It would never have worked on TV. Ann Widdecombe going out for a night on the town with a group of young professional women. No self-respecting binge-brunette would have allowed themselves to be seen on camera with a sexagenarian ex-MP who just happened to be off the booze for Lent. But there she was, in the Reggae Music and Soul Food Bar at gone midnight, knocking back her glass of fizzy water while Rebecca, Brooke, Phoebe and Kate sipped their shots and tots of vodka.
Widdecombe’s challenge was to look for some ‘real human beings’ behind the screaming headlines about Britain’s binge drinkers, those dolled-up girls in high heels, staggering along the nation’s high streets at three o’clock in the morning. Who are they? Why do they enjoy getting hammered? What do they feel like the next day?
The former Home Office minister is baffled. On Drunk Again: Ann Widdecombe Investigates (Radio Five Live) she told us about her grandmother, who refused to wash up the pewter tankard from which her dad drank his Sunday beer for fear of being contaminated by the alcohol. She herself confesses to being fond of a nightcap (unstipulated) and of enjoying a curry with friends and ‘bottles’ (unspecified) of wine. But going out to get drunk? When you’re a teacher? Or an accountant?
‘Can you honestly demolish half a bottle of wine, five vodkas and three shots and not feel slightly woozy?’ she asks her gang of four research assistants. But that’s the point, Ann. To ‘let loose a little bit’, ‘have a little bit more fun’.
‘Why don’t you wear sensible shoes?’ she pleads, after talking to an ambulance driver who has to pick up the war wounded. Brian Hayes set up the Booze Bus, which cruises London’s West End after dark. The young blokes, he observes, stick together. The young women often don’t. If you fall over and get left behind, you’re on your own.
‘We need to teach kids at primary school,’ he recommends, ‘that alcohol is a drug. It’s not some fun time thing.’ A bit like those sessions we had as kids, being forced by the local policeman to look at rotten lungs in jars, blackened with nicotine. Swap the lungs for a liver or two.
‘What’s a good night?’ asks Ann, still bemused.
Not much of an answer from her research team, except they enjoy having a good laugh next day when they look through the photos they’ve taken and can see how they’ve just got more and more deranged.
‘Have you ever done a sambuca?’ they ask her.
‘A who?’ she replies.
I’d give Widdecombe ten out of ten for having a go. But she’s only a five as an investigative journalist. The biggest let-down came when she gave us her ideas on how to solve the problem, based on what she’d learnt that night.
None of the young women wanted her (or us) to know their full names. From this she deduced they were ‘full of shame’. They didn’t want colleagues to know what they got up to at weekends. It’s also true that it’s against the law to be drunk and disorderly in public. So it follows, according to Ann, that if you told the police to blitz a town centre every so often, rounding up all the drunk and disorderly and taking them to court, this would do the trick.
What is it about politicians? They never quite seem to get it. As if being in the Westminster Village permanently removes their ability to talk with common sense. David Cameron fell into the same trap when he exchanged a few rounds with John Humphrys on the Today programme on Monday morning. ‘Let me draw the distinction [between tax avoidance and tax evasion] very clearly,’ he told us, bossily, like a teacher on the offensive, ‘so everyone at home can understand it.’ Humphrys should have floored him for that. I think everyone out here understands the distinction perfectly well.
Who needs Scandinavian detectives in frumpy jumpers when you can have Meera Syal as DC Jackie Hartwell of the West Midlands police? She’s back on Radio 4 with a new series of A Small Town Murder, Scott Cherry’s police procedural with a difference (produced by Clive Brill). Hartwell works as a family liaison officer, so instead of the usual blood and gore, we hear a little more about the impact of crime, its aftermath, those ripples that billow out into other lives, often for years after. Hartwell is having trouble coming to terms with her role in a suicide and court case about a dead baby. The DI wants her to take time off for post-traumatic stress, but she would rather keep on working. ‘I’m never going to move on,’ she says, not emotionally, just realistically. ‘It’s going to live with me for the rest of my life.’ So understated, yet so believable.
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