Would daredevil reporter Katya rather be presenting Top Gear? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV
Living Next Door To Putin
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The Great Flood Of ’07
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Top Gear is up on blocks, since presenter Freddie Flintoff’s horrendous high-speed accident. The show, at least in its traditional format, seems certain to be a write-off.
That’s a pity for the Beeb’s Europe editor, Katya Adler. She revealed a daredevil obsession as she toured Eastern Europe and the Baltic in Living Next Door To Putin (BBC1).
Meeting a Lithuanian racing driver, she persuaded him to take her out on the track for a series of tyre-smoking drifts and donuts — rally stunts that set the 51-year-old correspondent squealing with excitement.
How marvellous it would be to see Top Gear revived with her as its resident speed junkie, testing jet cars and rocket boats, alongside a rehabilitated Jeremy Clarkson.
Then she took off in an aerobatic Albatros jet to loop-the-loop with a Latvian pilot. This, improbably, was supposed to highlight the increased cost of aviation fuel since Russia invaded Ukraine, while the real reason for visiting the stunt driver was that he spends his free time fitting armour-plating to ambulances for use in the warzone.
How marvellous it would be to see Top Gear revived with Katya Adler as its resident speed junkie, testing jet cars and rocket boats, alongside a rehabilitated Jeremy Clarkson
But her true motive appeared to be simple thrill-seeking. On Poland’s border with Belarus, Katya and her cameraman deliberately provoked the edgy Polish guards by straying as close to the exclusion zone as they dared.
A steel wall has been erected along the frontier, to thwart the Kremlin’s tactic for destabilising Europe by funnelling refugees over from the Middle East. Like all BBC reporters, Katya was vehemently on the side of the migrants, seeking out pockets in the Polish forest where bands of them were hiding out.
It’s well known that the illegal migrants crossing the English channel every day in overloaded dinghies are being sent to Britain by criminal gangs of people smugglers. But this was the first suggestion I’d heard that Russia is actively promoting the human trade, as yet another way to undermine Western democracy. This documentary could have spelled it out much more clearly.
When she wasn’t burning rubber, Katya discovered some extraordinary characters, such as the grey-bearded Lithuanian sniper who volunteers to serve with the International Legion in Ukraine. He showed her how he uses an app on his phone to calculate range and windspeed for long shots.
And she met Egle Bucelyte, a Lithuanian newsreader who stayed on air even as Russian troops stormed her studios during the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Archive news footage also formed the majority of The Great Flood Of ’07 (Ch5), with video of cars floating down British streets and buildings collapsing into rivers. The most famous pictures came at the end of the 90 minutes: aerial shots of Tewkesbury Abbey on an island (File Photo)
The footage was heartstopping: Egle was receiving updates on the phone, even as we heard explosions and machine-gun fire. She told her audience that this might be the last time they saw her — and then the screen went blank, as soldiers cut the broadcast. Katya was in awe of her bravery, and small wonder.
Archive news footage also formed the majority of The Great Flood Of ’07 (Ch5), with video of cars floating down British streets and buildings collapsing into rivers. The most famous pictures came at the end of the 90 minutes: aerial shots of Tewkesbury Abbey on an island.
But there was little point to the programme — no effort to explain what measures have been taken to prevent a repeat of the disaster, nor even much discussion of whether climate change was to blame.
Instead, we had former punk rocker Toyah Willcox showing us how far up her garden the floodwaters came, while EastEnders’ Jo Joyner remembered that, luckily, she got married on one of the few days that year when it wasn’t raining. That’s a relief to know.
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