The week in TV: Witnesses; The Ugly Face of Disability Hate Crime; Dispatches: Hunted: Gay and Afraid

Witnesses (Channel 4) | All 4

The Ugly Face of Disability Hate Crime (BBC3) | iPlayer

Dispatches: Hunted: Gay and Afraid (Channel 4) | All 4

The French tourist board has surely to be over-confident in its product to the point of giggling insanity. First The Missing, Jimmy Nesbitt going loopso in that begrimed weirdo of a town, and now Witnesses. It’s set in Le Tréport, actually a relatively beguiling place on the sweet coastal cusp of Normandy and Picardy, but here cloudswept, bethundered, phlegmy with drizzle and perma-grey; and one of the earliest scenes to charm us is a cluster of shivering cops discussing how hard it is to wrench a recent body from a deep grave.

Hard. But someone, or someones, succeeded, because there have suddenly appeared two sets of three fresh-dug bodies, cleaned and dressed and apparently breakfasting, propped and slouched in two empty local showhomes. As if the very word “showhome” wasn’t bad enough for most souls.

It is quite the most bizarre, unsettling opening premise to a Euro-noir for a long time and it’s successful. Witnesses follows in that seemingly unstoppable line begun just eight years ago by The Killing, but does so with a different elan. Rather less bleak beauty, rather more mumbling into takeaway espressos. But still a heroine (with a troubled past, naturally, and boyfriend difficulties, and certain OCD issues, though this one’s able to smile) and a jovial fellow-cop and a troubled, grizzled one back from the brink. Marie Dompnier, almost a complete unknown to TV, all but acts the socks off the older Thierry Lhermitte, a much-garlanded star. This is paced and styled to perfection, not least in the last minutes when what seems an interminable funicular ride from a hole high in the chalk cliffs – location scouts must have bitten their Gitanes with glee at finding that one – blisters into shock. It’s already come-hither with intrigues, both through straight plot and early hints at weirdness, and I’ll be watching throughout, a little for Marie and a little for the promised wolf.

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Oddly delightful find of the week was on BBC3. The Ugly Face of Disability Hate Crime had two good things going for it: first, that it wasn’t on Channel 5, which might have turned it into a freak show, and second, hugely, in writer/presenter Adam Pearson.

Born with neurofibromatosis type 1, Adam’s condition causes benign tumours to grow on nerve endings. On his face. As he says brightly, he has one of those faces you remember. Adam, who’s not just disfigured but disabled, was on a quest to work out why disablism, an active prejudice against the disabled, is not treated with anything approaching the seriousness of the -isms that befall offenders against race or religion.

I’ll be honest. Won over in the first few minutes as I was by Adam, I shuddered inwardly a little to think of yet another “ism” for which we would have to mentally patrol ourselves daily. But within a further few minutes, it was becoming urgently clear that disabled people suffer disproportional agonies. Even beyond the daily humiliations, there lie far darker tragedies – Brent Martin, beaten to death by three men, and Francecca Hardwick, killed by her mother, who then committed suicide, after years of abuse from local youths – and an apparent top-down reluctance on behalf of government, police and courts to take disablism seriously, through a toxic mix of embarrassment and apathy.

And YouTube, now owned by Google. This became a personal bugbear after an online post suggested that Adam, who appeared in Under the Skin with Scarlett Johansson, should have been burned to death at birth. Even though the comment was posted on Adam’s own YouTube page, Google found this didn’t breach any of their ethical guidelines. Bless their little google-socks. The police were hopeless, even by police standards, when Adam filed a report at his local station.

Patiently, wisely, Adam explained how you could currently get far longer in prison for, say, punching someone because of their chosen religion rather than punching someone for what their body has chosen to do to them, a quite remarkable arse-about-titness of priorities.

There is an argument that there’s difference in “isms”. If you have a functioning body, but one devoid of all intelligence, you might stand in a bar and say “I hate all blacks” or “I hate Muslims/Jews” but think yourself anything but disablist. Yet, much later and lagered up, wander out and see someone such as Adam in the street, and react with anxiety and disgust – and then, possibly, taunts, violence. Ah, but that was personal, you think, it’s not all disabled people. As you might expect, this argument doesn’t chew much tobacco with Adam or his many friends.

We left him making his standup comedy debut, conscious that as soon as people know him they stop looking at his face. He was funny, as he’d been throughout. And he was also making a difference: not just in that he had changed since the beginning of the programme (sighing, with his wise mother, about his first day at school: “Ah yes. Day one of the longest 1,800 days of my life…”) but, it must be fervently hoped, in getting through to one brave politician willing to effect a change in the law. He made a difference to me. Though his YouTube homepage does feature far too many gaming walkthroughs for a grown man to possess.

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Prejudice of another hue – lest you think I’m without it, I’m not: I can’t get over overweight people, or, to be rigorously PC about it, “fatsos” – featured in another excellent Dispatches. We comfy Brits can, and do, lazily sneer at the American evangelistic right and its opposition to the alleged “lifestyle choice” that is homosexuality. Fine. Their lifestyle choice is the Bible. Live and let live. All fun and games.

Until someone loses an eye. It all begins to get rather less wholesome when you realise the World Congress of Families, now with clever tentacles in 80 countries and an estimated fighting fund of $200m annually, hugely influenced Putin’s anti-gay laws, the Slovakian referendum on same and the Ugandan filth that now jails not only gay men but those who fail to report them.

Liz MacKean fronted the vile Pastor Scott Lively – my fun and games are now over, given the 1,900% increase in attacks, some fatal, on gay men in these three countries since the new laws – in his vile and unwelcoming Holy Grounds Coffee House in Springfield, Massachusetts. It must have been hard for her to listen to his unconscionable equating of homosexuals with paedophiles, given that she was the reporter who tried to vainly break the Savile story for the BBC. I’m sure dear Springfield regards Pastor Lively as a dick. But he’s a truly and increasingly dangerous global dick.