A nation in pieces

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Rageh Omaar, who made his name reporting on the fall of Saddam for the BBC, returned to Baghdad to find out how life has changed for the friends and colleagues he has known since his first trip there in 1997...

The descent into Baghdad International Airport feels like falling out of the sky. Having cruised quite normally for more than an hour like any other commercial flight from neighbouring Jordan, the aeroplane hovers above the Iraqi capital and then suddenly begins a steep and rapid descent. It is the only way to avoid being shot out of the sky. The flights are full of men, mostly journalists, Western mercenaries, private contractors and security guards or diplomats who have made the trip many times. For the uninitiated it is a useful and stark reminder that you are arriving in a city like no other on earth.

Journeys to reporting assignments are all about transitions. It requires time to adapt from the comfort, security and certainties of my home and family to the inherent anxiety and danger of the places I am sent to; but it takes less than two hours from boarding the plane at Amman airport to seeing the flat familiar contours of the suburbs of Baghdad. If there was ever a journey to an assignment that I needed time to prepare for, it was this one: my return to a city that I had not only grown to love over 10 years there as a television reporter, but which also changed my life. Chronicling the city's destruction brought me to prominence and the advantages that go with it. Five years on from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have returned to Baghdad to find people whose lives have been changed in ways that none of them could have forecast even at their most pessimistic moments.

For us back home, Iraq has been a contradiction. The conflict has been the most reported and analysed war in recent times. There is nothing that has not been exposed and investigated: from the absence of weapons of mass destruction to the manipulation of intelligence; the staggering disregard for post-war planning; the absence of al-Qa'eda in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and its inexorable growth under American and British occupation. The list is depressingly long. Yet five years on, and millions of hours of news footage and front-page stories later, Iraq is still not only a bitterly divisive issue, it is also a conflict about which the most elemental questions have not been answered. In which ways has this war - in which our country's name will forever be tied - changed the lives of ordinary Iraqis? People like you and me - teachers, doctors, businessmen, journalists, civil servants. It is these personal stories and recollections (as opposed to the self-serving and often duplicitous dry analyses of Western policy and initiatives in Iraq) that I had come to hear.

Arriving in Baghdad is to enter a make-believe world where I have to convince myself that nothing is out of the ordinary. In the arrivals and immigration hall Iraqi officials are at pains to make sure that we have filled in the right colour-coded immigration form and that we all stand in orderly queues. The porters at the carousels eagerly try to carry my bags, saying it will be quicker to get ahead of the rush at customs - just as if we are arriving at Heathrow for the weekend. Only the returning Iraqi families who travel into the city without armour-plated cars or military escort betray any genuine sense of fear and trepidation.

Baghdad is a city where hiding from reality is both an art form and a way of staying alive. It begins the minute you start the 13-mile drive into the city. The Western military and security presence in Baghdad has given rise to a prolific renaming of places and districts. Virtually all the new names for locations in the city have a military connotation, regardless of what Iraqis call them. It is another reminder of how Western officials and Iraqis lead parallel lives. Thus the airport road is known as Route Irish after a battalion that guarded it. It is fenced in by mile upon mile of 20ft-high concrete blast wall that seems to go on for ever. The real Iraq on the other side of the wall is never visible; what you get in its place are paintings that have been commissioned to spruce up the otherwise dull grey of the concrete. It must have taken an army of artists to complete the thousands of images that evoke memories of an ancient Iraqi idyll, before the invasion, before Saddam. They show lush rural scenes of peasants bringing in plentiful harvests, flowing streams and rivers, beautiful girls with pale complexions and no headscarves, craftsmen working in an ancient bazaar.

The appearance of the first of many checkpoints into the city brings the real Iraq into sharp relief. Concrete barriers symbolise life in Baghdad today. They define the geography and state of mind of the city and they are everywhere, expressing everyone's fear of death in an instant, from a car bomb or suicide attack. They are particularly prominent in those places where people are most likely to congregate and which bombers are therefore most likely to target: busy road junctions and roundabouts, markets and shopping districts. Nowhere has more of these concrete blast walls than the Green Zone, the five square miles in the heart of Baghdad colonised by the largely American and British military, diplomatic and security presence in the city. It has been given a name makeover, so it is now officially called the International Zone. But its residents still call the rest of Baghdad the Red Zone. Five square miles is a huge area of someone else's city to commandeer but, even so, no Iraqi can get into it without a pass from the US or British authorities.

So difficult is it to meet Iraqis in normal circumstances that I have arranged to meet Faleh Kheiber, one of Iraq's best photojournalists, in a guesthouse inside the Green Zone. It can be a death sentence for an Iraqi to be seen with a Westerner. In fact, it is so dangerous even to be associated with anything to do with the West that when I telephoned an Iraqi colleague from the television station al-Jazeera the previous week, he spoke to me in Arabic, even though I had greeted him in English. He kept talking incomprehensibly about how he was just finishing his shopping and would be home soon. He explained later that he had been on the street when I called and to speak English would have been far too dangerous.

Faleh was wounded when US forces shelled the Palestine Hotel, the base for most journalists reporting the bombing of Baghdad (the US army claimed snipers had been firing on troops from the hotel roof, but none of the journalists heard gunshots). It was just two days before the city fell and, like many, he thought he had already survived the worst of the conflict. Faleh was working for the Reuters news agency, and had just walked into the room from where Taras Protsyuk, a cameraman, was filming an American tank on the bridge across the Tigris when the tank fired, killing Taras immediately. A few minutes later I saw Faleh being carried on a makeshift stretcher, covered in blood and shrapnel, his clothes shredded. The picture of his bloodstained camera lying on the floor is a stark illustration of the cost of the war to Iraqi journalists. Of the 126 journalists killed in Iraq, 104 were Iraqis.

Reporting on the daily life of ordinary Iraqis in a meaningful way has become almost impossible for Western journalists in the past three years; you need armed security or to keep your visits on the streets to a maximum of 20 minutes. Westerners have had to rely heavily on Iraqi staff and colleagues. Faleh says that now it is extremely difficult for Iraqis to accurately and freely report on the tragedy in their own country. In the five years since he saw his camera stained with his own blood, Faleh has been detained by US forces and had his photos seized by them, and he has been threatened by insurgents and sectarian militia. 'Being a journalist has become more dangerous,' he says. 'You can't move around because of all the operations by militia against US troops. You don't know who your enemy is any more.'

It has been a hard transition for a man who was so certain about where to turn his lens to capture the images needed to tell the story of his country. The one thing that has made the past five years worse for him is that now it is not just him who is in the firing line, but like most middle-class Iraqis, his family has also become a target for criminal gangs tied to sectarian militia. He has joined the brain drain of millions of Iraqis into exile, returning occasionally to Baghdad to earn some money to support them. 'Before, life was easy and safe,' he says. 'We had a house, a car and a settled life. There was security. Now it's gone.'

The Palestine Hotel is now empty. It lies in the Red Zone across the river from Saddam's former Republican Palace, now the American Embassy. Around the corner is the commercial district of Saadoun Street. It is busier today than in the years before the conflict for one reason: Saadoun Street is a centre of pharmacies and medical practices, the place to go for anything from tranquillisers to plasters. At one end of Saadoun Street as it meets the Palestine Hotel is Firdoos Square, where the statue of Saddam was pulled down on April 9, signalling the collapse of the dictator's rule in the city. As US marines occupied Firdoos Square that day, Iraqis tentatively came out to see them. There was no sense of jubilation among the crowds, which initially numbered no more than a hundred or so. People were curious and wary of their new rulers. The tearing down of the statue was partly a constructed photo opportunity, and partly a cathartic release for Iraqis who believed the war was now over.

Khadim Jabouri, famous in Iraq as a weightlifter and bodybuilder, lived closed to Firdoos Square and led the attempts to bring the statue down. He had known Saddam's notorious elder son, Uday; Khadim repaired Harley-Davidson motorcycles, of which Uday was fond. Khadim made the mistake of asking to be paid for work he had done. Instead of payment, Khadim was sent to Abu Ghraib prison for nine years. Helping to bring down the statue of Saddam was his way of getting revenge. The photograph of his musclebound body smashing the plinth with a sledgehammer is one of the most iconic images of the fall of Baghdad. 'I just began to hit it without even thinking about it,' he says. 'The boys from the neighbourhood, many of them Kurds, watched my back because there were a lot of secret police and paramilitary forces loyal to Saddam still about.'

