Distracting portrait of dictator short on real facts

By GREG DIXON

The world seems to need its bogeymen. The West discovered a large number of them under its bed during the 20th century, from the Kaiser to Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ho Chi Min and the Ayatollah Khomeini before demonising them and doing its best to get rid of them.

And now we have Saddam Hussein, making the clearest running to be the first international nut job of the new millennium, after a late, but startling run of bogey-mania in the late-20th century, and plutonium-hot competition from North Korean's Kim Jong Il.

This, at least, seems to be the thesis of tonight's Reel Life documentary, Uncle Saddam (9.30 TV One).

The hour-long programme from French freelance journalist Joel Soler sees itself as an ironic portrait of the Iraqi dictator, providing insight it believes to be surreal, uniquely intimate and darkly humorous, which is a flash way of saying that the documentary tries to take the piss out of a man his flunkies call His Excellency, the President, Saddam Hussein.

Featuring a cast of minor toadies and major sycophants from his excellency's inner circle, Uncle Saddam is filled with odd facts.

Here are just a few. He has a large collection of hats, ties and guns. His only true vice is the cigars he gets from his mate and (apparently) former bogeyman, Fidel Castro. He dyes his moustache. He has two large yachts and more than 21 palaces. He rebuilt the ancient city of Babylon, making sure that every 100th brick carried his name. He is overly concerned about body odour.

Now there's no doubting that Saddam is a criminal and a tyrant, but quite how all these factoids add to the sum total of human knowledge, I'm not sure.

And, worryingly, this banal information and Saddam's fawning toadies are intermingled with saddening footage of a children's hospital and extremely graphic images of torture and torture victims.

The narration is padded with glib statements, including the news that he has a number of bullet-proof hats for those pesky assassination attempts.

Dehumanising the enemy before and during a war is pretty much Propaganda 101 - it is intended, obviously, to help us to rationalise killing large numbers of people.

While you expect this sort of reporting from America's press and television which, in the main, seems incapable of discerning the difference between cool fact and Bush administration blather, you would hope that an outsider, particularly a Frenchman, might offer something more.

Soler certainly seems to have gone to great trouble to get his footage, which includes some startling images of the outside and interiors of some of Saddam's many palaces and public monuments.

Soler got them by obtaining a tourist visa to Iraq in France and by claiming he was making a film about the decade-old sanctions imposed by the United Nations. But his stay in Iraq grew increasingly perilous.

Two members of Saddam's Ministry of Information shadowed him throughout his trip and any Iraqi approached was first briefed on what to say. Soler even needed a permit to shoot footage of a statue on a traffic island.

When his escorts finally grew suspicious of Soler's intentions, they took him to a hospital for an Aids test. He protested and the test was called off. The following day he was tipped over the border.

Since completing his doco, his Los Angeles home has been splattered with red paint, his rubbish bins have been set on fire and he has received death threats that the FBI are still investigating.

So Soler has taken no small measure of risk to make Uncle Saddam.

But as a questionably justifiable war draws closer, it would seem a better use of his nerves and our time to have delivered a documentary that told us what we really need to know.