TV Review - Secrets of South America - Extreme Beauty Queens BBC3

Whilst the UK is a country obsessed with the weather, celebrity sex-lives and mediocre karaoke competitions Venezuela is a country obsessed with beauty. Girls of 4 don't play in the park but go to "beauty school" and practice putting on make-up and learn how to sashay down a catwalk. Having produced more Miss Worlds than any other country the obviously are doing something right but this pursuit of perfection comes at a cost.

Reporter Billie JD Porter spent 6 months in this peculiar part of Latin America following some of the aspiring beauty queens and the circus that surrounds them. Lets put it this way; if you are slightest bit ugly or overweight Venezuela is not the place for you.

Venezuela's equivalent to the X Factor is Our Latin Beauty (Nuestra Belleza Latina) and their Simon Cowell is Osmel Sousa, a camp beauty impresario with over 40 years in the business. Sousa knows about queens because he is one. He has the power to make or break careers and during his reality TV show contestants go through the mill until they are broken, emotionally and physically, until they fit Sousa's ideal of airbrushed "perfection".

With borderline OCD the smallest of details are seized upon and criticised. Ass not perfect? Get liposuction. Teeth too big? File them down. One contestant talks about him sotto voce.

"If you need a nose, face or voice changing he will tell you"

His show culminates in a grand final held in a huge sports stadium watched by TV audience of 50 million people. Despite Sousa being the paternal figure in Venezuelan pageantry his waspish comments do not show much compassion for the contestants. When one of them passes out due to lack of food his response is

"If you feint like a beauty queen, get up like one"

He is interviewed by Porter for his response to the feminists who protested against Miss World when it was held in London in 2011.

"Those protests were staged by Ugly Bettys who have no chance to be beautiful. All were horrendous"

His solution to virtually all flaws is to recommend plastic surgery.

"Nature has not been kind to some women"

To be fair to him he does practice what he preaches and has had so much work done he looks like Elton John and Barry Manilow's lovechild. You get the feeling he thought Zoolander was a documentary.

 In the UK beauty pageants died out with in 70's along with Tiswas and the "friendly" pat on the bottom so its curious to see why Venezuelan women still aspire to this Charlie's Angels image of plastic-breasted beauty. The answer may be that this beauty ideal is the one that wins competitions and doing well in Miss Venezuela opens doors in a country with very few opportunities.

Despite the poverty that affects large parts of the country families see expensive plastic surgery as an investment in the future the same way a public school education may be a short cut to a well paid job in the UK.
 

Porter interviews Maya an 18 year old aspiring beauty queen living in the run down Caracas slum of Santa Cruz. Her family saved up and forked out £7000 on new boobs, nose and dental work despite her looking stunning to begin with. The family make sacrifices not just because she is their daughter but because she is their meal ticket out of the barrio. Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities in the world with on average of a murder every 40 minutes and you can understand its citizens desire to move up the property ladder.

Hugo Chavez may have died but his legacy of his radical Bolivarianism lives on. Food shortages are commonplace since the state nationalised all the farms and Porter films an angry queue of women hanging about on street corners for basics like eggs, milk and toilet roll. Its no wonder aspiring beauty queens will literally do anything to win competitions. Careers, boyfriends and health are all sacrificed.

Perhaps the most shocking evidence of their desperation is that in an effort to loose weight Maya had a plastic patch sewn onto her tongue that makes solid food too painful to eat. All her meals are taken liquefied. You thought the Atkins diet was bad?

Its is a relief to hear the mother of another contestant reject this surgical madness 

"She doesn't need surgery. Who is competing? Is it the most beautiful girl or the best surgeon?"

With the BBC3 docu-bar being kept artificially low by the lightweight Stacey Dooley, Extreme Beauty Queens was a fascinating glimpse into this anachronistic way of life. Despite being a self-confessed newby to Latin America, Porter comes across as Alan Whicker in comparison to Dooley.

Of course it helps having someone as unhinged as Osmel Sousa as the centrepiece for a documentary but the whole hour had the air of an episode of Louis Theroux Weird Weekends about it. I can pay it no higher compliment.