The tearing down of the statue was started by Iraqis but was taken over by Americans who used an armoured vehicle to complete the job. None of us realised that this would be a fitting metaphor for the next five years in Iraq, but today Khadim is full of regrets about what happened that day. 'Initially everyone was happy to have got rid of the tyrant of the past 30 years, an oppressive regime that had destroyed the Iraqi people by enslaving, killing, executing and imprisoning,' he says. 'But things have just got worse.'

For Khadim, now a mechanic, the turning point was the holding of elections and the rise of political parties, many dominated by clerics and politicians returning after decades in exile and still tied to notorious sectarian militia. 'The killings started and things got worse,' Khadim says. 'That's when I began to have regrets. It's true that Saddam was a tyrant, a killer and a criminal, but he provided security and opportunities for business and work. I am somewhere between sad and happy about what happened that day.'

Today there is a new sculpture symbolising hope and renewal in the place where Saddam's statue once stood. The omnipresent images of Saddam - such a defining feature of the city in the years before the war, gazing at you wherever you went - have all gone, but his ghost still hangs over Baghdad; the sense of fear and insecurity, the oppressive and crushing feeling of dread and power­lessness about the future.

Dr Mowaffak al-Rubbaie is the national security adviser to the Iraqi government, one of the longest-serving senior Iraqi officials. He spent decades in exile in the UK where he trained and practised as a neurologist, raising his family in west London (they still reside there). Like all senior Iraqi ministers, he lives in a heavily guarded compound inside the Green Zone. In the corner of his ornate dining-room, adjoining a reception room where he greets visitors and colleagues, is a large metal bust, a head and torso torn from a statue. It was one of the statues of Saddam from the centre of Baghdad that was ripped down the day the city fell. US officers tried to take it out of the country back to their regimental headquarters, but were stopped and told to return it.

There is something eerie about seeing the head of Saddam in al-Rubbaie's house, because he is the man widely believed to have recorded the infamous mobile phone video images of the execution of the dictator. He openly admits that he was a witness at the execution but is coy about whether or not he filmed it. Instead he gives a wry smile. He is utterly unapologetic, shockingly so. He believes that everything about the way Saddam was killed was proper and correct. 'That day was historic,' he says. 'I think we started a new chapter in Iraq. It was necessary. We tried to make sure [the execution] was as professional as we could make it. I'm the first to admit that there were mistakes. But it was a brave decision, it was the right decision, and I think it has helped a great deal in reversing and controlling the security situation in Iraq.' Barely a minute after he says these words, we hear the distant sound of a machine-gun being fired in bursts.

Many senior Iraqi politicians such as al-Rubbaie passed their best years in exile. During this time in isolation, family members and colleagues were murdered and tortured and Western governments turned a deaf ear to their campaigns against Saddam, who was an ally until he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Now they have been restored to power, their sense of vindication and revenge is never far from the surface.

The once-opulent al-Rasheed hotel is now effectively a meeting place and dormitory for Iraqi politicians and the businessmen who want to sell them projects. It is across from the parliament and the American military's main information and publicity buildings. It always used to be a seedy place full of secret police and assorted lounge lizards, and very little has changed. It is an awkward environment for Sadoun al-Zubeidi to walk into. A thin, wiry man who is shy and diffident by nature, he walks through the lobby trying to attract as little attention as possible. He looks at the ground as he walks up to greet me. Al-Zubeidi was Saddam's personal translator. He was the interpreter for the dictator during some of his most important meetings and negotiations with Western officials. Al-Zubeidi has been specifically targeted by numerous militia and al-Qa'eda affiliates. He lives in exile but pays occasional quick visits to Baghdad to see relatives and friends.

Like many of Iraq's educated elite he had studied in Britain, a country that Iraqis of his generation adored and had strong links with. One of the bitter ironies of the war is that Britain invaded and occupied the most anglophile country in the Middle East. Speak to any middle-class Iraqi in his fifties who studied in Britain and you will hear remarkable stories of how integrated they felt in Britain. Al-Zubeidi, for example, ran for election to the National Union of Students while studying in the UK. 'Yes,' he says with a broad smile, 'I actually ran and campaigned against the writer and journalist David Aaronovitch.' I mention that he now writes for The Times and that he was very pro-war. 'Well,' al-Zubeidi says, 'he never had the best judgement in the world even back then', and gives a warm, affectionate laugh. This quietly spoken and cerebral man, a specialist on Elizabethan England, may have been Saddam's translator, but like so many educated Iraqi professionals he had no choice but to serve once appointed. There was no alternative.

'As regards the welfare of Iraq today, I as a normal Iraqi citizen wonder who is to blame in this tragedy? I have a list of culprits,' he continues, in a clipped almost perfect English accent. 'It begins from the mistakes of the past regime, through to the machinations of the United States and Britain, down to the people who have inherited governance in Iraq.' He looks at the ground again as he thinks, and in a bitter and incredulous voice says, 'But the disappointing thing is that the biggest power on earth manufactured intelligence in order to attack a country that had not touched its borders. That is something that the Bush administration is guilty of and will remain guilty of, especially when it has failed over a period of five years to rectify any of the mistakes.'

And the victims? I ask. 'The victims are many, too many. But one thing that is different about this tragedy is the destruction of Iraq's middle classes, the intelligentsia, the people who would rebuild this country. They are all outside the country. Go to Syria,' al-Zubeidi says. 'Just last week I met up with two friends, former professors, and I remarked that between us we had nearly 100 years of academic experience and teaching yet we cannot afford the rent on our two-bedroom flats for our families. That is the unseen tragedy of this country.'

On the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, in a drab industrial zone hemmed in by motorways and flyovers, is a compound built by the UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency. It serves as a registration centre for the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees exiled in the country, virtually all of them fleeing the violence in their own country. By contrast, Britain has taken in just over 200 Iraqi refugees. Because Syria is an associate member of the so-called 'axis of evil', it has received scant financial assistance to cope with the crisis. The war in Iraq has seen the largest movement of peoples in the Arab world since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Today, nearly 20 per cent of Iraq's population have been forced to live outside the country's border. The UNHCR registration centre is the largest such centre in the world. On its busiest days, it processes up to 10,000 people a day.

Outwardly the people here look nothing like how you imagine a refugee to look. The war in Iraq has produced a uniquely middle-class refugee crisis: they are neatly dressed, educated, many of the women do not wear headscarves and you cannot tell who is a Sunni or a Shia - and nor does it matter. The refugees come to apply for the papers that give them refugee status, thus protecting them from being thrown out of Syria. But the centre performs another remarkable and unique role. As part of the process of registration, families are interviewed and debriefed to assess them for trauma. When their numbers are called they are taken to a long corridor with cubicles on either side. Behind closed curtains, a young Arabic UNHCR staff records the testimonies of what happened to each of them. It is the largest collection of eyewitness testimonies from ordinary Iraqis in the world.

The survey was supported by the US Centre for Disease Control based in Atlanta, as well as teams from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, and its overall findings are horrific: one in five refugees registered with the UNHCR since January 2007 is a victim of torture or violence; 77 per cent of those interviewed reported being affected by air bombardments and shelling or rocket attacks; 80 per cent reported witnessing a shooting; 72 per cent were eye witnesses to a car bombing; 75 per cent know someone who has been killed; 68 per cent said they had experienced interrogation or harassment by militias or other groups, including receiving death threats, while 16 per cent have been tortured. It is the statistic of the number of Iraqis who are tortured, overwhelmingly by the vast number of sectarian militia, that most often goes unreported.

Although sectarian violence has driven most of these middle-class refugees out of Iraq, their faith or sect has not divided them in exile. Remarkably, what one finds in the working-class districts of Damascus where many Iraqi refugees live are the mixed communities that one found in Iraq before the invasion. The working-class district of Sayedah Zeinab in the south-west of Damascus is home to one of the holiest Shia shrines in the region. Yet Iraqi Christian and Sunni families live here as well and co-exist quite happily. It is here that I met one of my oldest friends from Iraq, whose real name I cannot use. I will call him Ali. He had worked with other British journalists since the first Gulf War, and although I had never worked with him, I got to know him as a personal friend in the late 1990s. A big-hearted and dignified man, I always used to think of Ali as indestructible, the rock that held his huge extended family together. Wherever he went he was liked and respected. I knew that he had been kidnapped but had not heard the details of what he had been through. It was a reunion I longed for and also dreaded.

As soon as he opened the door to his apartment and I saw him, a bit greyer but otherwise himself, we were both overcome with emotion. Ali sat me down in his bare, tiny living-room which converts into a bedroom that he shares with his sons at night and told me his story. 'It's like a film inside my head. I cannot tell this story in bits or in parts: I have to recount it exactly how it replays in my head day after day after day.' For three hours I sat listening to his story. There is no way to do it justice in a brief article, and frankly most of it is too horrific to repeat.

