Fat kids and fatwas

Last night's TV reviewed: Age of Terror; Jesus Camp; Too Fat to Toddle; Natural World

Who can remember 7/8? Where were you that day in 1998 when al-Qaeda bombed the American Embassy in Nairobi and killed more than 200 people? And for a bonus point, who recalls that the same day another dozen were murdered in a parallel attack in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania? I suspect that on that remote August Friday ten years ago, you, like me, were instead salivating at the prospect of Bill Clinton, mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, becoming the first sitting president to testify to a grand jury. As Peter Taylor told us in the last, excellent episode of his Age of Terror (BBC Two), Lewinsky would prove no more than a salacious footnote to history. Osama bin Laden was the real thing: history itself.

Taylor is not among those who doubt that al-Qaeda really exists as a terrorist network or that bin Laden is its leader. Nor does the journalist John Miller. He interviewed bin Laden in May 1998, shortly after he had issued a fatwa against the West. Miller sceptically asked when the first attack was likely. “Oh, you will see the results of this fatwa in the next several weeks,” an aide assured him.

“This was a warning in lights but few saw it at the time, including myself,” Taylor admitted. Not that Taylor was transfixed by the President's love life - having reported on Northern Ireland for 30 years, he was much more interested in the climax to the Irish peace talks. Equally, whatever the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's mind was on, it was not al-Qaeda. When her ambassador in Nairobi, Prudence Bushnell, wrote warning that her embassy was an easy target and, indeed, they had had word of a plot, she got no reply.

Of all the missed opportunities, the most amazing was a plot hatched by the CIA to kidnap bin Laden before his first assault. Clinton rejected the option in case bin Laden died in the attempt and the US got accused of assassination. According to the CIA man who would have headed the operation, there would have been little chance of that. They were so keen not to harm bin Laden that the CIA built an ergonomically comfortable chair for the outsize terrorist, padded his shackles, and fretted over whether the duct tape that would have gagged him might harm his beard.

As to who remembers, the painful answer that Taylor did not flinch from giving was the survivors: the blinded Ellen Bomer, of the department of commerce at the embassy; Moses Kinya, of the agricultural office, who had half his head ripped away; Naomi Kerona, a Kenyan trade development officer, so mentally scarred that she says she now lives an existence that is neither dead nor alive; and Bushnell, who learnt to “howl” in the privacy of her shower each morning before she returned to work. “It was a message we chose not to listen to because we were tone-deaf to terrorism at the time,” she told Taylor with barely suppressed fury.

Now, does anyone remember 9/11?

If I have a caveat about this series - and perhaps it is no more than an idea for another - it is that Taylor does not spend much time looking for the political motives of terror, the roots of fanaticism. In Jesus Camp (Channel 4) the documentary-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachael Grady certainly found a breeding ground for extremism in an evangelical summer camp in North Dakota aimed at enlisting children into the army of Christ. Kids On Fire is run by Pastor Becky Fischer, a "pentecostal children's minister". The children aren't actually burnt, but they will be later, if they don't do what Becky - and Jesus - says. They learn that Darwin was wrong, that liberals are wrong, and that abortion is very, very wrong, even though most of these kids are far too young to understand what evolution, liberalism or abortion are. And Harry Potter is wrong, too. I had no idea. "Warlocks are enemies of GOD! And had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to DEATH," the Pastor screams at her young congregation.

Becky seemed to be in the grip of a minor category error here, but then the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction is obviously not an indispensable requirement in this field of work. She is a wild holy roller who is proud of her ability to induce low-level psychosis in children after spending only a few minutes in their presence. "Moments later, they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God," she said, her voice gilded with wonder. Here youngsters aged 7 to 11 are told that it is their destiny to campaign against abortion (handy-sized plastic foetuses are passed round), and that a graven image of George Bush deserves their blessing. Becky is trying to reclaim America from the devil, and she's using kids because they're so open, and so "usable" in Christianity.

The devil's not making it easy for her though - it's not just the heathen lies these kids are being taught in school, with all the usual temptations; he's actively interfering with Becky's work. Before one meeting, she has to pray for all her conference equipment. "We speak over the PowerPoint presentations, all of the video projectors, and we say, 'Devil, we know what you like to do in meetings like this!'" I hate that, don't you? When Satan gets inside the PowerPoint? So annoying.

