Putin: A Russian Spy Story
Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings
Rating: 
Young Vladimir Putin faces the TV cameras for an interview in 1992, as chief political fixer to the St Petersburg mayor.
He’s a slight figure, even boyish, though boyish like Damien (the devil-child) from the Omen movies, not Kevin from Home Alone.
The reporter asks if rumours are true that gangsters try to bribe state officials. Putin doesn’t deny it. His blue eyes glitter, as if a match has been applied to a touchpaper.
It’s an amazing story, made even more incredible by the wealth of photographs and videos shot during his rise
‘Offers are made,’ he shrugs. With a nervous laugh, the interviewer says he won’t pursue that line of question. ‘Why not? Ask away,’ Putin retorts, with a mirthless laugh.
‘You’d like me to say that I take them?’ It’s a perfect vignette, a 20-second instruction manual on intimidating journalists. ‘Please excuse me,’ the reporter pleads.
‘I wasn’t right to ask.’ This amazing exchange was aired as part of the opening episode of Putin: A Russian Spy Story (C4).
It was filmed eight years before he became president. In those eight years, he rose from being a local politician’s strongarm man, to advising President Boris Yeltsin, to running the FSB (successors to the KGB), to prime minister, to leader of a superpower in economic chaos.
Putin became a KGB agent from school but, as the voiceover pointed out, he made little attempt to avoid the camera
It’s an amazing story, made even more incredible by the wealth of photographs and videos shot during his rise.
Putin became a KGB agent from school but, as the voiceover pointed out, he made little attempt to avoid the camera.
He was not an attention-seeker like the current occupant of the White House.
He simply had a knack for appearing in the corner of a picture, lurking behind someone’s shoulder or shooting a poisonous glance sideways.
Often, until he is pointed out, you don’t see him at all. Today in Russia, journalists who ask awkward questions about corruption run the risk of being poisoned.
An opposition politician opened this ruthless biography of the world’s most powerful dictator by noting the ‘strangely high mortality rate’ among his colleagues. But while we are all familiar with the image of Putin as Russia’s new ‘man of steel’, his background is less widely known.
We heard his voice, describing his childhood in a communal apartment of a bombedout building in Leningrad.
His prowess at judo brought him to the attention of the security services and saved him from a life of street crime — but to be accepted into the KGB he had to be married.
He chose a local girl called Lyudmila…and then had his friends try to tempt her onto dates, to test her loyalty. This was a documentary that felt like a thriller.
Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings (BBC2) lacked such drama, though one lawyer claimed the leaked papers that exposed how an entire town was polluted read ‘like something out of a John Grisham novel’.
This Horizon programme was a briskly efficient account of a shameful cover-up.
After the Corby steelworks were demolished in the Eighties, the council disposed of the waste as cheaply as possible.
The testimonies of grieving parents and bullied, disabled children was sad and painful to watch
Locals talked about ‘sludge lagoons’ and a layer of brown dust, like radioactive sand, that covered their cars every morning. Children were born with deformed limbs.
In the most appalling cases, post-mortems on babies revealed malformed inner organs. The testimonies of grieving parents and bullied, disabled children was sad and painful to watch.
But the camerawork was a distraction, constantly zooming in on details such as missing fingers or a lawyer’s colourful braces.
All the facts were present but too often with a sense of professional detachment, as if the passion was lacking.
Dodgy defence of the night:
PC Chris Jones told a drunk, in the police documentary Inside The Force: 24/7 (C5), that he was under arrest for assault.
‘Where is your proof?’ crowed the man.
‘You just headbutted me, you plonker,’ sighed the copper