Storyville: Mad Dog Gaddafi (BBC4). I was totally agog and despite all the horrors of torture and death, the most jaw-dropping part was of Tony Blair eagerly hugging Gaddafi. Shakespeare always wrote of how power corrupts and makes monsters of men. No truer words were ever written!
The Guardian sums it up perfectly!
Mad Dog was as dense, as informative and as powerful as you might expect of an 80-minute documentary about the Libyan leader containing interviews with those he bereaved, tortured and imprisoned, those who tried to stop him, and those who – when the money was right and the risk worth it – helped him; and it was twice as horrifying.
Christopher Olgiati's film outlined Gaddafi's funding and coordinating of terrorist movements, the orchestrating of civil conflicts, the training of genocidal warlords, the ceaseless executions of enemies real and imagined. Amid the litany of violations against God and man and conscience, some details stood out. Idi Amin's prisoners having to choose between suffocation in their overstuffed cells or death by stepping into the electrified water outside. The hot pokers and dogs trained to bite to a maximally-painful depth in Abu Salim jail. The six-year-old with her lips cut off and left to bleed to death because she did not smile when Gaddafi thought she should.
The only relief came when we moved from profound horror to profound disquiet, such as when the former National Security Council Director for Libya at the White House, Gwenyth Todd, recalled watching an oil company's CEO who had come to ask them to lift the post-Lockerbie sanctions start crying when they refused. "We handed him a Kleenex," she says, in a still-disbelieving tone. She uses the same tone when remembering the meeting at which one of her colleagues wondered whether they could remove the sanctions if they managed to discredit the families of the victims of the Pan Am bombing by pointing out that they had accepted insurance payouts from the airline, making them out to be moneygrabbers.
Then there was the light of adoration that shone from the face of the wife of German rocket scientist Lutz Kayser, who lives with him on the Pacific island he owns, when she remembers Gaddafi. "I called him Alexander the Great because he was going to change the world!" she says, smiling beatifically. "His gorgeous Armani outfits," she sighs. "Sometimes I thought he wore them for me." Between her husband's unrepentance, fugitive poisons dealer Frank Terpil's utter lack of remorse, the eager smile of Tony Blair flying out to visit Libya and aid in the colonel's international rehabilitation, and the relentlessly inhuman gaze of Gaddafi himself, you have before you all the elements necessary for evil to flourish.
It was a masterful portrait of the man and of his rise and downfall – slightly let down by an unnecessarily self-aggrandising voiceover: at one point the speaker intoned, in his effortfully gravelly manner, "The men who went [to accept Gaddafi's offer to train terrorists] are reluctant to talk. One told us to forget we even knew his name." Inducing an automatic "Dum-dum-daaah!" in the viewer's mind does not help any story, especially one deserving of such serious attention as this.