More absurd scenes included ten-ton Becky deriding America's youth for its reluctance to fast, her asking God's blessing on a temperamental speaker system, and a project in which children were encouraged to smash pottery (it represented big government, I think). To be particularly relished, however, was the camp's guest star. Anti-abortionist Pastor Ted Haggard, a confidant of George Bush, turned mid-oration on the cameraman and snarled: “I think I know what you did last night. If you sin me $1,000 I won't tell your wife.” He had already opened his lecture with the zinger: "You know a third of your friends could be here tonight...but they never made it." His congregation of solemn campers looked mildly baffled at this brain-twisting notion, but he had nothing to worry about. By the end, they were reduced to the same state of babbling, weeping hysteria that appeared to be the goal of all the prayer meetings. The good pastor, a caption later informed us, had since resigned as head of the National Association of Evangelicals amid allegations of methamphetamine use and of paying a male prostitute for sex. Perhaps there is a God.

Some of the children were lovely, including a chatty little nine-year-old called Rachel who plans to open an evangelical nail bar because she thinks that people will be susceptible to the Holy Spirit while they're having their cuticles massaged. It seemed sad that she should be consigned to a lifetime of pious bigotry and Christian dancercise, but she may be saved yet. So it is funny, but also it's not funny. Because most these people really are tonto. And there are lots and lots of them. And every day there are a few more.

One in four British children is now Too Fat to Toddle (ITV1), apparently. So they waddle. Waddlers, they're known as. What's the problem? Well, there is a problem - they get bullied and called "fatty" at school. And then they die of heart failure and diabetes. Not much of a life. So Paul Gately, "Professor of Exercise and Obesity" at Leeds Metropolitan University, is sorting them out. He goes for quite a direct approach, along the lines of: your kid is fat because she eats too much, and she doesn't do any exercise (basically, you're a crap parent). And it seems to work, after the initial tears as the realisation of crap parenting sinks in. Maybe there is too much sensitivity when it comes to weight, and people should hear it straight. I was a bit confused about one little girl's BMI being "quite literally off the scale, at 27.2". Is 27.2 not on the scale? And if not, how do they know what it is? Anyway, that's a minor quibble, in what was actually a more sensible programme than its title suggests.

And I think there might just be a defence for the title of Too Fat to Toddle, which otherwise would surely go down as the most cretinously thoughtless bit of programme-naming for months, a gift to the playground bullies that the programme itself identified as one of the burdens of childhood obesity. The defence, which I warn you now is not terribly convincing, runs something like this: the biggest problem for those suffering from childhood obesity isn't their genetic inheritance or the quality of their diet or the fact that they get breathless just picking up a television remote control (though all these are a problem), it's the fat content of their parents' heads.

The film itself offered conclusive evidence of this fact when Gately visited several families to find out what might lie behind their children's excessive weight. In Scotland, he watched as Teighan, a six-stone five- year-old, and her mother, Sonya, did their weekly shop. Into the basket went a large tub of low-fat cheese spread. "Who eats that?" asked Paul. "Teighan," replied Sonya. "I would give her that if she felt that she was a wee bit peckish before dinner." And the cold meat? "The cold meat would be for a sandwich at bedtime." Or take Dawn, who thinks that her daughter, Grace, is genetically doomed to health-threatening podginess. "She can't do nothing about it," she said ruefully. "She's going to be exactly like me. I look at a cream cake and I've put a couple of pounds on before I've even eaten it."

So, given that self-delusion and ignorance are more obesogenic than deep-fried Mars bars, it's quite important to get some basic education in front of the parents of the one-in-four pre-school children who are now overweight. How best to do this, though? Are they likely to watch a programme called "Too Dim to Say No" or even one straightforwardly marketed as educational? No, the thinking seems to have been, but if we offer them the prospect of sniggering at someone else's children they might tune in for long enough to learn something.

The good news is that Too Fat to Toddle was immeasurably better than its name, and that, with one exception, the cluelessness of parents isn't irremediable. All of the parents here loved their children, felt considerable distress at the thought they might be harming them by over-indulgence and went away from a three-day training session with some basic common sense typed out and stuck into ring binders, so that they knew what to do when imagination failed. The exception, incidentally, was Rami, who flatly refused to believe that his children were overweight and funnelled chocolate and sweets into them behind his wife's back. When the families reconvened for a weigh-in, it was clear that all of the other fat-heads had lost much of their cerebral flab, but Rami was still wobbling around the place convinced that loving your children means abdicating your parental responsibilities rather than taking them on. "They're still kids," he said. "Maybe when they grow up, they will look after themselves, they will lose weight."