Whilst a little green around the edges Porter did not shy way from asking probing questions but did so with an easy charm that got her subjects to open up to her. Let’s hope the remaining couple of episodes on South America are equally as entertaining.

Catch it on iPlayer for the foreesable future.

TV Review - Stacey Dooley Investigates - Cocaine Capital of The World BBC3

The war on drugs is one of the longest and most futile wars the West has waged and one which ruins lives on both sides of the divide. Fuelled by loudmouth tosspots in US/Europe this multi-billion pound business touches all of us directly or indirectly and the world's most powerful governments have been incapable of getting to grips with it.

Fresh from a her expose of the horrors of Magaluf, Stacey Dooley presents a three-parter on BBC3 exposing the murky world of the drug trade.  Think of her as a budget version of Louis Theroux, where serious subjects are tackled with the same knowledge and wide-eyed naivete you might find in your local 6th form media studies class.

Peru is now the largest producer of cocaine in the world.  This fact amazes Stacey and her first subject Danny, a cockney moron who tried to smuggle 1.3 kilos of Peruvian marching powder (the clue is in the title Stacey) out the country and is currently residing at El Presidente's pleasure, inside a overcrowded Lima jail.

‘I always thought Columbia was the world’s biggest cocaine producer,’ he tells Stacey, in his England cap . ‘So did I" she grins.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge on the subject would be aware the two countries share a border, a massive jungle and more importantly the kind of grinding poverty which makes growing coca one of the only viable ways to make a living.

With her credentials fully established what we get is Tracey pissing about in various locations; from the coca growers in the hills of San Jose where Tracey has to overcome the not-at-all staged road block by riding to the location on some passing donkeys.

"If it is this hard for us to get here think of the Peruvian authorities."

to the infamous cocaine laboratories of Santa Rosa where her attempts at creating some TV jeopardy by whispering sotto voce how they all need to keep a low profile are somewhat undermined by her delivering said piece to camera in broad daylight.

 

For those of you who are interested the process itself is a fairly amateur affair.  It involves picking coca leaf, sun-drying it and mixing it with salt, bleach, ammonia and gasoline in makeshift vats and treading all over it like a gap-student making wine in Provence. Whack the paste into microwave for 40mins and bingo!

Then she is off on a raid with a crack team of Peruvian commandos who are responding to a tip off. It might be revelatory to Stracey but they actually have helicopters that can reach those out of the way locations. As she tip-toes up a  muddy jungle path her excitement gets the better of her and she starts to resemble a fake tanned Blind Date contestant who drew the short straw and instead of being sent on a spa treatment got sent on a go-karting holiday instead.

"This is the most insane thing I've ever done"

The commandos get there but all the bad guys have scarpered leaving them to burn the makeshift factory to the ground in what feels like a futile gesture.  The outlook doesn't great for them as new varieties of coca leaf have been created that don't require the cooler hillside temperatures and can be hidden in the muggy Amazon basin well away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

Despite the misery that cocaine inflicts upon the world you find it difficult to criticise the subsistence farmers who grow the crop in Cuchillo Cocha, an Amazonian backwater, when one says he is finally able to drink cold water for the first time in 50yrs as he can now afford a fridge.  Dooley tries her best to emphasise the apparent wealth of this town

"There's tin roofs everywhere"

but these guys certainly aren't living like they're in an episode of MTV Cribs.  Give them something else they can grow and make living and they will move on to that. Growing coca doesn't make them rich it helps them escape poverty.

With the best will in the world Dooley is not a serious documentarian and would do well tackling subjects more suited to her style (although I did enjoy her Blood Sweat and T Shirts expose in 2008). Perhaps she will develope with experience but here she just looks a bit lost and out of her depth.

The documentary may not be particularly eye opening but it is timely following the news that
two 19yr olds, Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid, were arrested in Lima on Tuesday trying to smuggle 11 kilos of cocaine worth £1.5m out of the country.  Not to worry girls. I'm sure Danny will show you the ropes.

