Three haunting minutes you’ll remember for ever

Iwatched quite a lot of television this week, one way or another. There was Shrinking (Apple TV+), the new comedy from the Ted Lasso people starring Jason Segel and also Harrison Ford in his first major TV series, both playing therapists, but it was schmaltzy and tiresome. There was Amanda Owen, the Yorkshire shepherdess, whom Channel 4 appear to have stolen from Channel 5 for Amanda’s Owen’s Extraordinary Farming Lives, but do we really want Amanda Owen poking around other people’s farms? Don’t we want her in Ravenseat? Isn’t that the draw, along with the marriage (RIP) and all those children?

There was only one programme that I could say was outstanding, or that I’d remember this time next week – actually, I’ll probably remember it for all time – and that was Three Minutes: A Lengthening on BBC4, a channel I’d forgotten existed but thankfully it still does.

Shown to tie in with Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, this documentary film does something astonishing as it captures a Jewish community vibrantly alive, which makes it a different act of remembrance. Here we are asked to remember not those who are dead but those who had lived.

I’ll explain. The back story is that in 2009 an American, Glenn Kurtz, found a film reel at the back of his father’s closet in Florida. It was not in good nick and had fused together like ‘a hockey puck’, but someone had transferred it onto a VHS tape in the 1980s.

It was a home movie shot by his grandfather in 1938 when he toured Europe and took a detour to visit the Polish town of Nasielsk, where he’d been born. The film was restored. The Nasielsk portion only amounted to three minutes, with filming undertaken in only three locations: the town square, a cafe and outside the synagogue. Dutch critic, historian and producer Bianca Stigter first saw it on Facebook, could not get it out of her head and would go on to transform it into this, a sort of visual essay.

At the outset the footage, which was, amazingly, in colour, is shown in full, unimpeded. You see a girl with braids trying to push her way into every frame. You see yeshiva boys in caps and women in pretty tea dresses and old men in yarmulkes, and a girl of about seven or eight rushing from her house with a toddler brother in her arms, obviously desperate not to miss the action.

Kurtz’s grandfather tries to film the buildings but the people keep getting in the way, crowding excitedly around the camera, which must have been such a novelty at the time. The documentary, which is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, runs to 70 minutes, but you don’t see anything apart from these three minutes, which are then shown backwards and forwards, halted, magnified, refiltered, cut apart, stretched out.

This is its lengthening. You see every millimetre, every face, every detail, every cobble, every mezuzah on every door, every button. (There was a button factory in the town, run by a Jewish family, which the Germans would take over and then destroy).

We are connected to these human beings but know what they’ve yet even to suspect. We know that within months they will be rounded up, beaten, whipped, sent to ghettos and, finally, extermination camps. We want to shout: ‘Get out, get out now… Just go!’

Of the 3,000 Jews who called Nasielsk their home, fewer than 100 survived. Was that little brother torn from her older sister’s arms? The gap-toothed boy in the baker-boy cap who is smiling so widely… It doesn’t bear thinking about, although the point is that we must.

Some of the people are identified, and there’s a survivor who managed to escape with false papers whose voice is added to the narration. But we don’t see anyone living, only those who once lived. You will never forget it, I promise.

Deep Fake Neighbour Wars is a new comedy that spoofs one of those neighbours-atwar-type shows. But here it uses deep-fake technology like that seen in the BBC thriller The Capture and turns everyone into a worldfamous celebrity.

Visually this is astonishing, amazing, miraculous. If I didn’t know that wasn’t Idris Elba I’d have no idea. The voices, provided by impressionists, are spot-on too. And it is funny, but only initially.

The first episode (of six) begins with Elba – who is described as ‘delivery man, car detailer, handyman, barman, chef and DJ’ – in Catford in his ground-floor flat. He’s lived there peacefully for 20 years but there’s a new neighbour in the first-floor flat with whom he has to share a garden. This is ‘bus driver Kim Kardashian’. He is not happy about sharing the garden. ‘I came out the other day to tend to my brassicas and saw four towels hanging off the pagoda,’ he complains. He starts taking notes. She installs CCTV. It escalates.

Elsewhere, in Southend-on-Sea, ‘single mum Greta Thunberg’ likes where she is – ‘Here you have chips and fish and castles of sand made by the hands of children’ – but does not like her neighbours, Ariana Grande (‘scaffolder’) and Conor McGregor (‘florist’), who cover their house in Christmas lights from July.

This does sound as if it has legs but the joke, which is really only the one joke, starts to wear pretty thin after a while.

And it’s not something you’ll remember next week.