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Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls begins with the MP losing his seat when they go for the voting count (yes, I said COUNT!)
Sadly, he went on to be the resident idiot on Strictly Come Dancing.
He goes to Texas for the Rednecks With Paychecks Festival where it’s all beards and tattoos – albeit meant to be a celebration of Southern American pride, in a town where they think “Redneck” means hard-working American, rather than a racist hick, which is how most people see them.
In another section, he a Mexican woman who’s an illegal immigrant, and who voted for Trump as she believes he’s doing the right thing to get rid of “bad hombres” as we’re told; before going onto Atlanta with ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – who bust down doors in the dead of night to pick up such criminals before deporting them. However, there’s zero tension in this segment as the camera’s about a zillion miles away with far too many cuts to Ed’s face, so we don’t actually see much of what’s going on.
And this is before we see him in a wrestling leotard! (barf!)
Louis Theroux he is not. Nor is he any sort of politician-turned-travelogue journalist imparting interesting information like… ooh, Michael Portillo. The camera just goes from place to place while he talks in flat monotones, and the producers like to stick Balls in everyone’s face.
I didn’t care for Balls as a politician, when he was the Shadow Chancellor, nor did I care when he went onto the BBC’s flagship dancing show (but then I never give two hoots about that), and here, he continually fails to impress. Similarly, I didn’t care for Portillo as a politician, but ol’ leatherface has gone on to make some fantastic programmes and they tower over this!
When he meets a man who spent over 26 years in the military and wanted to retire, and then suffered a life-changing back injury on his first day out of a dangerous job, Balls comments, “That is like… the baddest… bad luck…”.
Wow, how insightful(!)
I can see that someone thought this was a good idea to get a former politician and, now, minor celebrity, to go and discuss another politician, but Balls is not that man, and as a result, I’m not really sure what the point of this is. In fact, I’ve seen some enthusing about this, but I found it pretty boring.
There’s been numerous programmes about Donald Trump since he became US President, but I’m not really sure what the point of this one is, as it doesn’t feature him, and only his supporters. It doesn’t offer anything other than the former Shadow Chancellor just talking to people before moving on somewhere else, and with a title like Travels in Trumpland, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect Alan Partridge to suggest.
As much as some people hate Trump, what’s very amusing are those people in that camp who do so by spreading the fake news he hates, such as the faked photo from 1994, claiming he’d run for office and the voters are so dumb that they’d vote in record numbers. They did it again, recently, with the picture where he met the Queen. That was closely cropped to show him having walked ahead of her, and it called him a “douche-nozzle”. This picture was shared over 15,000 times on Facebook before it was removed as ‘fake news’. Similarly, a closely-cropped video showed him doing the same, whereas if you watched the full thing with the full width of the video, you’ll see that he stepped ahead to look at one side of the guards, and it looked like she was going to inspect the other side of guards and just didn’t set off at the same time because… well, she’s a bit older. Apparently, she also told him to go ahead, perhaps because she’s not so light on her feet these days.
Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls continues next Sunday on BBC2 at 9pm, with the third and final episode on the week after. It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, but and you can watch each episode on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
Episode 1 Score: 1/10
Presenter: Ed Balls
Directors: Warren Smith and Samuel Wilkinson
Producer: Clare Cameron
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.