The kidnappers were waiting for him as he went to work one day. They blocked off the road with cars, grabbed him and bundled him into one of the vehicles. They forced him to the floor, pushing his face down with their feet. 'They were excited, triumphant. I could hear them say on the mobile, "We have the big package". If they had simply wanted to kill me they would have done it straight away, so I knew what was coming and I tried to make myself strong.'

Ali was held for six days, beaten, tortured, four of his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt. When he needed to relieve himself, 'they told me that the toilet is for humans and that I was just an animal. So, I had to…' He still cannot say what he had to do. When he came to telling this part of the story he repeatedly broke down; this act of humiliation and the sense of shame he still feels about it has compounded his trauma.

Soon after he was kidnapped, he was bundled out into a yard. 'They uncovered my eyes. I could see an Iraqi, around 40 years old. One of them grabbed him by the head and the other two were holding his body even though he was tied up. There was a knife, but it was more like a sword. You could see blood everywhere. It seems they had just slaughtered someone else.' Occasionally, Ali would pause as the images flowing through his mind gave way to the emotional impact they still have on him. Then he would continue. 'They started slaughtering him and I tried to close my eyes and they punched me in my mouth hard and put a gun to my head and said, "If you don't open your eyes, I'll blow your brain out. You have to watch. If you don't watch, I'll kill you." I managed to control myself and open my eyes, but I wasn't watching. It was as if my eyes were blank. Then one of them actually pulled my eyelids open. My eyes were open but I wasn't watching the scene.

'They were slaughtering him. The man was crying, screaming, howling, begging, and then the breathing stopped. There was no voice. Then one of them said, "Cut his head off." It was horrendous. No religion under the sun could condone such a thing. God will judge them.'

Inevitably it is the Western hostages kidnapped and executed who receive press coverage, but thousands of Iraqis have experienced the same fate. It is indescribably different when it is one of your friends. Some of the hostages, both Western and Iraqi, are taken for ideological reasons, but it is essentially about money. Ali's family had to come up with the ransom. They managed to get the £30,000 the militia demanded. On the sixth day of his ordeal, where he was again forced to watch other executions, Ali was taken to the 'Emir', the local commander of the group who was unmasked. He simply shook Ali's hand and told him that since his family had made the 'contribution to the Jihad', as he described the ransom, he could go. His parting words to Ali were, 'You have now joined the Mujahideen.' He was driven to the outskirts of Baghdad and pushed out of the car.

However we all felt about the invasion, whether we supported it or not, after five years only the wilfully ignorant believe that Iraq is a better place than it was before the invasion. Ironically, it was the middle classes that argued the most over the invasion, and it has been the middle classes of Iraq that have been destroyed by it. The most consequential war of our times has merely forced us to relearn the oldest and most basic of lessons: that power does not give us legitimacy, that might does not confer wisdom and that ultimately a war based on untruths can never be won. It has been said of Saddam that his epitaph will be that he destroyed Iraq. It is being said of us by Iraqis that we have helped to destroy the new Iraq. However we try to deceive ourselves about our role in Iraq, as a country we cannot escape that judgement by those best placed to judge - ordinary Iraqis. As the old Iraqi saying goes, history has a filthy tongue.

Rageh Omaar's documentary Iraq by Numbers will be shown on ITV 1, March 17, at 10.30pm and al-Jazeera English, March 22 at 7pm

Further reading: Iraq by numbers

The title matters

As individual programmes become more important than networks - because of a download and multi-channel culture - the titles of shows have increased in importance notes Mark Lawson...

Two years ago, the common view was that the need for quick recognition would result in a wave of tinned-peas titling - series called, for example, The Sex Advice Show - or branded franchises, such as the numerous strains of CSI. But in Britain, at least, it hasn't turned out quite like that. There are branded strands - such as Holby Blue, the cop spin-off from Holby City - but naming is often more imaginative than the marketing theorists predicted.

Indeed, BBC1 currently has two returning series that break all the laws of consumer loyalty by changing their names for each series. The talent show I'd Do Anything (BBC1, Saturday) follows How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and Any Dream Will Do by choosing the tune from the show for which a star is being sought.

But the choice of Oliver's big romantic ballad for the third run has already permitted tabloid TV columns to be sardonic about Graham Norton's alleged approach to his career. And, long term, this naming strategy would clearly begin to dictate the musicals that could be used. Cabaret, for example, seems out: even an age of irony might balk at a TV talent show called Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

The other series with a chameleon title is Ashes to Ashes, which, if made in America, would have been called Life On Mars 2: Ashes to Ashes. But, again, this tactic limits the show's prospects. DCI Gene Hunt can only appear in future years in which David Bowie had a major hit, which means a possible series three set in 1985 called Dancing in the Street, but not much beyond.

There are, though, many examples of less subtle naming. We can perhaps judge Channel 4's desperation for a drama hit from the fact that the title of its latest crime-family saga seems to have been dictated by a survey of the words most Googled on the internet: Dirty Sexy Money.

Talking about programme titles, there has certainly been better than Who Knew? With Marshall Brain. It doesn’t tell you much beyond the fact that there’s someone out there named Marshall Brain. Who knew? asks Mike Hale.

Actually, millions of people know about Mr. Brain through the How Stuff Works website, the popular resource he founded 10 years ago, and you have to wonder why the National Geographic Channel didn’t use that as the title of his new television series, which begins on Thursday night. It would have fit, though a more precise title would be “How Stuff Gets Made.” In each hour-long episode of Who Knew? Mr. Brain travels to three factories to show how everyday objects are manufactured. There’s a middle-American cast to the items he chooses; the title of the first episode reads like the recipe for a perfect Fourth of July: “Speedboat, Golf Ball, Fireworks.”

The How Stuff Works franchise, which includes books and lectures, has grown to cover everything from automatic transmissions to quantum physics to world history. (One feature on the Web site: “How Communism Works.”) But Who Knew? homes in on Mr. Brain’s fascination with robotics. Although there’s usually some old-fashioned handiwork still being practiced at the plants he visits — particularly at Zambelli Fireworks Internationale in New Castle, Pa. — it’s the machines that excite Mr. Brain, and that provide the show’s most arresting moments. In a coming episode the images of towering robots soldering together parts of Hyundai automobiles, the machines madly dipping and swivelling like a troupe of dervishes, are spookier than any Terminator movie.

Unfortunately not every moment on the assembly line is that vivid. In Thursday night’s episode machines spray polyester resin into boat hull molds. We don’t have to watch the polyester dry, but it wouldn’t have been that much slower. Who Knew? is up against the fact that a lot of the manufacturing processes Mr. Brain shows aren’t very interesting visually. It’s one thing to read about them — who knew that golf balls are cooked and stamped in little dimpled metal cups like poached eggs? — but when you see the golf balls being stamped, you think, yeah, I pretty much knew it would look like that. Mr. Brain, who was a computer programmer and teacher before How Stuff Works took off, does his best to liven things up. But as a television host he doesn’t bring a lot to the table beyond his enthusiasm. He has a habit of telling factory foremen, “So, you’re doing X,” leaving them to nod and say, “Yes.” He also asks questions, like “So, you take that data — like, how do you use it?”

The real problem with Who Knew? may be one of scale: golf balls and speedboats and cars are just too small and familiar. National Geographic already has an excellent program, Man-Made, that realizes this and focuses on gargantuan engineering projects like building the Shanghai World Financial Center or taking down a 1.4 million-pound section of a steel bridge and sailing it across San Francisco Bay. Perhaps in a future episode of Who Knew? Mr. Brain could tackle “Ocean Liner, Golf Course, H-Bomb.”

Who Knew? With Marshall Brain is on Thursday Nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time, National Geographic channel.

Iraq by numbers

'Is it just me or is everything a sham?' asks Charlie Brooker. The real world doesn't feel real any more, as though we're separated from it by a thick layer of Perspex: we can see it, but can't sense it. Perhaps it isn't there...

Take the war. Not the Afghan war, not the "war on terror", but the other one: Iraq. I call it a war, but really it's a TV show - a long-running and depressing one that squats somewhere in the background, humming away to itself; a dark smear in the Technicolor entertainment mural. We know it's happening - we catch glimpses of it happening - but we don't feel it any more. It's like a soap we don't watch, but keep vaguely up to speed with by osmosis.

Even as it unfolds, we have to strain to remember it's there. News stories about suicide bombers bringing death to Baghdad markets are as familiar as adverts for dog food. Our bored brains filter them out. Novelty and sensation - that's what our minds crave. Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour's washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We'll notice if it stops, but not before. The average response to the rash of programmes marking five years since the start of the war is likely to be: "Hey, is that still happening? Bummer."

