{"id":183286,"date":"2025-06-14T08:21:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-14T08:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/183286\/"},"modified":"2025-06-14T08:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T08:21:09","slug":"trainwreck-mayor-of-mayhem-this-shameless-crack-smoking-politicians-life-makes-for-car-crash-tv-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/183286\/","title":{"rendered":"Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem \u2013 this shameless, crack-smoking politician\u2019s life makes for car-crash TV | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary about Rob Ford<\/a>, the bellicose former conservative mayor of Toronto. Ford\u2019s rolling scandals in office include public drunkenness, smoking crack with gun-runners, and lying about everything. Talking heads in the documentary, sensitively titled Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem (Netflix, from Tuesday 17 June), remember him as \u201can everyman \u2026 without a shred of credibility \u2026 who turned city hall into a circus\u201d. That seems unfair. Circuses aren\u2019t that bad, and I refuse to believe every man smokes crack cocaine.<\/p>\n

Most documentaries wring every ounce of lurid detail from their subjects. This guy has more chaos than fits inside 49 minutes. We do get thrillingly grainy footage of him twirling his crack pipe, slurring first-degree murder threats with Mortal Kombat-levels of specificity, and making bizarre rants in Jamaican patois, against what or whom I\u2019m not sure. First-hand sources are film-maker\u2019s gold, and Ford is happy enough to spend his lowest points around people who video everything. These people never have good phones though, do they?<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t space to do more than mention Ford\u2019s extensive legal and domestic troubles, nor critique his executive choices, which included voting against grant money for HIV programmes, removing bike lanes and declaring transit workers an emergency service so they couldn\u2019t strike. In one council meeting, Ford reportedly stated: \u201cThose oriental people work like dogs.\u201d He later apologised for the remark, which he had intended as a compliment.<\/p>\n

Shamelessness and emotional dysregulation are fantastic traits for reality TV; at some point they became necessary for public office too. Trainwreck feels like a rear-view mirror on that turning point. Ford swings between joking around, puce-faced outrage and meek apology. He resembles a baby, which makes strange sense. If it\u2019s unfair to attack appearance, let\u2019s just say he was a voluptuous blond, and voters in the western world have a type. It is impossible to imagine a woman or an ethnic minority candidate getting away with one of the bad decisions Ford compulsively makes. Those folks can\u2019t even wear tan.<\/p>\n

Speechless \u2026 Ford outside City Hall in Toronto, 2013. Photograph: Mark Blinch\/Reuters<\/p>\n

The story \u2013 and our glee in watching it \u2013 is complicated by the fact that Ford is a casualty of addiction issues. The question of who, how and when we forgive is a live one. Does it make a difference if the wrongdoer demands we move on, as Ford does? His popularity remained high. He would have been re-elected but in 2014, was diagnosed with an aggressive abdominal tumour and died in 2016<\/a>. That same year Trump was elected president. There\u2019s a sick familiarity to the way controversies bounce off the Canadian mayor. The way he demonises the media as liars when he knows another scandal is about to break. The way he is able to position himself as a victim, and voters eat it up.<\/p>\n

There is an attempt at balance. \u201cI\u2019m proud to show this side of the story, and \u2026 why I stood by him through thick and thin,\u201d says his former head of security. The Rob-Ford-was-a-good-man argument here hinges upon a story we\u2019re told about a time the mayor was buying himself a Subway sandwich. Upon learning there was another order waiting but no driver, Ford delivered the stranger\u2019s sub himself. Doesn\u2019t make him Nelson Mandela, does it? By his own reckoning he made $35 plus three bucks as tip. Why does he have that much time in the day?<\/p>\n

Trainwreck shows Ford going door to door, asking people if their fridge freezers are working correctly, and taking a water-jet to graffiti. That\u2019s not governing; that\u2019s being a handyman. We all need to be more serious about public office. While politics will always be about public perception, it shouldn\u2019t be reduced to entertainment, and ideally should be distinguishable from true crime. Otherwise the only winner is social media clips and documentaries.<\/p>\n

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No point pretending it isn\u2019t watchable, though. I was gripped by this grainy footage, of a mayor fighting the public, or ploughing into an elderly female councillor, while barrelling across the chamber floor in a state of agitation. He might have been on his way to the Speaker\u2019s podium, to rip off his shirt and yell: \u201cAre you not entertained?\u201d I was. I\u2019m not proud of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary about Rob Ford, the bellicose former conservative…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-183286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114680750737253176","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}