Shared hardship

If Sean Langan isn’t the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don’t know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the six-day battle he witnessed in Garmser, Helmand, when a half-platoon of British infantrymen and a couple of hundred Afghanis held out against several thousand Taleban. Then, on Thursday, another one (Meeting the Taleban, Channel 4) in which he gingerly approached a Taleban/al-Q’aeda mountain stronghold and amazingly came away with testicles intact and a halfway cogent interview.

The temptation for a lot of reporters, I think, would have been to let their gratitude at having been allowed to survive such an experience spill over into their editorial position. ‘See, they’re not just evil fanatics in black turbans,’ the tacit conclusion might have been. ‘They’re jolly brave young men. Pious. Dedicated.