I’m going to open this week’s preview with a fairly bold statement but one that comes with a caveat, and that is: I would like you to forget that the last TV show I previewed on this channel was Grand Designs. OK? Hey, have you noticed that Channel 4 is becoming cool again?
I suppose it has always been a bit of a swinging pendulum of coolness, hasn’t it? When the broadcaster launched it was very: “Check it out, guys – The Word!” The Big Breakfast was amazingly cool until the exact moment it wasn’t, which sadly was many years before it was actually cancelled. But it ebbs and flows. Channel 4 will occasionally have a year where the only thing you really remember them doing is a harrowing exposé you read about but didn’t actually watch, plus First Dates. Sometimes you put the channel on and it’s a generationally good comedy series. Sometimes it’s Couples Come Dine With Me.
Anyway, despite the confusingly functional title, How to Survive a Dictator: North Korea (30 September, 10pm, Channel 4) feels like a channel that is skewing cool (and, crucially, young) again. The documentary is a follow-up to 2022’s How to Survive a Dictator, in which cool (and, crucially, young) person Munya Chawawa told the story of how his family fled Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s regime, using a combination of archive footage, excellent-access interviews and greenscreen comedy sketches. This new hour repeats the trick, although this time attempts to make a distant sense of Kim Jong-un’s rule over North Korea, a journey that takes Chawawa to an embassy in south Ealing, a Swiss boarding school and to squint across the border from South Korea.
I have decided my new bar for whether a documentary is good is: “Did it teach me anything I didn’t know, or couldn’t have found out from 8 to 10 minutes of Googling?” A lot of recent output has failed to clear that hurdle. Documentary is tricky to get right, because even the best subjects can be let down by uncharismatic interview sources or too-explainy bits or, frankly, a researcher not getting enough to pad an hour out. How to Survive a Dictator doesn’t suffer from any of that: I didn’t know there was a secretive embassy building in west London (and it’s just in a detached house?); I didn’t know Kim Jong-un was the second-eldest son of Kim Jong-il and only found his way to the succession after his older brother reportedly tried to go to Disneyland in Tokyo. I didn’t know how many nuclear weapons there were knocking about!
However, your enjoyment of this is going to pivot quite powerfully on how much you want your documentary to be interrupted by sketches, which in my case is “as close to never as possible”. Chawawa is such a great, agile performer – his viral musical skits, produced at head-spinning speed, made him a star coming out of lockdown – and he has taken the often difficult step from “internet’s favourite joker” to “actually on television without it seeming weird” adroitly. Here, he’s good at forging quick warmth with interviewees (especially ones speaking in their second languages), he’s got an easy charm with the production team that bleeds into the documentary, and he’s not afraid to get stuck in to an attempt at citizen intelligence where a guy in South Korea fills water bottles with dried rice and USB sticks and tries to float them north by throwing them in the sea.
But then he’ll take the information that Kim Jong-un played basketball at school and turn it into a really long Fresh Prince parody. Or he’ll do an American accent that it takes you 30 seconds to realise is actually a joke about Marvel to tell you that defectors from the north are a bit weird when they go on TV in the south. There’s a Gogglebox joke I actually don’t really want to talk about at all. It’s quite weird: one minute he’s in South Korea listening to a blocked radio frequency that just about reaches across the border (“Hmm, good documentary!” – from my notes), the next he’s outside the London embassy ordering a McMuffin on Deliveroo in an ill-advised bid to get someone to come outside (“Probably better not to write about this bit” – also from my notes). So: it’s a mixed bag that’s cool in a very “your mileage may vary” way. Channel 4’s back, baby!
