CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Murder, motors, Murano glass… Katya’s Euro trip was too disjointed
Europe on the Border (BBC)
Maria Chindamo, a mother of three, sealed her fate and her fate when she told her husband Nando that she wanted a divorce.
Unable to cope with the separation, Nando committed suicide in 2015.
Neighbors and relatives in the remote region of Calabria, at the tip of Italy, began to pressure Maria to give up her farm.
When he refused, he was killed; his body was fed to a herd of pigs and his bones were crushed under the caterpillar tracks of a digger.
The complete destruction of his family, leaving them without a grave, is an ancient punishment called lupara rosa, a brutal tradition of local ‘Ndrangheta criminal gangs.
Maria’s brother Vincenzo told reporter Katya Adler in the opening episode of his three-part documentary Europe On The Edge that the only traces left were blood and hair smeared inside his car, with the engine running and the radio still playing.
The story is terrifying and one that Adler researches with meticulousness and sensitivity.
But at a meeting that included a tour of the Murano glass factory and a visit to Siena to enjoy the historic Palio horse races, this struck a strangely macabre note.
BBC Europe editor Katya Adler appears in her three-part documentary Europe On The Edge
Katya Adler travels through Italy, France, Spain and Germany in her latest series for BBC Two
Although there was a theme of political tension present in many of the episodes, this was a disjointed collection of reports that veered from travelogue to economics, from crime to eccentrics.
In Germany, Adler took a 250 km/h sports car around the old F1 circuit at the Nurburgring to show how this part of the world has a renowned motor industry.
When we had a chance to absorb this information, he went on to explain: ‘Of course, not all of these are race cars.’
Apparently the Germans make family vehicles too.
To prove this, he took us to the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg and stood inside a large tower with a multi-storey elevator for stacking cars.
Adler said global competition and the impact of U.S. tariffs had undermined Germany’s economy to the point where roads collapsed and cell phone coverage was unreliable.
Exactly like England then.
Outside Munich, she met a man named Klaus who was building a house for his family with a nuclear bunker in the basement.
With its own electric generator and air purifier, food and water storage, and an iron blast door as thick as a fortress wall, the bunker could withstand Russian attacks for up to three months.
To make the place more homely, Klaus plans to put ‘a beautiful panorama of the sea and forests’ on one wall.
Adler accepted at face value his statement that Munich ‘was a strategic attack point’ and that ‘it was easy for things to escalate’.
We didn’t hear how he expected to be living in a nuclear wasteland when he showed up three months later.
More importantly, Adler forgot to ask what Mrs. Klaus thought about all this.
