Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus: Our Journey Continues. In theory, the case for limiting the numbers may be more or less unanswerable — but this is a joltingly uncomfortable reminder of what it can mean in practice. Any viewers suspicious of the BBC’s pinko tendencies will presumably have noticed that all the refugees we’ve met so far are completely lovely. Yet, faced with Thursday’s episode, even they might have found it tricky to preserve a steely primacy of head over heart. Or not to notice that these are people very much like us — only a lot unluckier in where and when they were born.
As in last year’s Bafta-winning Exodus: Our Journey to Europe, most of the filming is done by the refugees themselves, with news clips and captions filling in the political background. This time, though, we join them after they’ve reached Europe: a continent that in advance took on an almost mythical significance as the solution to all their troubles.
Dame, for example, talked of how he’d been arrested and tortured in Ethiopia for carrying leaflets objecting to the mistreatment of the Oromo people.
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