ITV1 are doing their bit with Rageh Omaar: Iraq By Numbers which, should you even detect its existence, is a violently dispiriting ground-level look at the life of the average Iraqi civilian. Rageh Omaar, of course, is the "Scud Stud" who became a minor celebrity back during the war's earlier, more exciting episodes. Because he's a celebrity, his name comes before that of the war in the programme's title: someone's decided you're more likely to tune in if you see the words "Rageh Omaar" in the EPG. Certainly worked on me.

In some ways, this feels like a comeback special: he left the BBC in 2006 to join Al-Jazeera's English-language service, and the majority of viewers won't have seen him since. So when he walks onscreen it's all, Ooh, it's him - the bloke from that thing. Used to stand on the balcony with all the bombs going off behind him and all sorts. Shock and awe or whatever it was. I used to like him. Think I'll watch this.

Which isn't Omaar's fault, of course. If he's "using" what celeb status he has, then he's doing so simply to encourage us to pay fresh attention to an ongoing tragedy that's grown too stale and too sad for us to even notice. To ease the viewer in gently, he pitches the show to us as a personal journey, not a stone-faced journalistic investigation. He meets one of the civilians who tore down Saddam's statue. He revisits a hotel where one of his cameramen was killed. He tours the Green Zone with some US troops. And he goes in search of his old friends.

Trouble is, seeking out old friends requires him to travel abroad, because so many of them have fled the country in fear of their lives. In Syria, he's reunited with one (his former driver), who was kidnapped and threatened. As his friend recounts his story, Omaar weeps on camera. Normally such a reaction would seem cynical and contrived: here, it feels justified and honest.

Interspersing each encounter are the numbers of the title: bald statistics served up as chilling graphics. Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead - striking because it's so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don't know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can't process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

Rageh Omaar: Iraq By Numbers is on Monday, 10.35pm, ITV1

There was 'Black Magic' before Kobe

Proving there was 'Black Magic' before Kobe, a new ESPN documentary chronicles great players in a tough game of race and basketball writes Paul Lieberman...

In an era when posters of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James adorn the walls of young basketball fans across the States, it may surprise many Americans to learn that when the NBA was founded, in 1949, there were no black players. None. There were the "Globies," of course -- the Harlem Globetrotters -- but they could be seen as the equivalent of the old black-faced minstrel shows, playing to buffoonish stereotypes, and some of the greatest black players, including Bill Russell, wanted no part of them. On the other hand, perhaps their act was calculated to seduce the enemy, a strategy of "make your enemy laugh," as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues in the documentary Black Magic, which airs on ESPN in two parts, Sunday and Monday night.

In the classic basketball movie Hoosiers, Gene Hackman plays the wise Indiana high school coach who yanks a player from a game for violating his rule that the team patiently passes the ball at least four times before shooting. But in Black Magic, that's the buffoonery, the plodding white guys passing around the rock, immediately contrasted with the shoot-in-8-seconds fastbreak, a style derided as "jungle ball" by certain whites but that may well be, the documentary argues, the way the inventor of basketball, James Naismith, intended it to be played.

Black Magic ostensibly is about basketball at all-black colleges in the days before major universities began their recruiting frenzy over the talent that would come to dominate the game. But the latest documentary by New York Dan Klores is just as much about such sensitive issues at the intersection of race and sports in America. Klores' first documentary, 2003's The Boys of 2nd Street Park, also began with basketball, but the sort he played in a Brooklyn playground with fellow Jewish baby boomers, whose lives he followed through the turbulent years of the Vietnam War and '70s drug culture. Though the film is not autobiographical, it does draw on the experiences of Klores, 58, as a student at the University of South Carolina, where he got into several fistfights after being called a "Jew bastard" and was reminded what it meant to be an outsider. Still, his experiences were trivial contrasted with those of blacks in the South, where he saw a group of whites celebrating after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., chanting "One less . . . !" -- well, the epithet is all too familiar. "I was right there," Klores says.

If you're making a film today, you know that a lot of viewers would rather you didn't rub their noses in that ugly history. They'll tell you we're over all that. But it's much like Denzel Washington's recent The Great Debaters in which a lynching provides the context for a peek into all-black colleges, which early on had to teach some students how to use knives and forks while nurturing others to doctoral degrees. Wallace, who is now a law professor at American University in Washington, says students today -- white and black alike -- find such episodes hard to believe. "I don't know whether they think I'm making it up or they just have no basis for understanding it," Wallace said this week.

Though ESPN has made an extraordinary commitment to the four-hour documentary, showing it without commercials, Klores and some of those featured admit that it is a daunting task to connect with younger viewers when, says Wallace, "they don't see Kobe, they don't see Allen Iverson." Instead, "they see all that black-and-white social history stuff that goes pretty far away from basketball." There is, to be sure, much highlight-reel basketball, most notably of two players from Winston-Salem State in North Carolina: the well-known Earl "the Pearl" Monroe, a twirling, scoring machine who went on to win an NBA title with the New York Knicks and who is co-producer of the documentary, and an earlier student, the almost unknown Cleo Hill. Hill could make hook shots -- now the tool of a few big men, playing around the basket -- from out beyond today's three-point line. But when he got his chance at the NBA, according to the documentary, he was frozen out of the action by white team-mates on the St. Louis Hawks, then he was blackballed by the rest of the league.

Though the official stats show that Hill played one year in the NBA and averaged just 5.5 points (and made only 35% of his shots), another central figure in Black Magic, retired coach Ben Jobe, calls Hill "the best of them all," at least as an offensive player, on a list that places Bryant second and Michael Jordan fifth. Jobe is part of a story that revolves around another coach, John McLendon, who learned the game from its founder, Naismith, then passed his knowledge to others, including Jobe, who in turn mentored Avery Johnson, the speedy guard who now coaches the Dallas Mavericks. But more significant than their up- tempo approach to the game is their bearing as patrician-preacher types, unabashed old-values voices in the hip-hop age.

We're told how McLendon used to teach the Four Ws, "Who are you? What are you? Why are you here on this Earth? Where are you going?" And to this day, Jobe, at 75, refuses to be paid for giving clinics ("Why would you charge for something you were given for free?") while warning about the dangers of teenage promiscuity and the insane worship of athletes and entertainers instead of, say, George Washington Carver, a one-time slave who became a great botanist.

When he finished making Black Magic, Klores thought Jobe, the son of a sharecropper, would be its breakout character. But at a Washington screening sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, another figure drew a standing ovation, Bob "Butterbean" Love, a Louisiana native who lighted up the nets at Southern University and the Chicago Bulls. What appeals to viewers is the disability he lived with: a stutter, a major reason he wound up, after his playing days, working as a busboy and dishwasher, pitied no doubt by those who had no idea what he was made of. Love comes across as a gentle soul ready with a hug for the world despite all he's been through. More important, he's someone for whom "We shall overcome" was a personal credo, in a way that brought the screening audience to its feet.

"They called my name and people yelled and clapped. I was shocked," Love recalled this week. "I loved it."

But he seems to have gotten equal pleasure out of something else, how people remembered how flat he shot the ball -- like a line-drive -- while twice averaging more than 25 points a game for the Bulls. That "really surprised me," he said. "I never knew that people loved my jump shot."

Black Magic shows a cross burning in its opening moments and later Alabama Gov. George Wallace's "Segregation forever!" speech, apt background for what happens to another Wallace -- Perry Wallace -- when he becomes the first African American to compete in the Southeastern Conference. When his Vanderbilt team went to play Mississippi State, they were greeted with a cheer, "Get the . . . ! Get the . . . ! Rah, rah, rah!"

Black Magic airs on ESPN in two parts, Sunday and Monday night.

Further reading: Recalling basketball greats held back by racism; Civil Rights on the basketball court

Joseph Mawle: Playing Jesus

Playing the Son of God is not an easy role- particularly for up-and-coming actor Joseph Mawle, who has had to overcome deafness and dyslexia to play Jesus in BBC 1's The Passion. Cassandra Jardine reports...

I have met Jesus. Appropriately, he is 33 years old. Less suitably, he has short brown hair, strangely slanted green eyes and lacks confidence. He is also profoundly dyslexic and largely deaf. Perhaps anyone would be nervous, having been catapulted from obscurity into playing the Son of God, but Joseph Mawle felt ill-equipped for such a divine part. On the farm in Warwickshire where he grew up, church-going was a Christmas- and Easter-only affair. "My family were Christian but definitely not evangelical," he says, rather overstating, I suspect, his parents' enthusiasm. "Does that make me Mary?" his mother asked, irreverently, when he told her he had been offered the part.