You can watch it for the next week in iPlayer but to be honest go check out Bruce Parry's Amazon  or Channel 4's Cocaine series for more substance.

TV Review - The Call Centre - BBC3 9pm

The much maligned call centre: a 20th century institution that everyone despises, especially the people that work there. Even though it isn't the most glamorous of careers over a million people work in call centres in the UK, that despite their bad reputation, provide the public with all manner of essential services from sorting out your gas supply, providing legal advice to organising a tow truck when your stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Useful they may be but their very impersonal and sometimes labyrinthine set-up can make contacting them a f*cking nightmare.

However, there are call centres and then there is the lowest of the low: the cold-calling telesales call centre. These are the type of organisations who will interrupt in the middle of your dinner and try and sell you PPI insurance or persuade you to put in a personal accident claim for an accident you’ve never had. They are the human equivalent of pubic lice and are about as welcome.

One such parasitic battery farm, going by the name of Save Britain Money, is the setting for new docusoap The Call Centre BBC3 9PM. It is managed by Neville "Uncle Nev" Wilshire a self styled "Napoleon" who is the real life embodiment of everything that was excruciatingly wrong with David Brent. Such are the similarities, after watching Ricky Gervais tweeted:

“I honestly don’t remember writing it but I must have surely. I think it’s my best work but I can hardly watch it”

Nev is a balding blowhard of a boss full of motivational baloney like "Smile When You Dial", "Glide In Your Stride" and " PPPPPP -Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance!". He seems hell-bent on creating an office environment that is a cross between a school playground, a night down the pub and 2AM fumble behind a nightclub.

"I'm like Napoleon. His troops loved him"

Do be fair he has a tough job on his hands trying to motivate the predominately young, dumb and lairy staff from remaining in their jobs when they are routinely abused by disgruntled punters who don't appreciate having an episode of Eastenders interrupted by their requests to buy cavity wall insulation.

"I've been told to f*ck off a lot of times."

Says perma-tanned Jenni.

"An old woman once told me she hoped I get killed. I thought that was a bit much."

Says another staff member who goes by the name of Chickenhead.

Whilst you may be able to excuse the mass sing-along’s during induction meetings "I've sacked two people for not singing", the jokey "banter" and informal ambience as an unconventional means of ensuring his staff stay positive and motivated (SBM motto "Happy People Sell"), his incursions into their private lives are harder to justify.

After seeing that admin assist Kayleigh was recently dumped by her cheating boyfriend, Nev steps in to turn her frown upside down in his own unique way. First of all he parades her up and down the office asking if any of lads fancy her.

"Any single blokes? I've got a desperate female here"

He then organises a speed dating event subtitled GKL (Get Kayleigh Laid) where staff members are invited to get drunk and cop off with each other. Showing that she isn't the best judge of character she selects South African sleazeball Dwayne but before he is allowed to break her heart again Nev wades and threatens to "throw him down the stairs" if he messes her about. Dwayne sensibly cuts his loses and bails.

Nev is easy to caricature and a documentarians dream, just turn on the camera and let it roll. Despite being a colossal d*ck is heart seems to be in the right place and he engenders a remarkable amount of affection from his staff despite his short-comings. There was a brief glimpse into his soul when his laugh-a-minute persona dropped for a moment as he described his bankruptcy and subsequent divorce as a "hurtful" period in his life.

Don't worry though he was quickly back into a swing with some gentle sexual harassment and mild ABH with new staff members shortly after. One of these newcomers is asked how she feels about her new boss after he parades her through the office with shouts of:

"Make way, good looking Welsh girl coming through!!"

"He seems really cool...a great guy...unless it carries on"

Personally, I think Nev’s enforced hilarity would make working at SBM my idea of purgatory but amazingly it was ranked 2nd in the Sunday Times list of "Best Companies To Work For 2013". For now, the bland politically correct tentacles of human resources haven't penetrated as far as Swansea thus guaranteeing Nev's place a micro celeb for the foreseeable future. Tune in next week to see how much "fun" you are missing out on.

