I realised recently that there is a certain moment in factual TV history that is treated by all millennials my age or thereabouts as a “canon event”, and that is: Jon Tickle walking across a swimming pool full of custard in a 2003 episode of Brainiac. British TV used to be full of these strange, undeletably memorable moments of documentary (another favourite is Danny Dyer taking a short hard slap from Mo Teague in Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, or the entirety of Richard Madeley Meets the Squatters). We’ve lost a lot of that in recent years – television has gotten too glossy, too high-definition, too reality-shaped, and we miss a lot of what can only be described as “a man wearing an unfashionable jacket while doing something quietly bonkers”, and culturally we have suffered as a result. Watching both episodes of Our Guy in Colombia (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4) – in which Guy Martin gets waterboarded, shot and shown around a cocaine factory in a jungle clearing – felt like being right back in 2006: no iPhones, no social media, no rules.
There’s no way you can watch Our Guy in Colombia and not be permanently changed by it. There are the scenes of kidnap and torture, obviously (the narrator solemnly intones over footage of Martin being slapped and yelled at in the back of a car while giggling: “The official advice is not to antagonise your kidnappers”), and ones of him being shot at close range to test the effectiveness of a bulletproof coat. He gets waterboarded for a while before he taps out, and we see the shocked footage of him, speechless, afterwards. There’s a scene where he mashes leaves and makes a kilogram block of cocaine while armed police watch on to make sure he doesn’t steal any of it. There’s footage of him downhill racing on a bike with no brakes, and a wonderful scene of him explaining the country’s history with guerrilla warfare while jacked up on coca tea. All you can think while watching is: how on earth did this ever get commissioned, let alone insured?
