Witch doctors, murder and the plight of children born too white: Claudia Connell reviews last night's TV

By Claudia Connell for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:48 GMT, 24 February 2017 | Updated: 00:48 GMT, 24 February 2017

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Born Too White

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Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?

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Born Too White (BBC2) showed how albino populations live in Tanzania

Tanzania has one of the highest albino populations in the world. Most of the 60,000 sufferers are children and only 2 per cent of them will make it to their 40th birthday.

As if things weren’t tough enough for them, in Born Too White (BBC2) we saw how they also live in fear for their lives.

Those with albinism risk being attacked, abducted and murdered for their body parts.

A superstitious belief, widely held among local people, was that albinos’ bodies contained special minerals and, when witch doctors put them into a potion, they brought good luck.

Such potions sold for around £7,000 with politicians and wealthy businessmen thought to be the biggest customers.

Presenting the show was Dr Oscar Duke, familiar to some as one of the medics on 24 Hours In A&E. He also has albinism.

One of the most inspirational children Oscar met was 15-year-old Festo

One of the most inspirational children Oscar met was 15-year-old Festo. Attacked for his body parts when he was seven years old, he lost his left arm and right hand and spent four months in hospital. Thanks to encouragement from his wonderful teacher, Festo was flourishing at school with a particular talent for art and portraiture.

Some parents feared for their children’s lives so much that they sent them to special residential centres for protection.

As police cracked down on the trade in Tanzania, it pushed the problem over the border to Malawi.

Some parents feared for their children’s lives so much that they sent them to special residential centres for protection

There Oscar met the relatives of farmer Fletcher Masina, who had been savagely hacked to death while tending to his crops.

Oscar interviewed one of his dead-eyed killers in prison who tried to claim he was possessed by Satan but had really done it for his share of a promised £40,000 fee.

Uncomfortable viewing it may have been, but it was a powerful and deeply upsetting documentary. Dr Duke isn’t an experienced presenter but he had a gentle, natural touch and was able to draw on his own experiences without hijacking the programme.

It only served to make some of the deluded fools in Trevor Phillips’s Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? (Channel 4) seem all the more ridiculous and petty.

Trevor Phillips’s Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? (Channel 4)

We saw Student Union representatives from universities across the country who had, between them, decided that: sombrero hats were offensive; fancy dress Pocahontas costumes were in bad taste; and that it was not on for men to dress up as women for fun.

Post-Brexit and the Trump election victory, Phillips was posing the question of whether liberal Lefties (as he admitted to being) had stifled debate with their over-sensitivity towards big issues.

A key player in the official Remain campaign, he realised that the Remainers’ refusal to even engage in an immigration debate had cost them the EU referendum.

In another example quoted, at Cardiff University, students even fought to ban feminist Germaine Greer from speaking after she stated that she didn’t consider male-to-female transgender people ‘real women’. Transgender campaigner Paris Lees called Greer ‘an old bigot’ yet simply couldn’t see that trying to ban somebody who doesn’t hold a certain belief was in itself illiberal.

However, when the general public were asked for their views, they were far more sensible than any student union representative or campaigner. It certainly proved that the professionally offended don’t represent the vast majority.

Trevor Phillips concluded that we have, indeed, all gone PC potty and that people need to ‘learn to live with offence’. And that’s certainly going to offend a few people.