KEY POINTS:
Ross Kemp, of last night's Ross Kemp on Gangs, is a hard man, yeah?
So who better to go and check out the hardest men in the hardest gangs in the world. But hang on a minute. He's not really a hard man, is he? He was an
actor who played a hard man on EastEnders. Then he was on Extras where he played himself, pretending to be a hard man, but who was really a bit of a wimp.
He was married to the editor of the Sun, Rebekah Wade, who, one heated night, allegedly gave him a thick lip. Much to the amusement of the other tabloids and just about everyone else because, ha, ha, who's the tough guy now, yeah?
It's all very confusing. What is Kemp now? A journalist? An actor playing a journalist? An actor who played a hard man who now makes documentaries about real hard men while capitalising on his character's reputation for being a hard man, yeah? That might be about right.
Ending sentences in "yeah?" is how you talk when you go to El Salvador to talk to members of the most violent gang in the world, when you want them to think that, maybe, you're pretty damn hard yourself.
The opening sequence is all gritty, scary camera angles and sirens and running people and people with nasty looking guns. It could be the opening of some cop drama.
The first episode was set in El Salvador where a very bad gang known as MS13 hangs out killing members of another bad gang. These gangs originated in LA where immigrants from El Salvador looked at the gang culture and thought, basically, what a bunch of pussies.
In LA, one gang member told Kemp, all the gangs do is stab each other. In El Salvador, you see people shot 20 times, and then have their heads cut off. You get the idea: these guys are B.A.D.
Kemp went to visit the gang leaders in prison, which they run, and which is, predictably, a hellhole.
He got permission to talk to a bunch of skinny, young guys who smoked joint after joint and were fatalistic about their chances of survival. They looked, as Kemp observed (although not to them), "like a bunch of scared lads to me".
This was all all right, as far as it went, which wasn't very far.
We could have done without Kemp's attempts to say anything meaningful. "It seems to me, unless there is some kind of economic or social chance here ... the rise of MS13 and gangs like it will only continue and so will the violence and suffering."
This managed to be both pompous and utterly meaningless. What an annoying git. No wonder his wife slogged him one.
* Ross Kemp on Gangs, Inside Story, TV One, Mondays, 9.30pm.
