Deadliest Place to Deal review the carnage at the heart of Duterte’s war on drugs – The Guardian

Deadliest Place to Deal: presenter Livvy Haydock with the mother of a drug suspect killed by the police. Photograph: Daniel Bogado/BBC

As a documentary presenter, Livvy Haydock is no stranger to risk. She has made films about girl gangs and prison smuggling. She has been to war zones and worked with Ross Kemp. But throughout Deadliest Place to Deal (BBC3) she looked profoundly ill at ease, as if the Philippines was the last place she wanted to be.

It is not hard to imagine why. It has been eight months since the foul-mouthed populist Rodrigo Duterte waselected president on a platform of eliminating crime, corruption and drugs. He promised that all of that would be gone in six months, a local journalist tells Haydock. He also promised it would be bloody.

It has been. Dutertes war on drugs has killed more than 7,000 people. The vast majority of these have been extrajudicial executions, either by police or more frequently by vigilantes acting on police instructions. To call Duterte unrepentant would be to understate things. Hitler massacred three million Jews, he said in one speech. Now there are three million drug addicts. Id be happy to slaughter them all. His numbers might be off, but there is no disputing his intent.

Haydock joined Manilas night-shift press pack, who travel from one bullet-ridden body to the next, reporting on as many as 22 killings a night. A single lonely underpass Haydock visited has seen 10 bodies turn up in the past eight months. Thats more than one body a month, said Haydock, who has a habit of resorting to the baldly obvious.

She is, however, nothing if not intrepid. She talks to the families of victims, goes on raids with the police, interviews a vigilante murderer and follows the bodies to the funeral home. She sees people being forcibly drug tested in their homes and at work by door-knocking cops. Anyone who tests positive is placed on the police drugs watch list the list used to furnish vigilantes with the names of people to be eliminated. Increasingly, political opponents of Duterte and even human rights workers find themselves targeted. Its really starting to look like a witch-hunt, said Haydock.

A lot of the camera work was the sort one associates with clandestine filming shaky, murky, reliant on the hastily framed closeup but everything was out in the open. The police were happy to be filmed at work. The drug dealer and the vigilante only required a bit of face drapery. What made Haydocks time in Manila so uncomfortably surreal was the backdrop of Dutertes extreme popularity: he won the election by alandslide, and currently enjoys approval ratings of around 80%.

Later, Haydock indulged a police spokesman in a bizarrely upbeat interview. Since the crackdown began, he said, all crimes happening in the streets went down, except for murder. Here, Haydocks gift for the obvious served her well. She pointed out that murder was sort of the worst crime. Heshowed her a pie chart comparing 760,000 surrenderers to the 1,795 people killed in police operations. Thats a big number, though, she said, pointing to the killing slice.

Where do we focus? he said. On the spot on the clean piece of paper? Oron the entire paper? He rather did himself in with his own analogy there.

The programme was rounded out with an interview with Dutertes sister, the family spokesperson. Chillingly, she ate lunch through it, pausing to swallow a forkful before defending the chaos and carnage as the will of the people. Now theres a phrase for the age.

The joy of The House That 100k Built (BBC2) is watching architect Piers Taylor manage both the expectations of budget-conscious self-builders and his own exasperation with their design choices. He smiles as he looks over their plans, but you can tell his eyes are bleeding on the inside.

Kevin and Leslie have got big ideas for a retirement dream house on the Isle of Sheppey, and only 50k to build it with now they have bought the plot of land. Their plan had a curved sloping roof and a staircase to match. Pierss sidekick Kieran Long said theyd fallen into the classic self-builders trap of giving showy design priority over a great place to live in. Piers was privately more blunt: I have to put my cards on the table, and say I just hate the roof.

Piers tried to convince Kev and Leslie that their roof was a stupid waste of money, but he only managed to talk them out of the staircase. At their next meeting he got rid of their two-storey wall of window. By the end of the show, their dream house was still only foundation-high. Mark my words: that crazy wavy roof has no chance.

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Deadliest Place to Deal review the carnage at the heart of Duterte's war on drugs - The Guardian