TV Review: Panorama - North Korea Undercover

As undercover reporting goes its hardly up there with Donal MacIntyre's tattooed two year infiltration of the Chelsea Headhunters or Antonio Salas learning Arabic, converting to Islam and getting circumcised in order to infiltrate terrorist organisations.

No, in Panorama - North Korea Undercover (BBC1) shouty documentarian John Sweeney manages to impregnate the secretive womb of communism by growing a bit of a beard and nodding his head in a professorial manner. Let's hope North Korea's long distance nukes are as effective as their border controls.

Judging by the media furore generated by his masquerading as LSE history teacher on a study trip, I was half expecting Sweeney to have offered up LSE students as free labour for the Korean gulags. The reality is much more prosaic. Sweeney just went along for the ride on the same lame coach tour as the students and filmed it. His guide offers words of reassurance for those tourists worried about security.

"Our bus has the mark of the Korean International Travel Company so the Americans won’t strike our bus. Ha ha .  .  .’

Despite Sweeny's attempts to ramp up the jeopardy,

”We’ve seen loads more soldiers in town today...you can feel the tension rising”

no one seemed to be in the least bit of danger during his eight day visit.

In fact for such a secretive society they seem relatively lax in their security. On the bus, despite repeatedly being asked not to take photos of the poverty stricken Koreans scrabbling about the drab countryside (they do anyway) the tour group are free to wave their cameras about during the scheduled stops and video whatever they like.

Some of these stops are laughable staged. A farm devoid of animals or crops, a bottling plant without any bottles or a pristine hospital that doesn't actually have any patients in it. This was the only point where Sweeney has the balls to conduct any challenging journalism.

‘Tell the doctor we’re not fools. We haven’t seen any patients."

Whilst their enemies to the South offer all the trapping of a prosperous, free western society North Korea's tin pot regime isn't even able to keep the lights on. Pyongyang suffers constant city wide power outages on a daily basis. Is this really a country we should be worried about?

Yes, according to North Korean expert, Professor Brian Myers, who suggests we should take them seriously in case their rhetoric inadvertently turns to war by accident.

‘We may see a thermo-nuclear war but it wouldn’t be because the North Koreans wanted it. It’s not their plan to unleash that, but it might come to that as a result of a disastrous miscalculation.’

Most telling are the stories from defectors talking about the work camps where bodies are buried in mass graves and the reality of living in this totalitarian regime is chilling. In South Korea Sweeney interviews an escaped doctor who explains that rank is no guarantee of protection in this oppressive society.

‘If you as a doctor had said, “We need more money for medicine for the patients”, what would have happened?’ ‘They would kill me that very day"

Offering a peak into this Orwellian country, Sweeney documentary is interesting enough from a voyeuristic prospective, but it's hardly ground breaking. Yes, Kim Jong Un comes from a long line of despotic nutcases. Yes, North Korea is a paranoid and warlike state. Yes, its inhabitants are routinely brain washed by 24hr propaganda. This is all common knowledge.

North Korea's "mystery" may have more to do with the fact it is such an utterly depressing place, very few people have actually bothered to visit it.

You can watch it on iPlayer for the next 12 months

TV Review: The Toughest Place To Be...A Bus Driver: Manila BBC2

For those in the UK who define "hardship" as not being able to afford Sky Sports or a second foreign holiday the day-to-day reality depicted in The Toughest Place To Be...A Bus Driver hits you like a slap in the face.

As part of the fantastic BBC series exploring difficult working conditions in the developing world, this programme focuses on Manila, officially the most densely populated city on earth. Much of its 20 million inhabitants live cheek by jowl in grinding poverty and the city was no doubt chosen due to its appalling road conditions and chaotic infrastructure. The producers no doubt thought they would get plenty of mileage watching a naive Brit flounder in the midst of Manila's madness.  Little would they have expected such an emotional human story to emerge.