Mawle describes himself as a "humanist" - a careful choice of words designed not to offend, because there are many dangers lurking for the man who plays Jesus. Robert Powell, who starred in Zeffirelli's 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth, said: "You always offend someone, and never live up to someone else's expectations." Seeking guidance on how to play the role, one of Mawle's first ideas was to approach Powell for advice. "I contacted him through his agent, but he never got in touch," he says. Then a minor miracle occurred. "The day I was flying out to Morocco to begin filming, I walked into the toilet at the airport and there he was, washing his hands. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him who I was."

"Oh my God," said Powell (or is that just fanciful?) Then they both stood staring at each other, dumbstruck. "Finally, I asked him if he had any advice and all he said was: 'It's one of the hardest jobs you'll ever do'." That wasn't much help. Not for someone who was already over-awed by the prospect of working alongside more experienced actors. James Nesbitt plays Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and Ben Daniels is the high priest, Caiaphas, in this even-handed version of the Passion, which makes the "baddies" more sympathetic than usual and upgrades Mary Magdalene from prostitute to widow. But there remain hordes of disciples in beards and droopy robes, among whom Jesus has to stand out.

Powell established Jesus's otherness by never blinking. "If I had tried that," says Mawle, "I would have ended up blinking like a madman." The research was not easy. He read the gospels in six translations, but they weren't as much help as he had hoped. "There's no description of his physical attributes. They just tell the journey and the teachings. I was left with a blank canvas but a vast responsibility, as everyone in the Western world has their own image of him."

Further reading was required - a chore for a man who is so dyslexic that he spent his early teenage years in a boarding school for special needs. "Look, I've got it here," he says, scrabbling in his bag for The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, which has been his trusty companion this past year. He read it again and again to get under the skin of the Galilean carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago. The thing that stood out for him was a single sentence: "God didn't cheat."

"What I think he meant was that Jesus felt everything a man would feel. He's incredibly human, he expresses fears, anger, lust, love. For me, he not only made the sacrifice of his death but the sacrifice of not having a family. He and Mary Magdalene really loved each other."

The facial hair that made Mawle look like the face on the Turin shroud during filming has long gone. But even cleaned up he has a strange intensity. I can see why Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer of Bleak House, who cast him, describes him as having "a way of holding your attention". When you talk to him, he watches your face intently, lip-reading. I've been told that he doesn't like to talk about his deafness, but that turns out not to be true. He doesn't want to be seen as a deaf actor, but he doesn't mind talking about being an actor who has overcome a disability. In daily life, he wears two discreet hearing aids, but he takes them off when he's acting because they produce a foggy sound. "It feels more natural not to wear them. I can usually tell when people are about to speak from their quirks and tics - though there have been times when I've had to ask a director to pinch my foot so I know when to come in."

He wasn't so sanguine about the deafness when it first struck at 16. Even before that he was having a difficult time. One of three children, his mother was a teacher and his father a farmer - a background that gives him the distinction, rare among actors, of having tractor-driving as a skill. But being dyslexic made his school life hard. He once played Dick Whittington at primary school but he was "too unconfident" to do more acting there, or at the boarding school he attended from 13 to 16. He won't name it, but he had a "really tough time" there; meanwhile, his parents were splitting up. "The best times were Saturday film nights. I disappeared into those films. I left there a quiet, passionate person who wanted to act."

Mawle left school at 16 to pursue that ambition, but almost immediately got an infection - labyrinthitis - which destroyed the hairs of his inner ears, leaving him 70 per cent hearing-impaired in the upper register and with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. "Deaf. Dyslexic. Give up, man," remarked a helpful friend. "It was a dark time," he says. "I spent a lot of time in the gym, channelling all my angst and aggression into making myself huge. Really, it was a cry for help." At 16 he weighed 13 stone and had only 4 per cent body fat.

Living alone in a caravan in his grandparents' garden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, he felt he had nothing more to lose, so he begged the director of the local college to let him study drama. He worked as a fitness instructor, washed dishes and did some tiny acting parts before he applied to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, which had recently taken on two blind students. He got a scholarship, but even after voice training his troubles weren't over. He left in 2002 with no agent and worked as an assistant in a special needs school. Life was looking bleak until his disability suddenly became a selling point.

A deaf actor was needed for the lead role in Soundproof, a TV drama. "Everything came from that," he says. Parts in Persuasion, Silent Witness, Foyle's War and Clapham Junction followed. He met a girlfriend in the pub on "deaf night", though he is now single. Then Jesus happened. Stafford-Clark's idea was to make a naturalistic drama about the last week in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It starts with him buying a donkey on the outskirts of Jerusalem so that he can enter the city riding on it, in accordance with prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. There's a documentary feel to the way the drama unfolds. Pilate is trying to keep this troublesome province under control because it's the trade route to Rome for wealth from Syria. Caiaphas doesn't want trouble. And then Jesus arrives to stir up an already explosive situation.

Filming wasn't much fun. It was boiling hot in the Moroccan desert and Mawle's dyslexia and deafness made learning the lines hard. But it was his disability that, in the end, gave him his way into the part. "I came to see Jesus as a modern man who gave time to everybody. He loved humans, he wanted them to excel. When I first got a taste of religion, I thought it was all don't do this or that. As I learnt more about Jesus, I found he had a more positive message: use your gifts."

That thought gave him courage, but still he was often so nervous that he turned for help to David Oyewolo, who played Henry VI for the RSC and is Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion. "He's straight-down-the-line religious and that was very calming. I was getting mixed up with words and so I asked him what it meant to be humble. He said, 'It means asking for help'." Mawle's humility turned out to be his best qualification for the part.

The Passion is on BBC1 on Sunday, 8pm

Further reading: A bold new interpretation of The Passion; Jesus and Judas in one week Holy Week

John Adams reviewed

Like a declaration of war against any contenders at this year's Emmys, HBO's John Adams arrives Sunday, with a cast far beyond the standards of mere mortal television -- Paul Giamatti! Laura Linney! Tom Wilkinson! -- and production values of Spielbergian proportions. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough, it follows, in seven episodes, the adult life of the man often considered the most influential and, ironically, least well-known of our country's founders. It is gorgeous, precise and at times poetic. If only it were more interesting, groans Mary McNamara...

I feel like a heretic writing those words, but there they are and I won't take them back. Historical drama, if it is any good, always serves two masters -- story and period detail. In that order. Unfortunately, so smitten are the creators of John Adams with historical earnestness and pedigree they seem to have forgotten how to tell a good story. Which is pretty astonishing considering what a great story it is to tell. Love, war, sex, politics, danger, betrayal, depraved foreign courts, postal issues -- the life of John Adams has it all, and a short, bristling, ill-tempered but still brilliant and yes, sexy, protagonist to boot. A Colonial "House" without the Vicodin addiction.

Yet writer Kirk Ellis and director Tom Hooper seem determined, especially in early episodes, to make it not so. Zealously illuminating the often ghastly nature of the times and "real" temperaments of these famous men and women -- arrogant, exhausted, plagued by fears and insecurities, often physically beset -- they get mired in historic detail and hobble their characters, who become as one-dimensional in their failings as they are so often portrayed in their patriotism. Yes, it's interesting, if a bit gruesome, to see early smallpox vaccinations, but not if the price is rendering Abigail Adams mopey and Thomas Jefferson tedious. Which takes some doing.

Things improve in Episodes 3 and 4, but from the moment it opens, John Adams is passionate only in its determination to deglamorize the American Revolution. We meet our main character as he defends the British troops involved in the famous Boston Massacre, successfully arguing that they were hectored into firing by a group of miscreants intent on setting off a bloody incident. Giamatti's Adams is not likable, nor is he meant to be. Grouchy and vain, principled yet sanctimonious, he abhors the way King George III treats the Colonies, but he will not stoop to acts of violence to protest it (a horrifying sequence involved a man being tarred and feathered bolsters his point quite effectively). It is difficult to figure out what, exactly, John Adams wants, except constant reassurance that he is smarter than the average guy. Certainly it isn't his wife, Abigail (Linney), whose main job seems to be to tease her husband into a better humour by reminding him that his intelligence is so superior he need not be constantly reminding people of it.

Yawn.

