The slippery nature of truth

Last night's TV reviewed: The Girl in the Box; Storyville: My Israel; Storyville: The Battle for Jerusalem; The Apprentice; Desperate Housewives

Hitchhiking across California in the Seventies, a young woman called Colleen Stan found herself on the outskirts of a town called Red Bluff. She turned down two lifts because she wasn't sure about the look of the drivers, but then a young couple drew up, the woman nursing a baby, and Colleen made her first big mistake. She climbed in. A little later, when the car stopped at a petrol station and Colleen paid a visit to the bathroom, she made her second, which was even bigger. She ignored the inner voice, which was telling her that there was something not quite right about the man. When she climbed back into the car, he drove to the edge of town and pulled a knife on her, forcing her to lock her head into a specially constructed box, lined with insulating foam to muffle the sound of her screams.

I don't suppose you'd be in a condition for dispassionate analysis at such a moment, but if you were, I think you'd recognise that the box was a very bad sign, evidence that your attacker hadn't just got carried away in the heat of the moment but had everything planned. And so it proved. Cameron Hooker, an apparently inoffensive type, was bringing to fruition a carefully calculated scheme to acquire a female slave, and doing it with the acquiescence of his wife, who was keen that someone else take up the burden of satisfying Hooker's obsession with torture and bondage. The deal was simple. As long as Hooker didn't sleep with Colleen, he would be allowed to keep her in the basement and torture her from time to time.

As Five's film The Girl in the Box made clear, Hooker didn't just want someone who had to be chained up. He wanted a mental captive, too, a woman reduced to a state of unquestioning obedience. So, after applying Rumsfeldian tactics of sensory deprivation, stress positions and sexual abuse, Hooker began to train Colleen up to a greater liberty. He told her that he belonged to a shadowy group called the "Company", which, should she make any attempt to escape, would track her and her family down and kill them all. Broken by her regular beatings and torture sessions, Colleen believed him. In the end, Hooker's control was so effective that he was able to let her go to work at a nearby motel and even visit her family, who had assumed that she'd either been murdered or had joined a cult. Even this was at Hooker's whim, though. And when he became bored, Colleen spent nearly three years in a coffin-shaped box underneath Hooker's waterbed, emerging only for a few hours a day. Hooker's young daughters had no idea that she was even in the house.

Eventually, for some reason, Hooker's wife spilled the beans, at which point Colleen escaped and Hooker was arrested and charged with kidnap and multiple rape, the only problem for the prosecution being Colleen's solo excursions and the fulsome love letters that she'd sent to Hooker under her slave name, a symptom of complete psychological dependency that Hooker's defence team immediately enlisted as evidence of consent. Tellingly, the jury didn't find it remotely difficult to believe that a man would do something so outlandish and cruel, only hesitating over the possibility that a woman might not immediately flee when she had the chance. Fortunately, they grasped what enthusiasts for torture – both psychopathic and governmental – cannot, which is that it reduces its victim to a person quite incapable of discriminating between truth and fiction, or between their own interests and those of their tormentor.

Quite a lot of Israelis presumably view Yulie Cohen Gerstel as just such a person, so disturbed by aggression that she has lost sight of the self-preserving duty of enmity. Storyville: My Israel was the raw and far from resolved story of Gerstel, who was one of the crew of an El Al flight ambushed on their bus in Central London in August 1978. The attack left two of her colleagues dead and Gerstel with shrapnel in her arm. One of the terrorists, Fahad Mihyi, was captured and given four concurrent life sentences. The man who helped him died in the assault. Gerstel, now a film-maker and active in the Israeli peace movement, decided it was time for a personal gesture of reconciliation. She wanted to forgive Mihyi, wrote to him in Dartmoor Prison and then began working for the freedom of the man who once tried to kill her.

Many of her fellow Israelis thought she was nuts. On a talk show, she was confronted by a woman who had lost her daughter in a Palestinian terrorist attack. “My whole life has been destroyed,” she wept. Later the two women met and their positions had not changed. “What would I not do to hold her,” the woman said. Gerstel cried with her, but remained resolute. Her letters to Mihyi were cautious though inquisitive: why had he done what he had done? He said he was weak and impression-able as a young man. She believed him and wrote a letter to the parole board recommending his release. The former terrorist did not want to be filmed (though his restrained, intelligent letters were read out) and the film, frustratingly, did not make clear what happened next – was he released, where was he now, did they meet again? A Sun report in 2005 revealed he had been refused parole in 2001 and was being let out of jail every day to work as an assistant to a Halal butcher in Newport.