A couple of years ago London bus driver Josh West visited the Philippines to trade jobs with local "Jeepney" driver Rogelio Castro to see what it is was like to ply his trade on the mean streets of Manila. Its is fair to say the experience was life changing for them both.

Before arrival, Josh admits to knowing little about the Philippines other than the infamous Imelda Marcos' shoe collection.  On the face of it their lives could not be more different.  Whilst Josh has a comfortable job driving a state of the art £35K Routemaster through London's well maintained streets, his conditions protected by a myriad of employment and driving regulations, Rogelio toils away for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a clapped out minibus through the chaotic, congested streets of Manila.

His gruelling days, where he acts as driver, mechanic, cleaner and ticket collector, earn him about £8 a day which is often not enough to pay for his wife's medication. Rogelio lives in a ramshackle, self built property  with tiny rooms inhabited by ever growing collection of extending family.

What made the show powerful and pushed it beyond the bounds of the realms of poverty pornography was the human relationship that played out between Josh and Rogelio. Despite only staying with him for 10 days the visit made a profound impression on the Londoner.

"When you see someone working that hard, how can you turn your back on them?"

On Josh's first visit Rogelio broke down when explaining the arduous treadmill his life had become and his inability to escape from the crushing weight of poverty.  He was basically running just to stand still. Josh was overcome with emotion as he realised that despite them both being bus drivers only one of them was destined for a life of drudgery.

‘If I was born here I’d be in the same situation as you. It’s just by chance that I was born in London‘.

Rogelio might be struggling but he is positively middle class in comparison to some of Manila's poor. There was one section of VT which turned my stomach and gave an indication into how far reaching and desperate the poverty has become in the shanty towns of Manila. Josh went into the slums to witness the phenomena of "pagpag", a form of food recycling . 

Scavengers will collect discarded and half eaten chicken remnants from the garbage cans outside Manila's numerous fast food restaurants and root through them to pick out the bits they can re-use (mostly bones, cartilage with the odd bit of rancid chicken attached).  They then sell these on to pagpag "restaurants" who will recook the detritus and sell it on to slum dwellers for pennies.  This is likely to be their main meal of the day.  It is truly a shocking state of affairs.

Despite seemingly being worlds apart the 10 days Rogelio spent teaching Josh the Tao of a Filipino bus driver had transformed their relationship into something of a "bromance" with them exchanging emails and photos after Josh returned back to the UK. Deeply affected by his visit Josh decided he would do something practical in order fund the one request Rogelio had for a better life. 

  I won't spoil it but Josh makes an emotional return to Manila two years later to reunite with Rogelio his adopted "brother" to see how his life has changed since the documentary first aired (he is something of a local celebrity now) and lays out his long term plan for Rogelio's family.  I must admit I don't know many people would make such a commitment after such a chance visit. Josh is a truly an inspirational character.

After years of being bombarded with images of poverty through Live Aid, Sport Relief, Red Nose Day it is testament to Josh and the programme creators for making an utterly engrossing documentary  packing more punch than any celebrity endorsed hand wringing I have ever seen. 

I urge you to watch the documentary on iPlayer and donate to Josh's Danceaid page that is attempting to raise money for Manila's street kids. After watching this documentary only those with a heart of stone could refuse such a request.

TV Review - Storyville - I Will Be Murdered - BBC4

Fact is often stranger than fiction, but if the real life story of Rodrigo Rosenberg, a successful Guatemalan lawyer gunned down by hit men in 2009, exceeds that of even Hollywood's wildest imaginations. If it's not currently being made into a Hollywood blockbuster, it certainly will be.


Whilst we wait for the airbrushed version, director Justin Webster's documentary I Will Be Murdered (part of the excellent Storyville series on BBC4) unravels the complex nature of his death and lifts the murky lid of Guatemalan society. A mix of interviews and CCTV footage it views like a real life CSI Guatemala whose Machiavellian cast feel like extras from a John Le Carré novel.