The chemistry between Linney and Giamatti is less than zero, even by New England standards, and as for sexual frisson, there is none. It's too bad, not only because John and Abigail are among history's great love stories, but because a little sexiness would have gone a long way in firing things up. With her dimples and sharp chin, Linney makes a very comely Abigail, but she too is laden down with "realism" -- when she isn't getting her children inoculated for smallpox or up to her elbows in mud, she spends far too much time staring out the window, complaining that her husband doesn't write her enough, like some mob-capped desperate housewife.

Eventually, of course, Adams becomes a representative to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where he is among the first to argue for a complete break with Britain. What precisely has changed his mind, or how this decision has changed him as a man, we will never know, because Giamatti portrays Adams with grim consistency as more irritated than passionate, more concerned with his standing among his peers in history than in the creation of democracy.

It is hard to say a word against Giamatti, because we all loved him so much in Sideways, yet he never quite captures the complexities of his subject. Yes, it is true that Adams was arrogant and testy, but he was also witty, passionate and compelling, a man who could, and did, persuade people to do things they didn't want to do. Like start a revolution. Of that Adams, we get only the rarest glimpse. Giamatti has the tantrums, the principles and the self-absorption down pat, but he never finds the divine spark. It's as if he is loath to play Adams as a leading man, despite the name of the miniseries.

Indeed, a strange flatness permeates the entire cast and certainly that Congress. With Wilkinson trying to decide whether Ben Franklin was a vaudevillian or a canny politico, and Stephen Dillane's Jefferson given nothing much to do, it is hard not to long for the song-and-dance numbers from "1776" just to have something to watch. Only David Morse radiates anything like charisma, but then as George Washington he is allowed to tower and wear a cool uniform (though I'm not sure what's up with his mouth -- is he going for the false teeth thing?). Things pick up a bit in the third episode when Adams goes to France, where his Yankee frankness is not appreciated (and a bloodier revolution is still a few years away), and then as he takes his place in the nascent government. Giamatti's air of resigned irritation makes more sense at this point, and the narrative becomes more concerned with actual story than making certain that you, slothful television viewer, feel the proper gratitude for being a citizen of the 21st century.

There are, of course, some wonderful and moving moments in the first and second episodes. The confused exhilaration after the battles at Lexington and Concord, the what-now? silence that falls over the Congress when the Declaration has passed, the smoky glare of the Battle of Bunker Hill viewed from the Adamses' farm -- these images beautifully capture both the mundane and the extraordinary and how they conspired to make history. In those moments you see what the film-makers were striving for and may make John Adams worth watching, severe disappointment notwithstanding.

Certainly no one could argue with the production values. If John Adams doesn't make you feel like you-are-there (in Colonial Boston, aboard a heaving ship, among the doomed French aristos), then you need a bigger TV. But for such a glorious production to work true magic, you have to want to be there. And the roiling implacable gut-wrenching force of desire is something this "John Adams" strangely, and sorely, lacks.

Further reading: John Adams gives the overlooked president his due; John Adams brims with life and texture; Starring as Boston: Virginia; Blowhard, Patriot, President; Dear(est) Abby; John Adams, second to none

Ooh, matron! New 'Carry-On' film in pipeline

A 32nd Carry On film could be on our screens by the end of the year, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the series famed for its slapstick and double entendres. After years of delays, a final script for the film, with the working title 'Carry On London', has been signed off, the production company has confirmed. Stars including Vinnie Jones, Shane Ritchie and Daniella Westbrook have been linked to the project, but casting details have yet to be confirmed. The plot is said to revolve around a fleet of limousine drivers taking celebrity clients to the Herberts, a British version of the Oscars.

It will be the first Carry On film since the attempt to revive the franchise with the ill-fated Carry On Columbus 16 years ago. That film starred Julian Clary, Jim Dale, Maureen Lipman and the Carry On veteran June Whitfield, but was panned by the critics. Empire magazine called it "a cheaper alternative to pantomime." It flopped at the box office.

The Carry On films began with Carry On Sergeant in 1958, a gentle-humoured affair compared to later entries in the canon which mined a deep – and deeply popular – seam of toilet humour, lightweight smut and mother-in-law jokes. They also starred some of Britain's finest comedians, notably Kenneth Williams and Frankie Howerd. While some films – such as Carry On Don't Lose Your Head, from 1966 and the 1978 Carry On Emmanuelle – rarely got a television outing after their cinema release, others, such as Carry On Doctor, from 1967 and Carry On Up the Khyber, 1968, became hardy re-run perennials. The 1969 Carry On Camping contributed the defining Carry On moment, involved Barbara Windsor's bra, an al fresco aerobics session and a shocked Kenneth Williams. Pinewood Studios will hold a party this weekend to celebrate the franchise's 50th birthday.

Plans to resurrect the series began in 2003 but the production has had a problematic birth. The EastEnders and Extras star Shaun Williamson was due to play chauffeur Dickie Ticker, but pulled out in 2004 after the producer James Black was replaced, delaying the film's production.

SNL takes pro-Hillary allegations seriously

For three decades, Saturday Night Live has prided itself on skewering politicians of all stripes with equal zeal, from Chevy Chase's clumsy Gerald Ford to Darrell Hammond's sighing Al Gore. Executive producer Lorne Michaels has long maintained that the show risks its comedy credentials if it appears partisan. So he is troubled by the recent chatter that the venerable late-night program has exhibited a pro-Clinton bent. "That's a major concern," Michaels said. "I can assure you that there's no agenda, that there's only a reaction to what's going in the world."

Since returning to the air in late February after a hiatus forced by the writers strike, the NBC comedy showcase has zoomed back into the political zeitgeist. When media toughened its coverage of Sen. Barack Obama after a 'SNL' sketch portrayed the press as fawning over him, analysts credited the show in part for the shift. (Obama even joked that he was going to call Michaels to complain.) A series of other bits in recent weeks have contributed to the perception that the program is trying to sway public opinion toward Clinton. Guest host Tina Fey gave a shout-out to the New York senator, saying women like her "get stuff done." The candidate herself made a light-hearted appearance the following week, appearing in a matching brown tweed suit with cast member Amy Poehler, who plays Clinton on the show. Two days later, Clinton performed strongly in the Ohio and Texas primaries.

Seth Meyers, one of show's three head writers, said he was amused by suggestions that Saturday Night Live changed the momentum of the race. "We don't quite feel we've affected it as much as people want to give us credit for," he said. "The show happens too quickly for any of us to have an agenda," added Meyers, who donated $1,000 to Obama in January. "And our egos as comedy writers are too big to ever let our own political loyalties get in the way of a joke. So we aim for whatever is the richest to be satirized on any given week."

Michaels, a political independent who donated to both Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd and to Republican Sen. John McCain last year, said the personal politics of the show's 23 writers don't influence its content. "I really don't believe anyone walking around up there thinks, 'What can we do for Hillary right now?' " he said. In fact, the show's mantra is that it's against "whoever is winning," said Poehler. "There is a certain amount of being able to poke fun at everyone equally that's kind of nice," she added. "And so I think that anything more than that would be giving us too much responsibility and making us seem much smarter than we actually are."

The renewed focus on the 32-year-old program and the discussion of whether it has shaped the presidential race has helped lift its ratings. In its first two shows back on the air since the strike, Saturday Night Live averaged 6.8 million viewers, compared with its pre-strike average of 5.8 million viewers. "We're hoping for a dead tie in the delegates so it, like, goes on for another year," Meyers joked. "They have to postpone the general election." But the scrutiny has also forced the late-night institution to contemplate whether it has a responsibility to provide equal doses of satire in a tightly fought race.

Michaels believes one of the factors fueling the perception that 'SNL' has a bias toward Clinton may be Poehler herself, who plays the New York senator as a woman labouring valiantly to ignore the jibes sent her way. "People can confuse the charm of the character with the person," he said. For her part, Poehler noted that "people forget that we did two full years of kind of slamming her in a lot of stuff. I've certainly done her in other situations before on the show in not so flattering ways," she said. "I think there's been a history of different takes on her."

Still, the show's writers were divided when Clinton's campaign called and said that the candidate was interested in making an appearance on the show March 2, right before the Ohio and Texas primaries. "Some people thought it wasn't a good idea," Michaels said. "Would it appear partisan?" In the end, he felt it was only fair, since Obama had been on the program in November. But he added that "we were very clear that she was doing something that would be written for her and that it was not a campaign appearance in any sense."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the candidate is not concerned that his rival is getting a lift from 'SNL.' "Frankly, Barack Obama knows he's good enough, smart enough and, gosh darn it, he's won more states, more votes and more delegates, and that's what probably matters more anyway," he quipped, à la Stuart Smalley.

