I'm not a particular fan of TV's penchant for 'real life' shows: A night in an ambulance, A Day in the Life of a Dog Handler, or SKYcops, all of which inevitably sound more exciting than they are. But I was quite looking forward to last night's episode of Motorway Cops based on the listings guide, which assured me that if I only watched 10 minutes of TV this week, the opening sequence should not be missed. It featured, apparently, two Swedish girls - twins, as it turned out - who cause a monumental distraction to untold priapic motorists, as they walked down the central reservation of a motorway, somehow eluding the clutches of the motorway police. Sadly this small oasis of excitement in the howling wasteland of Thursday night's telly was cancelled, in favour of some of the cutting edge reportage we've come to expect from the Beeb who can't spot the difference between a journalistic coup and voyeuristic schadenfreude. So instead we got The Undercover Soldier.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Russell Sharp, fresh from a psychology degree and working with feral children somewhere up north, decides to become an investigative journalist and go undercover as a soldier in the notorious Deepcut Barracks. Deepcut is one of those media buzzwords at the moment, with all the right ingredients. After a spate of mysterious deaths, many attributed to bullying, the Army launched an investigation into training methods and vowed to stamp out bullying - in a manner of speaking. They produced a neat little code of conduct for their corporals: Thou shalt not indulge in physical abuse of new recruits or use unnecessary force. Nice touch, that 'unnecessary'.
Sharp was inducted into the Army, took his vow to defend the Queen, her heirs and graces, and assorted royal hangers-on. He was shorn, issued several different sets of kit, and located his broadcasting studio, which was a broom cupboard. Periodically throughout the program we would return here while his wan face whispered into the camera of his mobile phone, citing hair-raising examples of physical abuse encountered... or not.
Some of the first things we heard were how, out of the group of 17-year-old squaddies, when they were asked how they would vote, 50% of them said BNP. A senior officer politely explained to them that that really wasn't a very good idea, as the BNP were racist. There was lots of talk of 'fookin Pakis' from the recruits, but actually no evidence of racial abuse at all from the instructors.
One of the biggest problems with the program was the sheer lack of physical abuse that appeared to be going on. Sharp got terribly excited when he heard that a corporal in another company had punched a recruit, and managed to interview the chastened squaddie a few days later.
Sharp: "So he actually punched you?"
Squaddie: "Yeah."
Sharp: "And why did he do that?"
Squaddie: "Well he was giving me a hard time, so I took a swing at him and missed, and he fookin decked me."
Fair enough, one might say. Sharp would argue that by saying that instructors ought to be trained in better methods of conflict resolution. Hello? This the Army. Do you expect the corporal to start screaming he's being assaulted and call the MP's?
There were incidents reported that did appear to run contrary to the Army's code of acceptable conduct. One soldier - an East African, judging by his accent - reported being attacked by a corporal in the toilets, damaging his hand. He seemed put out that, in his words, 'a 24-year-old boy can beat a 27-year-old man.' He registered a complaint and the corporal in question was suspended. In fact out of the 8 corporals featured in the program, 5 were suspended at one time or another for physical abuse. But when you got to hear of the actual abuse, each time it seemed curiously weak. 'He took a swing at me'. 'He peed on my boot.' 'He threw me on the floor and sat on me'.
Call me callous, but in Russia every year scores of soldiers are crippled and killed by systematic bullying that is virtually indistinguishable from torture. If that was the premise of this program - 'Deepcut's Hidden Shame', if you like, if was woefully anticlimatic. It seemed as if Sharp had set out to uncover the connivance of the British Army in the abuse of its soldiers, and instead came up with a few half-hearted incidents of corporals overstepping the mark. And in nearly every case those corporals had since been suspended from the Army.
Throughout the program Sharp referred to 'another company, which I can't name for legal reasons', presumably because legal action is being pursued for exactly this reason. Nevertheless, name it he did, inadvertently, while safely tucked up in his broom cupboard. We were given subtitles due to the poor acoustics of the cupboard, and while the subtitles asterisked the word, Sharp himself clearly said: 'in the rifle company.' Then he said it again. And again. You could almost picture the legal affairs department head in hands.
Nevertheless he approached Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the Army, with his findings. Personally, if I were Dannatt, I suspect I would have laughed Sharp out of the room with his media studies journalism and his nervous righteousness. But Dannatt played along, pointing out that things had changed hugely in the Army in recent years, and that in an organisation of 150,000 people, when a few isolated incidents of abuse did occur, they were cracked down on.
My grandfather was an instructor in the Commandos in the war, and carried on with the TA for many years afterwards. I remember him saying that the recruits of the 1960s weren't a patch on previous generations, and how they'd got worse ever since. They weren't just mentally soft, he'd say, but physically. Nobody would argue that bullying should be tolerated in the Army, or that recruits deserve to suffer physical abuse, but you have to wonder how prepared some of these troops would be for the realities of capture by the enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan if they've been trained in an environment where when a corporal punches out a squaddie who takes a swing at him, the corporal gets suspended.
I have to admit I'd half-hoped the Army wouldn't let Sharp go at the end of the six months, and instead announce that he was being posted to Helmand. Perhaps that would have given him some worthy reportage. As it was I felt like I'd wasted an hour of my life sitting in front of it. But I got off lightly. He wasted six months of his.
