CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Gunfire's the new normal in 'war ...

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Gunfire's the new normal in this chilling look at 'war zone' Britain

By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 02:07 BST, 20 June 2019 | Updated: 07:25 BST, 20 June 2019

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Hometown: A Killing

Rating:

The Supervet

Rating: rating_showbiz_3.gif

With his air of impish innocence and Just William freckles, the boy on the Huddersfield street might have stepped out of a 1950s comic-book, in the crime documentary Hometown: A Killing (BBC1).

His name was Macauley and he was about 11. In Macauley's world, though, catapults and ink pellets have been left far behind. He was talking, with an articulate calm and lack of melodrama, about how normal the sound of gunfire is in his town.

'You hear shooting,' he said, 'living round here you don't get scared — you're used to it. It's just how it is in Huddersfield, sadly.'

In Hometown, DJ Mobeen Azhar was invited back to the suburb of Birkby where he grew up, to talk to the father of a man shot dead by police

In Hometown, DJ Mobeen Azhar was invited back to the suburb of Birkby where he grew up, to talk to the father of a man shot dead by police

This wasn't bravado. It wasn't gangland posturing. A lad with a Geoffrey Boycott accent was explaining that, round his way, there were nowt strange about guns and bullets.

Hometown was truly shocking, a chilling indictment of how drugs crime has unleashed casual violence on ordinary streets across Britain.

Radio DJ Mobeen Azhar was invited back to the suburb of Birkby where he grew up, to talk to the father of Yassar Yaqub — a man shot dead by police when he apparently pulled a gun during his arrest in January 2017.

This is Gentleman Jack country: Shibden Hall, the setting of BBC1's Sunday night costume drama, is less than five miles away.

Mobeen thought he knew the place. He bumped into one old schoolfriend or neighbour after another. But it quickly

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