Sleeping with the Far Right: Worlds collide for tolerant Londoner Alice Levine and Jack Sen

Tonight, Channel 4, 9pm
Out of her comfort zone: Alice Levine meets Jack Sen in Southport
Chris Bull/UNP
David Sexton21 February 2019

Here’s a good one.

Such a great adventure: a hip Londoner embracing diversity and tolerance mounts an expedition to the north to spend a week under the roof of a family who shockingly reject those values. Worlds colliding! Anthropology in action.

Alice Levine, 32, first came to fame with the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. She has hosted Big Brother’s Bit on the Side and has been a Radio 1 presenter, appeared on game shows and run a supper club in Clapton. She’s good-looking, with red hair and three hoops and a stud in one ear.

Sleeping with the Far Right (a tease, that, it’s just staying) is the first such documentary she’s presented.

Having a cuppa: Jack Sen and Alice Levine (Chris Bull/ UNP )
Chris Bull/ UNP

Off Alice goes Southport to meet far-Right activist Jack Sen and his family. Jack’s a bad ’un, all right. After being expelled from Ukip for an anti-Semitic tweet he joined the BNP, but even they suspended him for his extremism. “He’s definitely going to say stuff that turns my stomach,” Alice predicts.

But Jack’s a surprise. He has an American accent, having lived in the US from the age of seven to 20. He’s clearly mixed-race himself, articulate and initially charming. His pretty Ukrainian wife, Natasha, says she first fancied him because he looked like Keanu Reeves and you can just about see it. They have the sweetest little daughter.

So the inclusive-beauty meets a fascist-beast scenario — this being television, let’s not pretend it is anything other than an attractiveness contest — doesn’t play out as planned. Absurdly, Alice even gets into a reality show-style exercising competition with her hosts which she doesn’t win, Jack showing off his pull-ups, Natasha demonstrating how she does squats with her daughter on her shoulders.

Jack’s mother Faye, who lives with them, is a surprise too. She may think what we need is our own Donald Trump and that her son is ideal for the role - but we also see her chatting on the phone in French and German. Still, Jack delivers the stomach-turners, soon spouting all sorts of racist nonsense and bonding online with Klansman David Duke and nasty Nick Griffin. He doesn’t want to live in a society with many black people — although the demographics are irreversible now.

Meeting: Alice Levine and Jack Sen (Chris Bull/ UNP )
Chris Bull/ UNP

“London’s gone, Birmingham’s gone, there’s no way to get them back.” He would have liked to have run for Mayor of London, he says, so that he could expose “the problems with black-on-black crime and Sadiq Khan”. For good measure, he’s also homophobic, after some early experiences in musical theatre, as well as anti-Semitic, after his schooling in New York.

Alice whispers her indignation into the camera each night but the big bust-up only comes after Faye has shown her photos of Jack as a boy captioned “Dilip”. It turns out that until 2015 Jack’s name was Dilip Sengupta, his father having been of Indian and South African heritage.

When Jack realises Alice knows about the name-change, he wants to stop the filming. He rages: “I believe multi-ethnic societies are toxic for people who live in them. You keep to your own — and I don’t have an ‘own’. Here I am. Who’s my own? People in west Lancashire?”

It’s almost possible to sympathise with the hidden hurt and confusion this reveals — but then Jack drops the charm and turns nasty, telling Alice that he sees her as racist, condescending and an obnoxious human being. She seems bewildered, having trouble coping with the idea that anybody could feel like this or think so differently from her.

They have to take a publicity picture together. “It’s very uncomfortable, isn’t it?” he mutters. “One of the most uncomfortable moments of my life,” she says. “You must have led a sheltered existence,” he retorts. Riveting viewing.

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