Guatemala is a country with a murderous past whose decades long civil war only finished in 1996. 36 years of abuse and wide scale brutality has indoctrinated the population into adopting the "life is cheap" maxim as the country's official motto. Violence is deep rooted in Guatemalan society and seen as a viable solution for the poorest subsistence farmer to powerful heads of government.

The country is now riddled with corruption, cover ups, conspiracy, propaganda, assassinations and coups. Mexico may be considered by some to be a no-go zone following waves of narco killings but in 2009 the Guatemalan murder rate was four times higher. Statistically you would be safer going on holiday to Baghdad.

In 2007 the UN even went as far as saying:

“Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it.”

In the UK we complain about our politicians fiddling their expenses but Guatemalan politics take it to another level. Public life seems to be polluted by a malevolent criminal oligarchy. As a nation Guatemala is about as stable as a three legged table.

I was there in 2005 and warned about travelling at night or hanging around too long in Guatemala City such were the levels of violence and car jacking. Despite the warnings I foolishly did both and ended up on the red eye from the northern town of Flores ending up in the capital in the early hours of the morning. I distinctly remember the squalor and degradation of the capital and the fact the bus company locked their customers in their compound whilst they waited for their connections. Standing in the street would be "unwise" I was told

Rodrigo Rosenberg would have been nothing more than another forgotten crime statistic, one more unsolved murder, had his dramatic prophecy not emerged from the ashes. Soon after his death a video emerged that appeared to show Rosenberg foretelling his own murder.

"If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Ãlvaro Colom, with help from Gustavo Alejos."

In the video Rosenberg claims the reason he had been killed was because he had "direct knowledge" of a conspiracy involving a multi-million dollar money laundering operation through the national Banrural bank perpetrated by the Colom administration. He had come across this evidence after investigating the assassinations of Khalil and Marjorie Musa who he believed had been murdered because the incorruptible Khalil was going to accept a position on Banrural's board thus scuppering the government’s embezzling operation.

The video went viral and crashed the servers on YouTube. Rosenberg's revelations were dynamite and caused an explosion of anger with normal Guatemalans who took to the streets in vast numbers accusing the elite of being "asesinos" .

With the government on the verge of collapse, and in desperation, Colom agreed to allow an independent UN backed investigation unit called CICIG into the country to try and restore the government’s tattered reputation. Chief prosecutor Carlos Castresana only agreed to the position after demanding:

“To take the case, I need complete independence.”

Castresana had to overcome the usual obstacles to justice in Guatemala: informants, moles, counter surveillance and personal smears but his team quickly uncovered the first piece of the puzzle; hit man and former policeman Willian Divas. CICIG used wiretaps to piece together his gang's network through clandestine conversations and simultaneously swooped on dozens of locations around the country.

SPOILER ALERT.

The gang quickly gave up the people who had ordered the hit; the Valdez Pais brothers: two of Rosenberg's close cousins. The target had been described to the killers as simply an extortionist who was blackmailing Rosenberg. Divas was given extremely detailed instructions as to where the mark would be and exactly at what time. But why would the Valdez Pais brothers, who supposed were very close to Rosenberg order his death?

Investigators then obtained a mobile number from which Rosenberg had reported receiving threats. They traced it back to Rosenberg's driver. He had been ordered to buy two anonymous mobiles and gave one of them to his boss and the other to the Valdes Pais brothers. Rosenberg was using the anonymous mobile phone to call his home number thus creating the illusion of receiving death threats.

Once Castrasena tracked down the phone other tell tale evidence started to appear. A cheque for $40.000, the amount Divas received for the contract killing, was issued from Rosenberg office via a 3rd party bank account so not to attract suspicion. Rosenberg used the Valdez Pais brothers as go-betweens who were completely in the dark about Rosenberg’s real intentions to distance himself from the hit.

It was becoming clear to Castresena that the unbelievable scenario could be the only explanation for the convoluted turn of events: Rosenberg had ordered his own killing.

"This is the end of our careers as no one will believe it"

Meticulously planned and painstakingly executed Rosenberg would have succeeded in bringing down the entire government if only the his driver had remembered not put his name on the receipt for one of the phones.