For the most part, the writers said they believe the show's balance is apparent over time, although the program did consciously try to spoof Clinton last week. Playing off her ominous "3 a.m." ad that suggested Obama lacked the experience to handle a crisis, the piece showed stark black-and-white photos of a panicked President Obama calling Clinton at home for help. "If anything, it was sympathetic toward Obama," Michaels said, though he admitted not everyone saw it that way.

This Saturday's program, hosted by actor Jonah Hill, will likely include more sketches about the 2008 race, although Meyers noted "that the governor of New York will probably take it worse than either of the candidates. I also promise that by the end of the campaign," he added, "both candidates will feel that we've portrayed them unfairly."

Testing over, Hulu.com to open its TV and film offerings this week

Hulu.com, the long-gestating Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, emerges from limited testing on Wednesday to make its catalogue of TV shows and video clips available to anyone on the Web. The streaming-video site displays free, ad-supported shows and feature films from NBC, Fox and more than 50 media companies, including Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Hulu is also planning to announce today that the Warner Brothers Television Group and Lionsgate will add content from their libraries. Hulu will also give sports fans highlights from N.B.A. and N.H.L. games, and full-length N.C.A.A men’s basketball games from the last 25 years, the company said. Hulu’s videos also appear on AOL, MSN, Comcast, Myspace and Yahoo. Over 5,000 Web sites have embedded clips from Hulu, the company said.

Hulu has so far failed to recruit two major television networks, ABC, a division of Walt Disney, and CBS. Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, said that he was still having regular conversations with executives at the two networks. But even without them, he said, the company has quadrupled the number of show titles in its library since testing began. “We won’t stop until we have everything in terms of premium content. That is our mission,” he said. “I just think back to the fact that 24 months ago, there wasn’t anything online legally in terms of full TV episodes or films. In just 17 weeks, we have gone from nothing to over 200 premium titles.”

NBC Universal, a division of General Electric, and Fox, a division of the News Corporation, announced their joint venture to much fanfare nearly a year ago. The then-unnamed company was at first viewed skeptically by many in the industry as a desperate attempt to keep up with the Google's YouTube, the dominant player in online video. Recently, Hulu has received high marks from media and Web executives for creating an easy to use site with high-quality video and professional content attractive to advertisers.

Hulu has been in a password-protected testing period since October, but has slowly been inviting users to enter the site. Mr. Kilar said that more than five million viewers have watched Hulu videos in the last 30 days, and that 80 percent of the shows on the site are viewed at least once a week.

Hulu is experimenting with giving viewers a choice in advertising. During certain shows, viewers will be able to choose which commercial they want to watch — for example, whether they want to see an ad for Nissan's Rogue S.U.V., Maxima sedan or Z sports car. Some viewers will also be given the opportunity to watch a two-minute film preview before a TV show, and then skip all the other advertising breaks.

One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season. “If those episodes keep disappearing, they are going to have trouble getting people to go back and recommend TV shows on Hulu to their friends,” said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst at JupiterResearch.

Using a Founding Father to promote art of letter-writing

HBO and the Postal Service are joining forces for the first time to co-sponsor a multimillion-dollar multimedia campaign that is intended to evoke the pleasures of sitting right down and writing yourself — or anyone — a letter. The campaign promotes John Adams, the seven-part mini-series scheduled to begin on the cable network on Sunday. The campaign includes television, print, online, retail and promotional elements.

The campaign, by the Civic Entertainment Group in New York, seeks to demonstrate what it calls the “power of the letter,” which is also the U.R.L. for a special Postal Service Web site that is a central element of the campaign. The Web site is the work of AKQA, which was recently named digital agency of the year by the trade publication Adweek. The website from HBO devoted to the mini-series also directs visitors to the Postal Service’s letter site, and the campaign also appears on the main Postal Service website as well as on placards and posters in post offices around the country. The cost of the campaign- estimated at $5 million to $10 million- is being footed by HBO, as part of Time Warner.

The inspiration for the campaign — and the Postal Service’s involvement — is the reputation of Adams and his wife, Abigail, as prolific letter writers. They exchanged more than 1,100 letters from 1762 until 1801, dating from their courtship through his presidency. Indeed, in the Broadway and movie versions of the musical “1776,” the songs sung by the actors playing John and Abigail Adams were based on the contents of their letters. The campaign is indicative of a couple of trends. One is the growing willingness of marketers — including media companies like Time Warner, which make entertainment products — to look beyond conventional outlets for their sales pitches.

The campaign to encourage viewers to watch John Adams includes commercials on television and in movie theaters, as well as outdoor advertising and newspapers ads. But the Postal Service offered an "opportunity to extend communication beyond traditional advertising platforms, on a scope and scale that’s pretty broad and impressive," said Zach Enterlin, vice president for advertising and promotion at HBO in New York. "We have a presence in almost 13,000 locations," he added, referring to the posters and placards in the post offices. And the cancellation marks promoting the mini-series are to appear on more than three billion pieces of mail. Mr. Enterlin played down any perceptions of the Postal Service as old-fashioned or low-tech, calling it "a national institution with a great legacy."

The other trend that the campaign epitomizes is the increasing eagerness of organizations like the Postal Service to consider teaming up with corporate partners. For decades, such deals were off-limits, particularly when the Postal Service was part of the presidential cabinet as the United States Post Office. More recently, the Postal Service has affiliated with marketers that include Pillsbury, for a tie-in campaign selling holiday stamps, and the film-maker George Lucas, for a "Star Wars" campaign that featured mailboxes designed to look like R2-D2. The partnership with HBO "is the most elaborate" of those the Postal Service has agreed to, said Joyce Carrier — yes, that is her real name — who is the manager for channel advertising at the Postal Service in Washington. "The more we thought about it, the more we thought, ‘This is a great opportunity,’" she added. "HBO is a wonderful brand and the cast is first-class."

Pun intended. The cast of John Adams is led by Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as Abigail. Other cast members include David Morse, Sarah Polley and Tom Wilkinson.



HBO will begin John Adams with two back-to-back episodes. The remaining five episodes are to be shown each Sunday from March 23 through April 20. Each episode will be rerun several times, as is the practice at HBO. They will also be shown on a sibling network, HBO2.

Putting all the pieces together

For five seasons, critics have worshiped The Wire—and lamented that more people don't. Newsweek's Devin Gordon marks the passing of what may be TV's best drama ever...

We ' re building something here. And all the pieces matter.
—Det. Lester Freamon

About 3,000 miles away from Hollywood, in a crusty dive called Kavanagh's on the corner of East Lexington and Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore one of the most highly praised dramas on television is coming to an end. The bar is set up for a policeman's wake—a framed photograph, rosary beads, a bottle of Jameson—and soon, in this smothering August heat, the place will be filled with large men pretending to be drunk. It is the last scene on the last day of filming on the last season of The Wire, the HBO series that started out in 2002 as a drama about a single West Baltimore detective unit but has evolved, with furious ambition, into the story of an entire city in decline. The show is legendary here—many of the characters are based on people plucked from the city's recent past—and the cast and crew are often treated like folk heroes.

On the sidewalk outside Kavanagh's, the creator of The Wire, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, a salty, pugnacious guy with a bald head, thick chest and the kind of pale pink skin that catches fire in any kind of sun, chats with a black teenager with a gold grill in his teeth and dreadlocks spilling out from underneath a lopsided Baltimore Ravens cap. He came by to give Simon a T shirt that he'd made. "Did you see this?" Simon asks a visiting journalist. "This is what they're selling in West Baltimore now." The shirt features a photo of one of the show's most fabled characters, a female assassin named Snoop, played by former Baltimore gang member Felicia Pearson, who spent six years in prison on a juvenile murder conviction. Very few people watch The Wire—about 4 million per episode, about half what the mighty Sopranos drew—and this pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn't for everyone. And besides, he's got the fans he really wants. "I'd rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world," he says. "Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I'm proud of that. That's why this"—he holds up the shirt—"makes me so happy. Because you know what this is? This is subversive."

If you've never seen an episode of The Wire, which began its final season on Jan. 6, by now you're probably sick of hearing about what a fool you are for missing it. The show has become an object of worship among critics and culture snobs (Barack Obama told TV Guide that it's his favorite show) and they—OK, we—can be flat-out annoying in our zeal for it, as if there are only two types of people: enlightened fans of The Wire, and everyone else. Worse, with all our talk about the show's Dickensian cast of nearly 30 principal characters, its novelistic, episode-opening epigrams, its street-level patois and labyrinthine detail about city bureaucracy, we tend to make The Wire sound like homework. In fact, the show is riveting, infuriating and funny as hell. (In one scene last year, a schoolteacher locks his keys in his car and one of his 13-year-old students, already an accomplished car thief, helpfully jimmies the door open for him.) Baltimore's ruling class has complicated feelings about The Wire—there's more to their city, they complain, than crime and blight—but its embrace by Baltimore's underclass hints at its uncomfortable truth. "There is a sense around here that someone finally said, 'Your lives are worthy of the same degree of drama and meaning as beautiful housewives'," says Simon. "That's a simple thing, but it becomes profound. It becomes a bit of connective tissue between these two Americas that are going their separate ways."