So apart from the main participants being under five, Too Fat to Toddle was a standard reality diet-show. The parents were generally mystified as to why their offspring were so overweight – until an expert appeared and pointed out that the children ate far too much and didn’t take any exercise. The parents then responded with astonished gratitude to this insight and vowed to mend their ways. The rest of programme was duly devoted to two main activities. It praised to the skies the wisdom of the expert and then showed us, sometimes rather touchingly, how well most people did. From five-year-old Edden, mind you, we got a different indication as to why the child-obesity statistics are so high. According to the Government guidelines, Edden’s Body Mass Index officially makes her obese. By all other criteria, including her appearance, she’s nothing of the sort.

As we know, Stephen Fry does like his bears – which is presumably why Natural World (BBC2) was able to bag him as the narrator for a documentary on the South American spectacled kind. From there, it wisely gave him plenty of purple prose to get his diction round. (“In the mist of the Andean cloud forest, there’s a shy, mysterious beast…”) Luckily too, Fry was happy to go along with the programme’s idea that because Paddington was from Peru, he must have been a spectacled bear as well – rather than say, a fictional character made up by a writer with no obvious commitment to zoological accuracy.

The spectacled bear, so called because of the markings on its face, is the only surviving bear in South America. Now there aren't many of these elusive creatures left. They mooch about in the forests, climbing trees in search of marmalade. And when they venture up on to the high Andean plains, they put on duffle coats and Wellington boots. Actually, I think the programme's whole Paddington connection is being slightly overdone. Edward Bond, his creator, originally had his bear coming from Africa, until his editor pointed out there weren't any bears in Africa, so it was changed to Peru. But I don't think Paddington was especially modelled on spectacled bears - he didn't have the facial marking for a start, and he certainly didn't rip cows to shreds. Still, it seems to be amusing Stephen Fry, who's doing the commentary, and who seems to think he is narrating Paddington. Either that or he thinks that everyone who watches Natural World is seven years old.

We were also promised “staggering revelations” which would overturn everything we thought we knew about spectacled bears. Even for those of us who thought we knew nothing, this sounded pretty tempting – and although the revelations were a long time coming, they did raise some interestingly awkward questions about the whole nature of conservation. The programme, in fact, unfolded like an old-fashioned detective story. The opening sections were devoted to slightly dull scene-setting – but also threw in a red herring: a careful study from 40 years ago which decided that, give or take the odd termite, spectacled bears are vegetarian. Only then did the bodies begin to pile up.

You see it seems they may not eat marmalade sandwiches at all, but dead cows instead. Here's one, turning over a rotting carcass in the river, and gorging on the dead animal's belly. Eurgh. And it gets worse - it seems the lovely spectacled bear, which was always thought to be a docile vegetarian (by naturalists as well as children), doesn't just eat the cows, it kills them too. It jumps on their backs, then clumsily rips the skin from the poor animals' shoulders before dragging them off for a slow and horrible death. And it's not just cows they eat, but tapirs, too - funny snuffly things. Murderers.

The claims by local peasant-farmers that spectacled bears kill their cattle have long been dismissed by the conservation establishment as pure anti-bear prejudice. Unfortunately, it now seems they might be true. Nobody has yet filmed a bear in the act of murder. They have, though, found dead cows with suspiciously ursine marks on them, dead cows being eaten by bears and bear-claw marks on the trees close to the corpses. (This last clue, incidentally, provoked Fry’s worst line of the night: “Is this where little Paddington sharpened his marmalade spoons into a butcher’s knife?”)

All of which sounded fairly conclusive to me. The trouble is that, if spectacled bears are exposed as killers, the farmers might understandably want to shoot them. In the circumstances, most of the conservationists we met snapped into politically-motivated denial, except for Isaac Goldstein. To his credit, Andean bear expert Goldstein took the bear-related equivalent of George Orwell’s line on the Communist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War: that the truth, however inconvenient, must be told. (As with Orwell too, this hasn’t made him very popular with his former comrades.) Less bravely, the programme couldn’t quite bring itself to agree – variously arguing that we still don’t know whether the bears kill anything, that they’re lovely anyway and that it’s the peasants’ fault for having cows in the first place.