Take me to your ex-leader

Bad Baghdad behaviour: presenter Inigo Gilmore, right, strolled around Baghdad like a colonial Englishman
The Weekender

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One of the lowest points of the recent Iraq war was surely the news that Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens and even more formerly Steven Demetre Georgiou) had gone back into the studios, to record a new version of Peace Train. The resulting publicity reminded us that Cat turned to Islam after a brush with death, although his admission that "I nearly drowned in Malibu" seemed somewhat unbecoming for a rock star (whisky or vodka would have been fine, but Malibu?).

Some say that the musician behind such faux-naif songs as Where Will the Children Play? and Moonshadow habitually sings flat, but that's not strictly true (it's the entire orchestra that's sharp), and his tone-deafness is surely exceeded only by his hypocrisy. Because the man who now sings about peace and tolerance is the same man who, back in 1989, issued a personal statement about the vile fatwah against Salman Rushdie, in which he stated: "The ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty of it must be put to death."

According to this month's edition of the Islamic fashion magazine, The Shi'ite Face, mullahs in Iran and Iraq are no longer issuing fatwahs against Westerners who mock their way of life. Which is good news for Inigo Gilmore, because otherwise the presenter of last night's The Third Degree: Searching for Saddam (BBC3) could well have merited a death sentence for the condescending way he strolled around the bombed-out ruins of Baghdad and Tikrit while talking down to the locals, the very epitome of a colonial Englishman abroad.

On the feeble pretence that he was going to find the elusive dictator where all others had failed, he travelled to Iraq at the end of April and got into the country with no great difficulty. But once he had entered Baghdad, it became obvious that he had no more idea of what to do next than the White House or Downing Street have, and no clear exit strategy for his documentary. Watching his faltering attempts to get beneath the skin of this war-scarred and complex nation, I soon realised that I knew as much as he did about Iraqi society (and I've seldom been east of Ipswich).

Gilmore didn't appear to speak a word of Arabic, and therefore needed a translator to spoon-feed him with snippets of information, and he seemed genuinely surprised every time he found that an Iraqi had a gun in his house or his car (when, in reality, an Iraqi without a gun would be a rarity).

Worse, he believed every contradictory piece of gossip he heard about Saddam's whereabouts, apparently unaware that Baghdad is a city alive with rumours. But his inability to make progress was perhaps a blessing in disguise. After all, if he had actually got onto the dictator's trail, he'd undoubtedly have got a bullet in the head long before he caught up with Saddam; although, given Gilmore's lamentable performance in front of camera, perhaps that would have been a blessing in disguise.

His unfocused search was made to seem even more pitiful by some overly literal editing and narration, so, for example, when the lights went out during a US press conference, the voice-over asked: "Are the Americans trying to keep us in the dark?"

But it was his Dom Joly-like behaviour that seemed so inappropriate in such a traumatised country, as he deliberately misunderstood an Iraqi who told him he had a stone head of Saddam in his car ("You've got Saddam's head!? In your car!? His HEAD in your car!?") and fell into a James Bond parody when a Mercedes briefly followed his vehicle. His taunting of a petrol pump attendant (a distant cousin of Saddam with a marked facial resemblance) was the most distasteful moment, as he asked loudly, "How can you prove you're not Saddam Hussein?"

"You can see my home," pleaded the nervous Iraqi, only to be told "You could have had a job as a double," before receiving a patronising pat on the shoulder as Gilmore cooed "You won't go to prison, don't worry". What fine upstanding journalism. Give that man a Bullitzer prize immediately.

When one thinks of what Robert Fisk or Jon Ronson might have done with this subject, one could weep at the waste of airtime, but BBC3 budgets allow for so little thinking time or decent research that they probably wouldn't have wanted to do it anyway. Instead of a futile hunt for Saddam in Iraq, what is surely needed now is a search in Westminster for the person who concocted the lies that propelled this nation into an unjustified war that is now sending British soldiers back home in a box (answers please to Tony BLiar, c/o Alastair Campbell).

I'll be away from this column for the next two weeks, overseeing the final edit of 21st-Century Bach - The Complete Organ Works (nightly on BBC2, starting Monday), and although reviewing good programmes is often a pleasure, I won't miss having to write about absurd speculative reportage like this, the sort of ill-informed "Where's Wally?" theorising that used to be indulged in over Hitler's whereabouts during my youth.

Which reminds me of a triple link I recently discovered between the Fuhrer and golf-crazy Bing Crosby. Both were interested in other people's handicaps, both were obsessed with the Masters Race, and both died in a bunker.

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