Cutting Edge: Beauty Queens and Bloodshed, C4
AVOIDABLE death is not a phrase you normally find yourself starting to write in a sentence containing the words "Miss World". But last year, when the pageant came to Nigeria during th
e holy month of Ramadan, it looked like a gaudy, profiteering feast which, through careless ignorance and blatant insensitivity to the religious qualms of Muslims (50 per cent of the population), triggered a spate of furious riots resulting in thousands of people injured - and 250 dead.
Watching Beauty Queens and Bloodshed you had to conclude that it was a disaster that need not have happened. First, the journalist (a rookie) who ignited Muslim tempers by suggesting the prophet Muhammed might have once cared to select a wife from the gathered bevy, could have thought twice.
Second, her editor could have spiked the offensive story. Third, the Muslims might have engaged in peaceful protest. Fourth, the circus could have chosen, in the first place, to come to town in a different country - something it had to do in the end when the beauties, scared by all the brouhaha, decided to mutiny.
In fairness, some of the lovelies had already expressed reservations about the plight of Nigerian women living under Sharia Law. To begin with, Miss Norway, Kathrine Sorland, had researched the situation and was so offended by the plight of a young Nigerian woman, sentenced to death by stoning, that she decided to stay away. In the end, persuaded by the Norwegian foreign minister, she relented. Had Julia Morley, the Miss World organiser, taken half Miss Norway’s pains to become informed, she might have selected a less fraught venue.
However, the programme was rightly determined to suggest that Morley’s ignorance may have been underpinned
by the fee of £5 million the Nigerian government had paid her to help put their country on the international map. Two billion viewers were expected to watch the show.
The economics of the enterprise were analysed by none other than Miss Australia, (these days beauty queens need a masters degree to simply prequalify for the contest). Miss Australia, one of the Sydney cognoscenti, had spotted that girls from countries disposed to provide financial support for the carnival, were most likely to come out on top. Thus Miss Peru and Miss Colombia made the podium, the Latin American viewership for the contest being huge, and their governments’ willingness to bring the show to their shores being part of their play for the popular vote.
A Muslim, Miss Turkey, took the title - and in the aftermath of the fundamentalist riots you had to cynically wonder if the crown was really an olive branch in disguise. This year’s pageant takes place in China - where female babies are sometimes aborted or often abandoned, due to the government’s stringent one-child-per-family dictat. Will the contest sit more comfortably there? Or was the money, and the audience size, just too promising to spurn?
Seven Wonders of the Industrial World: The Hoover Dam went out on a high - 900 feet above the River Colorado to be precise. It was one of the best of a very good series. Over the course of the last ten weeks, landmark achievements in construction have been spectacularly re-enacted, but none more convincingly than this taming of one of the world’s most dangerous rivers. Its mastermind was Frank Crowe, an engineer whose genius was equaled by his ruthlessness. As workers fell to their death ("Heck, we’re losing three men a week right now!"), Crowe faced a strike.
The drama was beautifully and believably reconstructed. The actors playing the principal parts had a craggy honesty that overcame the occasional duff slice of dialogue. The scenery too was magnificent and the filming captured the dusty unbearable heat - and the plight of the workers’ itinerant families, forced to eke out a meagre existence. As the death toll raced past 100, men from the queue of unemployed were replaced like spare parts.
When the dam was finished, "where once there was desert," the voice-over stated, "there now existed civilisation".
You may know it, otherwise, as Las Vegas.
The full article contains 728 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
