Here’s my review of Panorama: North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney. For those who missed the news, John Sweeney, a BBC investigative journalist, joined some London School of Economics (LSE) students on a trip to North Korea. He went undercover, as North Korea doesn’t allow many/any journalists in. In fact, border control is so tight, one undercover journalist had to pretend to be Dennis Rodman just to get his scoop.

Unfortunately, the LSE claim that the students going didn’t know about the journalist joining the trip, or were only told in Beijing (the stepping off point for the trip), or in Pyongyang. Check the details here.

So with all the hoohah, what was Sweeney’s documentary – shown yesterday evening – actually like?

Well he confirmed what has already been confirmed by journalists confirming what other journalists had confirmed too. In fact, I would say if anything, Sweeney has created a new genre: investigative confirmalism. Ironically, the show did confirm one thing for sure: that Sweeney is a bit of a D**K (clue, it’s not ‘DPRK’).

The content that he sold the LSE, their students and the travel agency down the river for was mediocre at best. I thought investigative journalism took months, if not years to complete – it seems Sweeney’s prep was speed-reading the introduction of Lonely Planet’s North Korea on the plane over.

The plane. I went there with a rowdy 10-man football team. Less undercover – more under-the-influence. I took the train, not because I wanted to get an in-depth look into the countryside of a hermit nation – I was actually scared of flying. Being on the train meant hours upon hours of ‘the real’ North Korea, as Sweeney calls it, zipping past your window. And I didn’t have to secretly sneak out to film it. Before I’d even stepped off the platform in Pyongyang, I’d got more ‘unauthorised’ footage to make Sweeney’s documentary five times over. On the way back, I shared my cabin with a bunch of North Koreans. We ate, drank (lots) and talked – in rudimentary Chinese, English and sign language – for about 5 hours. The nearest Sweeney gets to the common citizens is looking at their glum faces during a 30 second subway ride.

Lights, camera, and more camera.

On day one: Sweeney shows us there’s no light in the hotel bogs. Wow. In fact, we see a lot of footage of power outages, inter-cut with a photo of a dark N.Korea from space, you know, the one that went viral sometime in 1983. Also the majority of the time they are filmed by the tour company. Sweeney narrates ‘We filmed him. Filming us, filming him’. Yawn. It’s a damn tour video. I have one from my trip. Is it a sinister way of keeping a digital record of all tourist’s behavour? Maybe. Is it a mainly out-of-focus, stock-footage-filled piece of shit, slapped on DVD to get an extra $20 out of each visitor. You betcha.

Sweeney’s team also film construction of a bank from their hotel window. The worker’s were building ‘night and day, day and night. It never stops’ Sweeney narrates. Thus confirming that the North Korean construction industry has the same work ethic as my local 24-hour Tesco’s. Shocking.

DMZ

Next, a trip to the DMZ – the military border between North and South. Over foreboding violin music, Sweeney describes the place as ‘eerily quiet’ perhaps due the recent heightened tensions:

Where are the South Korean or American soldiers on the far side?! Maybe they’ve run off to prepare for war?!! It’s all very tense and serious, especially with the additional foreboding violin music.

Lucky, my own trip was at a time when there were no heightened tensions:

I concluded they must’ve all been on lunch. Still, Sweeney says he can ‘feel the tension’. Although he says this from the 45th floor of his hotel, having talked to no-one.

More interesting were the interviews with the North Koreans who had escaped to the South: a guy who’d been run over by a train, an ex-prisoner of the gulags and a doctor. Basically all had the same message: you say something slightly out of line and you die ‘the next day or maybe the same day’ as the doctor put it. Scary stuff.

On the last day, the group visits an obviously-for-show hospital. There’s no heating, the electricity cuts off and it seems pretty much devoid of life.
‘Where are the patients?’ ask our hero journalist to the show-doctor, ‘We’re not fools, please don’t treat us this way’.
Hold on John, didn’t your earlier interviewees perhaps mention that saying the wrong thing is pretty much a death sentence? As the doctor tries to think up some way to palm off the question to save his own life, I can’t help but wonder what Sweeney has actually learned at journo school. Asking pressing, uncomfortable questions to politicians and dictators is one thing, fishing for an answer you know you’ll never get whilst endangering some poor bastard who didn’t chose the life he got given, is quite another.

Another complete waste of time is a visit to the National Library where – to prove an extremely subtle point *cough* – Sweeney asks if they have 1984 by George Orwell. Oh dear. I was praying for the attendant to then produce it with a smug smile. Instead he gets a tatty copy of ‘Diet and Nutrition’. Point made but this year’s Pulitzer list isn’t any longer. And you’re still an asshole.

Conclusion

Whilst the interviews and the talking heads were interesting, there was clearly no reason for Sweeney & Co. to actually go to North Korea and screw stuff up for others by doing so. You could argue it’s a BBC journalists duty and everyone concerned wasn’t really in danger. Bottom line: no-one can say what would have happened if Sweeney & Co. would’ve been rumbled. I feel more inclined to go with what happened the last time shit went down.

The students and LSE were screwed anyway after the documentary was aired – they’re pretty much banned from ever going back there, until a regime change. We’ll have to see how it effects LSE’s dealings with other ‘polictically sensitive’ nations in the future.

The end result: the downside is the students and the LSE will not be going back to DPRK anytime soon. The tour company who arranged it is probably out of business as I type this or possibly, if North Korean, in jail. Maybe the tour guides are history. And their children and their children’s children (google ‘three generations of punishment”). We just don’t know.

The upside, we got the chance to watch Uncle John’s package-holiday home video.

Shit.
0/5.