But what had brought Rosenberg to such an extreme course of action?

It turns out that Rosenberg was having a secret affair with Majorie Musa and was about to propose the day after her murder. In his depressed and agitated state he took the responsibility of investigating her deaths and believed the government was responsible for her inadvertent killing (the real target was her father). He lacked concrete evidence to pursue the matter in court and felt desperate and powerless.
His friend and fellow investigator Luis Mendizabal said

"His impotency to do something dismantled him"

Rosenberg felt the only way he could avenge his lover’s death and politically destroy the corrupt Colom government was to frame them by physically destroying himself.

Since the truth emerged, and despite all the corroborating evidence, there are those who refuse to believe Rosenberg killed himself, believing the verdict another in a long line of political white washes.

"Carlos Castresena, are you trying to sell us mirrors?"

No one seems to have come out of this episode with any particular credit. Rosenberg is seen by some as a hero and by other as a coward. Evidence has emerged, not included in the documentary perhaps to preserve its narrative, indicating that Khalil Musa was not the victim of state sponsored murder but was killed because of his dealings with a criminal network from whom he had bought contraband for his textile factory.

Once the dust died down on the Rosenberg case, Castrasena suffered a backlash from powers that be resentful that a “foreign” body was meddling in internal affairs. A concerted smear campaign attacking his private life forced his hand. He discovered, much like Rosenberg, that in Guatemala the only way to fight impunity was to “blow himself up.” His marriage suffered and now, having been hounded out of the country, admits that the case took its toll.

“I have nothing, I lost my family while in Guatemala. It almost took my life.”

At the end of the day it is hard to know what to believe in the curious case of Rodrigo. Guatemala is a country of counterfeit realities and misdirection is a way of life.

The ephemeral nature of Guatemalan truth is best summed up by scholar Susan Jonas

“Guatemala mocks me. Just as you think you understand, we’ll show you that you understand nothing at all”

You can catch it on iPlayer until Mon 4th March

For further reading I suggest this excellent article in the The New Yorker

The 10 Richest Songs in the World - Part 2

Continuing our countdown to the highest earning song in music I must first issue a warning to all aspiring songwriters.  Your new song may charm the birds from the trees and have women's knicker elastic pinging within the first four bars but no matter how fantastic the track you are ever going to get on this list unless you have a good lawyer. 

Take the example of everyones favourite Irish curmudgeon Van Morrison.  As a naive 21yr he flew bright eyed and bushy tailed to New York eager to please would be boss Bert Berns owner of Bang Records. Van was in a particularly accommodating mode following of the break up of his band Them and would probably have traded his first born for a recording contract. 

Without legal advice he signed away rights to songs, one of which was his signature tune Brown Eyed Girl ,which guaranteed no royalties would be payable until all recording and miscellaneous expenses attributed to Big Bang records were paid first. Through some creative accounting Van says he has never received any royalties for his most famous song which has been played over 10 million times on US radio.  No wonder he is a grumpy bastard.

OK. Back to business.

5. 'Unchained Melody', Alex North and Hy Zaret £18m

Long before the likes of Gareth Gates and Robson & Jerome made the song as musically satisfying as a glass sandwich made with dog turd mayonnaise it was the soundtrack to the long forgotten 1955 prison movie ‘Unchained’ about a prisoner yearning for freedom.

It has been recorded over 650 times in more than 100 languages but the definitive version is and will always be that performed by the Righteous Brothers.

Like many of the top ten earners it got a second wind off the back of a movie, in this case the how-to-guide-to-paranormal-pottery flick Ghost. Such was the clamour to buy the single in 1990, singer Bill Medley opted to re-record the song as he wasn't making any money from the original anymore.
 

4. 'Yesterday', Lennon & McCartney £19.5m

Despite a co writing credit this song was written and played exclusively by McCartney (the first time this had happened) and was one of the final nails in The Beatles coffin.  A melancholy folk ballad, Yesterday was a Beatles song for people who didn't really like The Beatles.  The melody famously came to Paul in a dream so fully formed he was sure it was already a recorded song.

