UKIP: The First 100 Days

UKIP is a strange beast – originally little more than a protest party, it received a surge of enthusiasm from a public fed up with politics and has not fashioned itself into a viable option for the next election. It has MPs, it has support, and it has an appeal far beyond most modern politics, due in no small part to its leader, the charismatic Nigel Farage, a man with buckets of charisma and the face of a climaxing frog. However, with this comes more coverage – many slurs about racism and a party that supposedly wants to put Britain back in the past. This news gets a bit samey, though, so where do we go from here? Step forward Channel 4. Continuing in the same documentary style that brought us Gary Glitter being hanged for his crimes and Prince Harry becoming a plaything of the Taliban, UKIP: The First 100 Days offered us a pseudo-documentary based on Britain’s first hundred days after the party wins a majority at the general election. Farage is PM, and we’re all looking forward to a bright and prosperous future. We set off with on the night of the election, with UKIP taking seats from all the other parties, handily padded with actual news clips to add authenticity to proceedings. It chooses to start by following a character, Deepa Kaur, who is the party’s only Asian woman MP, and has been held up as the face of tolerance. Free movement into Britain is banned, and the party faces accusations of racism – not an unexpected development, given the familiarity of this criticism – and Deepa defends it, before the documentary suggests this is only in order to secure a cabinet job. Come week 2, and UKIP announces Britain will leave the EU. The news highlights only the negatives here, with Airbus leaving Britain the next week. Deepa draws attention to how the media always whips up a frenzy, before another business is shut down and angry constituents flood her surgery to complain about the situation. A brick is thrown through her window, and as this crisis deepens, the next week leads to a crackdown on illegal immigrants. Again, we focus on the racial aspects, although this wins them some support. At home, Deepa and her brother argue about politics – at this point, it seemed as though she was becoming a one-note character (boo immigrants boo!) and it was getting annoying. As the crackdown continued, anti-racism campaigners started to get vocal and Deepa was harassed by the news, shaking her by suggested she was a racist. As week 8 closed, riots were beginning to kick off – clashes between UKIP supporters and deriders made for some depressing scenes. Farage announced a new national holiday celebrating Britishness, so we focused on the idea that it is a distraction and then met a homophobic woman who liked Deepa and a shouty woman who didn’t. She went on her first immigration raid, and a teenager allegedly assaults a police officer, leading to massive clashes and culminating in a new apocalypse. Deepa is unable to stand by any more and tells the police the boy is innocent after a massive internal crisis. Many people have complained about this show, and I can see why – every UKIP person but Deepa is a cartoon villain, speaking in racist slurs and nonsense, and the show suggests that their election would be a total disaster for Britain – it is very much a worst case scenario. However, it is noticeable that we don’t have other fake documentaries of this sort – the media is determined to skewer UKIP and clearly is happy to resort to any means necessary.