Muslim Drag Queens
Channel 4
★★★★☆
World’s Busiest Railway 2015
BBC Two
★★☆☆☆
“Today, I’m channelling Benazir Bhutto.” “Let’s hope you don’t get shot.” Asif Quraishi and his best friend, Sergio, are only half-joking. While Asif long ago reconciled faith and sexual expression, his dauntless work on behalf of drag artists on the so-called gaysian scene has made him enemies. “When an entire community is telling you you’re bad, you’re horrible and you deserve to die,” he said in Muslim Drag Queens, “a small part of you can end up believing that.”
This affecting, insightful documentary was no lazy, blanket condemnation of Islamic conservatism in Britain — there were some supportive friends and family, not least in the shape of Asif’s mother, who joined him at the Attitude Pride Awards — but it made abundantly clear the risks that Asif (stage name: Asifa Lahore) and his fellow performers run. “I love you beyond all boundaries,” Asif told his mother from the podium; if only everyone could be so unblinkered.
Imran’s alter ego Zareena, meanwhile, had to use a neighbour’s spare bedroom for sex, often with married men who were unable or unwilling to come out. The clandestine nature of it all was redolent of gay life in less enlightened times, and shocking to witness.
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Expanding on the community highlighted in a short film by the journalist Kieran Yates, Marcus Plowright’s documentary was a canny mix of the gritty and the fabulous (drag neophyte Ibrahim’s public unveiling was pure joy). It followed in the fine traditions of Channel 4’s First Cut documentary series, allowing a fresh voice to tell an important, revealing and unfamiliar story about the modern world, warts, glitter and all.
The same can’t really be said of World’s Busiest Railway 2015, which blended a pair of relatively recent BBC Four series — Bombay Railway and Indian Hill Railways — to examine the network that keeps Mumbai ticking in 2015 (just in case you were in any doubt about the year).
The three-headed hydra of Dan Snow (steady), Anita Rani (newsy) and Robert Llewellyn (geeky) were our guides, working from the hub of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. CST looked chaotic on the surface, but was, we were told, a triumph of slickness and precision — only nine people were killed on the network every day!
This latter point was treated as an awkward discrepancy, acknowledged without really being explored. Cuddly John Sergeant, meanwhile, did a slightly off-topic history bit, travelling up to Darjeeling to pick a few tea leaves and rummage around the system’s colonial routes.
It was both frenetic and faintly dull, bombarding the viewer with stats and information but rarely engaging: watching three people trying to board a commuter train will never be landmark television, whether in the cramped confines of the London Underground or the “super dense crushload” of Mumbai; even less so when the sequence takes a full ten minutes.
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When it delved into the minutiae, it came to life, such as the remarkable efforts of the 5,000 dabbawalas carrying 60-65kg of tiffin to city workers every day or the intricate architectural details of CST itself. But it’ll be a stout viewer who buys a return ticket for this workmanlike series.