Even Lennon in his bitterest hatred for McCartney (as evidenced in the vitriolic How Do You Sleep?) had to grudgingly admit it was a good song. Whilst the melody came out fully intact it took Paul a while to work out the lyrics. Yesterday started off like this

"Scrambled Eggs
Oh, my baby how I love your legs"

If only McCartney had the courage of his convictions as who doesn't like women's legs and scrambled eggs. He was shouted down by his bandmates and eventually firmed up the lyrics during a Portuguese recording session.

It has been covered over 2000 times by artists as diverse as Placido Domingo, Daffy Duck and Wet Wet Wet. Michael Jackson famously bought the publishing rights rights for £24m and sold them to Sony in 1995 for £59m. Perhaps you can blame Macca's songwriting skill for Jacko's riches and his inability to decide if he preferred to be Black or White.

You've Lost That Loving Feeling, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and Phil Spector £20.5m

According to the BMI this hold the record for having been played more times on American radio than any other song and no doubt is the reason for its lofty position in the top 10 money earners.

No wonder Brill Building husband and wife team Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil are in a cheery mood when interviewed. They recall with much hilarity Phil Spector's contribution to the track. Apart from imbuing it with his lush Wall of Sound production when the group were stuck with a line to finish off the bridge Weil tells us he came up with the classic:

"and he is gone, gone, gone, Whoa, whoa, whoa. We said Phil you can't just put whoa, whoa, whoa on a song. But it worked!"

In the UK, Cilla Black tried to get the jump on The Righteous Brothers by releasing a mediocre George Martin produced version in 1965 just before the original was released.

In response flamboyant music mogul Andrew Loog Oldham posted a full page ad in Melody Maker subtly dissing its competitor

"This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR Record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing "YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELING". Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow's sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry"

You could argue that Oldham was the pioneer of this type of Blur v Oasis PR hype.  Aah innocent times.

While we are are it check out Telly Savalas which I'm including for the sheer hell of it

2. 'White Christmas', Irving Berlin £24m

Proving that the maxim that it's only Jews who really know how to write a good Christmas song comes the top selling Xmas perennial of all time from the pen of Irving Berlin. Bing Crosby's version alone has sold in excess of 50 million copies and the song is the best selling single of all time according to the Guinness Book of Records.

Russian born Berlin was a prolific songwriter who wrote over 1500 songs including scores for Broadway shows and Hollywood movies.  George Gershwin called him

"The greatest songwriter that has ever lived"

He was influential in the creation of The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) the organisation that first adopted a unified system for collecting and distributing artist's royalties so we can thank him in part for the ability to create this top 10 list.

I'll be honest I hate this song mainly because I've heard it too many times and I hate Christmas.

So....all that is left is to unveil the best selling song of all time.  It has to be one by The Beatles right?  Wrong.

1. 'Happy Birthday To You', Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill £30m

Sadly not the Stevie Wonder track aiming to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national US holiday but the ubiquitous ditty that has woven into the fabric of society and used the world over to embarrass birthday boys and girls.  Originally "written" in 1893 by two sisters in Kentucky as "Good Morning To All" as a musical greeting to their kindergarten class the kids liked it and started using it at birthday parties with substituted lyrics.

The sisters won a copyright case in the 30's and the song's ownership has subsequently passed through various faceless corporations including Warner Music Group who were earning $2m a year from public performances as of 2008.

Royalties are payable from use in film (as much as £25000 a pop), television, radio, all commercial product such as watches or birthday cards, public performances and amazingly anytime it is sang among a group where a substantial number of those in attendance are not family or friends of whoever is singing.  That sounds like one of my birthday parties.

For this reason most restaurants or other public party venues will not allow their employees to perform the song for their guests. Seriously is there no section of society that has been sullied by the greedy tentacles of some corporate asshole?  That is a rhetorical question if you were wondering.

Right, that is it. I'm off to write my own cash cow. Its called Happy Birthday to Jesus. I figure I'd kill two birds with one stone.