Horizon – How Violent Are You?, Tuesday 9pm, BBC2

Posted by Stewart Turner
Michael Portillo


It’s a funny old world. Michael Portillo spent the last couple of decades spewing forth rabid, right-wing polemic as one of Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted Rottweilers. Nowadays, when he’s not cuddling up to Labour MP Diane Abbott on the Beeb’s weekly political schmoozefest This Week, he’s being asked to front serious documentaries about extreme ultraviolence.

What’s more, despite once firmly planting his jackboot into the Great British Public by launching the Poll Tax, Michael reckons he doesn’t have a malevolent bone in his body. Or at least, he didn’t until he was packed off to the Bolivian Andes to witness the locals’ annual festival of violence, where the previous year’s scores are settled with a few bouts of good, old-fashioned fisticuffs.

All this rough and tumble was to facilitate Portillo’s quest to find out what makes ordinary people commit acts of extreme violence. In one of the more interesting studies, he was presented with a couple of life-sized plastic babies, to induce sleep deprivation, and see if the constant crying could finally pierce his calm exterior. Throw in a gruelling shift chopping vegetables for a proto-Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen a London restaurant, and poor Mr Portillo ended up a gibbering, paranoid wreck, ready to punch out the lights of the nearest clinical psychologist.

The show also revisited Stanley Milgram’s notorious experiment in which members of the public are asked to give someone electric shocks as part of a fake “learning experiment.” The shocking study consistently finds that most members of the public are only too happy to administer fatal shocks if an authoritative bloke in a white coat tells them too. Tonight was no different, with nine out of 12 subjects going all the way. Its apparent conclusion – that most of us would probably kill someone if we were told to by a man in uniform – is absolutely chilling.

For all the Michael-taking above, Portillo has perhaps found his natural home on the gogglebox. He was an engaging, thought-provoking host throughout, and since he’s given up the day job I’ve even warmed to the old goat. While at times some of the “science” on offer came straight from the School of Stating the Obvious, last night’s Horizon was absolutely riveting.

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