My Israel was a kind of accumulated diary of this enterprise, as well as a portrait of Israel today, and Gerstel's own deeply conflicted journey from proud member of the Israeli armed forces to patriotic dissident. The programme followed her as she tried to re-establish contact with her ultra-Orthodox brother, now estranged, and her relationship with her daughters after the breakdown of her marriage. Her parents lost their home and health, the hatred of Israelis towards Palestinians was evident in an ugly brouhaha at some kind of peace rally. Her belief in love endured, a stubborn corrective to the politics of hatred and division swirling around her. It was a strange, compelling film, mostly distinguished by a sense of pain, whether it was that of the Israeli mother whose daughter had been killed in a terrorist attack or of Gerstel herself, as she heard her father confess that he participated in the killing of Palestinians fleeing from Beersheba, unable to say for sure whether they were fighters or civilians. It was a portrait of a society simmering with rage and fear, and it was impossible to tell where one emotion stopped and the other began.

The Storyville credits always open with a matchbox dropping into an open-topped car. The gentleman in the car, wearing training shorts, seems surprised when it flutters into his hands – ah good old Storyville, quirky, never know quite what to expect, a welcome original among all the reality shows around it. The second instalment last night, The Battle for Jerusalem (BBC4), unexpectedly dealt with the battle itself in a couple of sentences. In May 1948, the Jordanians bombarded the Jewish area of the city. Nine days later, the Jews surrendered and left as refugees. The rest of the programme then focused on how the battle was seen in the West. Life magazine, for example, ran the headline “Arabs Sack the Holy City” over photographs by John Phillips, an Israel supporter whose pictures were thought to be the sole record of what happened.

The Battle for Jerusalem therefore started out as a slow and revealing analysis of the work and motives of Phillips, who shot those amazing portraits of displaced Jews and looting Arabs in 1948 when the Arab Legion gained control over the Old City. Last night’s documentary, however, tracked down photos by Ali Za’Arur, an Arab photographer who had taken pictures of the same battle. His family went to the archive office, and after much rambling on the director’s part, found pictures which showed, among other things, that refugees also came in the opposite direction, as newly homeless Palestinians fled to Jerusalem. The programme then introduced us to some doughty old guys on both sides, none of whom gave many signs of being willing to rethink their long-held positions.

So if you didn’t know the wider historical context of that battle – the trajectory and underpinnings of the Arab-Israeli war and its consequences, for example – this documentary wasn’t going to help you. The Battle for Jerusalem assumed far too much knowledge on the viewer’s part, then lapsed into lazy, unfocused mush when it shifted attention to Za’Arur. When an Israeli film-maker discussed a film he had made about the battle years later, his reminiscences weren’t that interesting either. The emotional punch, even a basic focus, was lacking. There was still no point to the stories and no explanation of the events. What The Battle for Jerusalem proved is the unsurprising fact that the Israelis and Palestinians disagree about their supposedly shared history. Yet, precisely because this was so unsurprising, the portentous accompanying commentary on the slippery nature of truth felt like a rather cumbersome way of spelling out the fairly obvious. This was an attempt at documentary Rashomon and it didn't really work.

Always a programme to use London landmarks well, The Apprentice (BBC1) last night opened in the church of St Bartholomew the Great. As the religious music swelled and the remaining eight contestants did their best not to look bleary-eyed, Sir Alan Sugar marched in with his latest task. The teams had to select some wedding dresses in London and flog them at the National Wedding Show at the NEC. At first, it looked as if this could be an atypical episode in which every utterance of the remaining octet of dead-eyed, venal, pig-ignorant, amoral freaks did not flay you to your very soul, as they divvied up the task of inspecting dresses and choosing A.N. Other product almost amicably.

Of course, this soon plunged all eight into what I believe sociologists call “a gendered space”. To the presumable dismay of any old-school feminists watching, most of the women instantly turned shiny-faced with excitement. The blokes had to fall back on a spot of cunning pretence; gamely attempting to disguise the fact that they felt themselves adrift in a sea of indistinguishable satin and tulle concoctions. Michael Sophocles in particular was thrilled with his performance. "I feigned interest very well. That's what I do for a living. I can pretend I'm passionate about the most insignificant thing. And pull it off with an effortless charm." The ability to say this kind of thing without a hint of a flicker of a suggestion of a smile, or indeed a scintilla of charm, effortless or otherwise, would in any other context mark him out as a sufferer with a rare pathology who should be taken away and studied in a secure area. Only in the rarefied conditions of The Apprentice is he allowed to continue roaming free.

