TV review: Dispatches/Women

A MORE insensitive man than I would begin this column by pretending to make a hilarious misapprehension that Dispatches: Children of Gaza was about the long-suffering offspring of a famous alcoholic footballer. And shame on him for doing so.

Instead, this superb documentary focused on Palestinian children affected by the Gaza war of 2008-9. More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed when the Israeli Defence Force unleashed a 22-day campaign to, according to official intelligence, reduce the capabilities of the Hamas government and other terrorist organisations. Following the ceasefire, Bafta-award-winning director Jezza Neuman travelled to the demolished Gaza Strip to spend a year with children whose lives were tragically altered by the attacks.

His deeply moving and discomfiting report featured innocent young victims recalling their experiences with chilling clarity. Confused, scared, angry and despairing, they placed the human price of this never-ending conflict in devastating perspective. These are children for whom war and abject horror have become an everyday, all-pervasive fact of life, illustrated most shockingly by the violent games in which young boys re-enact memorised "battles" between Jews and Arabs.

Kids like Mahmoud, whose father and four-year-old brother were shot dead in front of him, were livid with notions of revenge. It was clear that as soon as he was able he would rise up against them, fully willing to martyr himself for a cause he barely understood. In one of the film's most dismaying scenes, he sat rapt as his uncle showed him violent Jihad videos and let him play with his Kalashnikov. All that the future appeared to have in store for him was a pointless, early death.

His sister, Amal, had been trapped in the rubble of their demolished house for three days before she was rescued. Shards of shrapnel were embedded in her skull, causing severe headaches and nosebleeds. Amal and her mother were forced, time and again, to wait at border control for an appointment at an Israeli hospital. When a doctor finally agreed to see her, he informed her that there was nothing he could do and that she'd have to learn to live with the pain.

Although Neuman's film eventually offered brief glimmers of hope, the overall impression was of terrorised civilians left to flounder in a perpetual, senseless nightmare. An outstanding and important piece of television.

In the second part of Women, director Vanessa Engle's oddly lighthearted inquisition into the impact of the feminist movement, she interviewed wives and mothers to find out what feminism means to them.

The middle-class descendants of that pioneering generation of 1960s-70s female freedom-fighters, most of them seemed immune to hard-line feminist principles, preferring instead to adopt a more traditional role. And despite Engle's playful attempts to stir things up, they seemed quite happy.

This rambling, repetitive programme was hamstrung by the director's limited line of questioning and the fundamental impossibility of trying to reach a consensus over such an elastic and often paradoxical ideology. In the end, it was far less enlightening and worthwhile than last week's encounter with the original feminist ground-breakers.