Simon and his writing staff, made up largely of urban-crime novelists such as George Pelecanos ("The Night Gardener") and Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River"), as well as old pals from the Sun, like Bill Zorzi, who spent 20 years covering courts, cops and city politics, are not optimistic people. The Wire is filled with revelations, but its authors aren't holding their breath waiting for a new day. "I think 'The Wire' is going into the archive as an artifact of where we were as a country when we fell on our a–– and became a second-rate society," says Simon from his trailer near the set, parked just across a courtyard from city hall. As he talks, the mayor's office looms over his shoulder through the window behind him. Each new season of The Wire has focused on a different organ in Baltimore's flat-lining civic physiology, with the aim of articulating "why an American city can no longer solve its problems," says Simon. Season one explored the justice system through the prism of a prolonged wiretap case against a powerful drug dealer named Avon Barksdale. Season two shifted focus to the city's waterfront, profiling its eroding community of blue-collar dockworkers. Season three examined city politics in the heat of a mayoral election, while the show's standout fourth season followed a group of boys through Baltimore's overmatched school system. "David has a social conscience, but he's never ax-grinding," says Dominic West, a British actor who plays combustible Det. Jimmy McNulty. "Very rarely in life are there out-and-out villains. People do things for reasons. And you see those reasons on this show."

In this fifth and final season, The Wire's probing eye focuses on the media, a subject that Simon knows intimately from his years as a newspaperman. The Baltimore Sun's leadership gave HBO permission to film in its newsroom, and in a scene during the first episode, a pair of actual Sun veterans—including Simon's wife, Laura Lippman, who no longer works at the paper—watch from the window as a fire blazes a mile or two away. After a minute, the paper's city editor, Augustus (Gus) Haynes (a superbly gruff Clark Johnson), comes over and suggests that maybe they should find out what's going on. "What kind of people stand around watching a fire? That's some shameful shit right here," Haynes says. The scene is vintage "Wire," delivering a bitter-pill message with a healthy dose of gallows humour. "The next and last argument we wanted to have," says Simon, explaining the season's media focus, "is about why nothing ever gets fixed. While the American empire slipped off its pedestal, what the fuck were we paying attention to?"


Serial killers, mostly. In one of the show's most grandiose storylines yet, a homicidal maniac with a thirst for homeless men is loose in Baltimore during season five—only not really, because the killer is actually a fiction created by McNulty and fed-up fellow Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters). It's all a brazen publicity stunt designed to shame the mayor into funneling a few more pennies into a police force so strapped for cash that it had to shutter its wiretap investigation into a soft-spoken but brutal drug kingpin named Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). As fanciful as the phony-killer plotline may sound, it is executed with The Wire's customary verisimilitude, and Simon's point is never far from the surface. The story is "very much a critique [of] the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence," Simon wrote in a December e-mail. "We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted shit or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective." (Simon and his creative partner, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, have been declining all media interviews for months in deference to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike; Simon agreed to answer follow-up questions about the new season for NEWSWEEK because the principal reporting for this story occurred prior to the strike.)

For all of Simon's passion on the subject of journalism—and maybe because of it—the fifth season of The Wire doesn't quite match the power of the fourth. Simon accepted a buyout from the Sun in 1995. Several more rounds of staff cuts have shrunk the paper's newsroom from about 450 reporters to fewer than 300, and Simon believes the reductions have crippled a proud institution. But fury has a way of flattening people into caricature, and some of the key personalities in Simon's fictional newsroom lack the lively mind and tangle of motivations that other characters on The Wire, even the rotten ones, possess in spades. A callow young reporter with ethics issues, played by Tom McCarthy, is almost robotic in his deceit, and the top editor who coddles him is a naive blowhard in prissy suspenders. Simon vigorously disputes this criticism, though to give him his full say would require spilling major plot points. He does point out, correctly, that "the vast majority" of his newsroom "is made of ordinary souls, professional and trying to find their way through ... I believe people in [real] newsrooms will recognize the dynamics and characters and issues throughout. If I'm wrong, you won't be the only guy I hear from." The character of Haynes, in particular, is a healthy antidote. On set, Johnson, who has also directed several episodes, calls Haynes "the editor that every reporter dreams of having," and Simon's fondness for him is clear: he gets all the best lines. "You know what a healthy newsroom is?" Haynes says at one point. "It's a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time."

The media storyline is just one of a dozen or so that The Wire will wrap up over the next three months. Old faces will reappear, including an imprisoned, though no less influential, Avon Barksdale ("I'm what you might call an authority figure around here"), and season two's elusive crime lord known as the Greek. When the finale airs in March, the culture will not convulse the way it did after the sudden end of The Sopranos, but fans of The Wire, who adamantly believe they've got the better show, are likely to feel a deeper, more personal sense of loss. Simon promises he won't pour salt in the wound with a Sopranos-style snap to black. "I actually thought that was a great ending," he says. "But this is a different show. We'll pay out what we've set in motion."

Across town from Kavanagh's, at a farmers market in the parking lot of the racetrack in Pimlico, a second unit is finishing up the last scene for a character named Bubbles, a homeless heroin addict who has struggled, with little success, to get clean since the first episode of The Wire. (Simon and Burns covered similar narrative terrain in 2000 with their Emmy-winning series for HBO, The Corner.) Bubbles is a figure of weakness and decency on the show, and his crushing ups and downs have made him into a fan favourite. Between takes, Andre Royo, the actor who plays Bubbles, breaks out a script of the final episode with the front page covered in signatures from the cast and crew—a parting gift to himself. "When my manager first got the call about this part, I didn't want to go in for it," Royo says. "A junkie snitch named Bubbles? I was upset, actually. I was, like, 'Are white people still doing that?' But to come from that moment, where I was in my life then, to this moment five years later—it's very emotional. This was my biggest break. Bubbles will stay in my heart forever."

Royo, like nearly every other actor on The Wire, had no high-profile credits before he joined the show—and hardly any since. Only the rakishly handsome Dominic West has been able to cross over into major movie work, playing supporting roles in a few "trashy films," as he calls them, such as "300" and "Mona Lisa Smile." Lance Reddick, a regular on The Wire, can now be seen doing Cadillac ads and bit parts on Numb3ers and CSI: Miami. After every season, Clarke Peters, who plays Freamon, gets back on a plane for London, where he lives and works as a stage actor. "Let me indict Hollywood as much as I can on this one," says Simon. "We have more working black actors in key roles than pretty much all the other shows on the air. And yet you still hear people claim they can't find good African-American actors. That's why race-neutral shows and movies turn out lily-white."

None of the actors on The Wire has ever been nominated for an Emmy. Overall, the show has earned just one nomination in four seasons. (Pelecanos and Simon, for writing. They lost.) What really steamed Simon, though, was a story two years ago in Emmy Magazine, the Academy's trade publication, about diversity in television. The story made no mention of The Wire. "Nothing," says Simon. "Not in the whole issue." The silent treatment from Hollywood, though, has cultivated a theatre-company camaraderie around the show, a nervy pride in what can be accomplished by unheralded artists in a supposed backwater like Baltimore. "You get a lot of cachet from being the underdog," says West. "And I rather enjoy that feeling—that you're a cult thing, a secret delight. That means a lot more than an Emmy." Simon is less diplomatic. "I don't give a fuck if we ever win one of their little trinkets. I don't care if they ever figure out we're here in Baltimore," he says. "Secretly, we all know we get more ink for being shut out. So at this point, we wanna be shut out. We wanna go down in flames together, holding hands all the way. It's fun. And it's a good way to go out—throwing them the finger from 3,000 miles away."

Further reading: Debating the Legacy of The Wire: Did Season Five Tarnish the Show That Invented the Dickensian Aspect Ratio?; One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece; Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the 'Wire' Finale; Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire'; Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’; David Simon Still Has Some Things to Say; 'The Wire' spins out a future that is believable if not exactly cathartic; The Wire': Goodbye, farewell and amen; Still Defiant: David Simon Caps Five Seasons of Unspooling The Wire; David Simon on cutting 'The Wire'

The Wire: The Last Word (HBO)