Cultural surrender

When I was a teenager I used to upset my father by telling him I thought it would be really glamorous to die young in a car crash. The stupid thing was, I believed it. The corollary of feeling immortal is that you have no real understanding of the finality of death. That’s why you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of 40-plus suicide bombers.

In My Brother, the Islamist (BBC3, Monday), a likeable Dorset tree surgeon called Robb Leech set out on a quest to discover why the blond, perfectly normal-seeming stepbrother Rich with whom he’d grown up in Weymouth had ended up as a member of the group Islam4UK. That’s the now-banned radical group led by the obnoxious Anjem Choudary which you see doing tasteful, multicultural things like burning the US flag outside the American embassy on the 9/11 anniversary and gathering in Luton to yell ‘babykillers’ at the Anglian regiment returning from a tour of duty in Iraq.