Even so, Michael’s project manager, Helene Speight, decided to go for a range of coloured dresses, which at £900 were around a third the price of the Ian Stuarts. Not only that, but as the woman in the shop clinchingly noted, both Jordan and Jodie Marsh got married in non-white. Claire and Raef for Team Alpha chose the designer creations and thrilled by the alliance forged by the Alpha pair with such a high-end name, the lady who sold the diamante bridal lingerie that both teams wanted to stock chose Alpha. Ian Stuart's response to the impending juxtaposition was not recorded. Team Renaissance were left, therefore, with wedding cakes. £600-a-pop wedding cakes. Alas, the good people of Birmingham know the price of marzipan and stayed away in droves. Those foolish enough to stop by risked being bludgeoned to death by Michael and Sara's sales tactics. "It's only on offer today ... You'll regret it if you don't," Michael warned one, his effortless charm appearing to desert him. "It's your bloody wedding!" he told another, who wanted to ring her fiancé to find out what he thought of cupcakes. "These people are dumdums!" he muttered incredulously as she fled in a mixture of anger and fear. "They don't know what they're doing!"

For a while in the NEC, Team Renaissance looked like they had made good decisions. Sadly, though, the price of the Ian Stuarts meant a late surge of three sales of them was enough for Lucinda Ledgerwood’s Alpha team to triumph. To be honest, this wasn’t a vintage Apprentice episode. For one thing, in a rare and unwelcome development, nobody made a huge comic cock-up. For another, when Helene, Michael and Sara Dhada were left to battle it out for boardroom survival, it didn’t really matter too much which of them was fired – because none stood a chance of winning anyway.

Still, Sir Alan’s decision to dispatch only Sara to the waiting taxi will surely have fed the suspicion that he’s being kind to Michael. Last week, he grew almost misty-eyed as Michael’s endless bluffing (to use the polite word) seemed to remind him of a thrusting young shaver by the name of Alan Sugar. Last night, his failure to sack the man provoked the unusual sight of Nick Hewer looking aghast, as if he thought his beloved boss had made an error of judgement – or worse, gone a bit soft. Sara, however, who had finished the day all but punching people in the throat to get them to hand over a deposit, Sir Alan found less persuasive. "If I'd been the recipient of a sales pitch that was anything like what you're doing now, I'd have pushed your head in the bloody thing," he snarked. "You go off like a machine gun." And like a machine gun, she was fired. Only seven are left. I need pills.

Perhaps I can get some from Mike Delfino. Currently, they're the only thing
getting him through life with Susan in Desperate Housewives (Channel 4), and one can only say that one does entirely understand. The woman is a congenital idiot. Can't cope with gay neighbours, can't cope with contraception and now can't cope with daughter Julie having a pierced boyfriend. So she sets her up with a nice pre-med student who turns up on the doorstep, who is actually Mike's drug-dealer. Whoops again, you arrant, multi-vested fool.

This results, eventually, in all the doctors in Wisteria Lane blackmailing each other in order to get Mike a new prescription. In the meantime, Andrew leaves home to let Bree and Orson bond with the baby, prompting an almost touching scene in his new apartment in which he thanks his mother for all she's done for him. Carlos is trying to persuade Gaby they should go to the police about, y'know, killing her husband. Gaby, who is to matters of conscience what Michael Sophocles is to self-effacing understatement, declines to unbuden herself to the authorities. Victor then washes up on the beach, not dead and not, as he claims, amnesiac, but bent on avenging himself on his tiny wife. I suggest setting her in Lucite, Victor, and wearing her as a badge forevermore.

All this and more, however, is entirely eclipsed by the arrival of Lynette's long-lost stepfather who turns out to be . . . Richard Chamberlain! Richard flipping Chamberlain! I haven't been this delighted since Barbara Stanwyck pitched up in Dynasty. He looks 10 years younger than he did in The Thornbirds, moves like Baryshnikov and has the waist of a 12-year-old girl. On this evidence, I would suggest we all head for Drogheda immediately. The preservative effects of the pure outback air are truly incredible.