ROOTS, BBC4, 9pm
THIS is a remake of the classic 1970s series about slavery.
Kunta Kinte is a young warrior-in-training in Juffure, West Africa, in the 1760s. He is proud of his land and family, has his eye on a pretty girl, and everything is jolly and sunny. In fact, the opening section in Juffure is quite dull and sentimental, but everything changes when he’s kidnapped by another tribe and sold to British slave traders.
The show breaks completely with idyllic Africa and becomes a stream of horror as the slaves are transported across the ocean in a cramped ship.
Chained and laid out head to toe in sweating, wailing rows on the ship, they are whipped, humiliated and force fed with steel pincers.
There are also grotesque exercise sessions out on deck as the human livestock must be kept in good condition. “Oh my brothers, dance!”
On landing, Kinte is sold to a plantation in Virginia where even greater horrors await.
Be warned that this is often difficult to watch.
THIS COUNTRY, BBC3, on demand
IT’S so easy to miss new programmes on BBC3 these days. The channel doesn’t appear on TV listings because there is no schedule to show. Its material is available online only and so it can easily slip through the cracks, but this new sitcom is worth a look.
It’s a mockumentary about marginalised young people in a Cotswold village.
Kerry and Kurtan, the two Mucklowe cousins, tell the camera about life in their boring village in Gloucestershire.
They are true yokel types, but instead of sitting on a fence in smocks, they hang around the streets in tracksuits and football tops with a “lot of effing and jeffing”.
These “marginalised” youths have nothing much to do but prepare for the Scarecrow Festival, a day where “everyone forgets their utter hatred of each other”.
I’d say the actors are rather too old to play “marginalised youth”. They look more like Jeremy Kyle contenders than tragic youngsters stranded in rural England.
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