre in great
distress.
Abdelmoneim tried not to get too involved, but he became
increasingly angry. As he said, it was only once white people began
to be infected that the world sat up and took notice; and the
disaster was unfolding against the background of pre-existing
malaria and poverty. What hope is there? This was powerful and
important television; Panorama is clearly back on
form.
Secrets of the Castle with Ruth, Peter and Tom (BBC2,
Tuesdays) is another series following in the footsteps of the long
running historical re-creation series which started five years ago
with Victorian Farm. In this case, the team of historians
are hard at work on an extraordinary, 30-year project to build a
medieval castle - using entirely medieval methods - in Guédelon, in
France. The historian Ruth Goodman and the archaeologists Peter
Ginn and Tom Pinfold met a crew of English and French stonemasons,
rope-makers, woodcutters, tile-makers, blacksmiths, and other
craftsmen who are painstakingly recreating life as it was.
As in the earlier programmes, it was fascinating to see how much
- and how little - has changed over the centuries.