TV PROGRAMMES generate many different emotions: elation, amusement, enlightenment, boredom, or — all too frequently, as far as I am concerned — terminal irritation. But Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods (BBC2, Thursday of last week) made me feel soiled. This 90-minute exposé presented testimony after testimony of women formerly employed by the hyper-luxury store of being abused, groped, assaulted, and raped by its owner at the time.
Trial by television is itself morally dubious, but this evidence was so overwhelming, its scale so vast, as to be essentially conclusive. Perhaps the most revolting aspect was not merely Mohamed Al Fayed’s despicable actions, but the utter failure of those — police, law, media — whose explicit job is, supposedly, to protect the innocent and to bring the guilty to justice.
This virtually mires us all in a spider’s web of collusion — not forgetting that the instrument of revelation and truth was here a national institution that, as its own shameful histories of Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards attest, is as unwilling as anyone else to stand up to powerful wrongdoers.
Does this abject failure, as yet another scandal breaks, mean that our country does not just contain many very bad apples, but is, systemically, rotten to the core? This story will certainly develop even wider ripples of revelation and accusation, while one minor strand of bad taste is the BBC’s moral compromise: wielding the sword of righteousness, and yet hoping for a torrent of outrage that will — just like the Post Office scandal — boost its viewing figures for weeks to come.
Recent years’ inundations of testimonies by victims of sexual abuse by no means inure us to each new revelation — the depth of shame, guilt, and failure, the careers destroyed, and lives blighted and ruined are always searing. Harrods itself seems to accept the truth of the accusations completely; we heard some of the guilt acknowledged now by the security staff and employees who provided the protective shield that enabled the predation.
Paradoxically, for a scandal built on uncontrolled libido, the most overwhelming sense was impotence: no one, no sector, not only fully aware of a vile situation, but enveloped by its guilt, felt able to stop it. The age-old sins of the vastly wealthy and powerful trampling, merely for personal gratification, their dependants in the dirt have rarely been so shockingly revealed. The final insult? That it came too late to call the perpetrator to account — at least on this earth.
Traditionally, the clergy are railway-obsessed; so, the thriller series Nightsleeper (BBC1, from 15 September) might initially appeal. A hacker breaks into the control systems of the entire rail network, transforming the Glasgow overnight express into a missile aimed at the heart of London. With more red herrings than pre-grouping branch lines, and promiscuous accusations transferred quicker than pass-the-parcel, can the trapped passengers and the compromised national cyber-security team save the day? What do you think?