The Road to Guantanamo, Channel 4, Thursday 9th March 06 By Patrick Henry

Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's work is hardly like anything else ever shown on television, which makes it remarkable and welcome, though not to The New Statesman's reviewer who complains of its deficiencies, TV-wise, and that it fails to inform about the political attitudes of the protagonists or the real nature of Camp X-Ray and as a road movie lacks amusement. This critic is in fact a staff writer from The Times.

Why did the NS get him to write all this? I disagree entirely; this work told us a lot about all of these matters. The key moments are not so much in Camp X-Ray as at the beginning when the young men from Staffordshire arrive in Afghanistan, and at the end, when they visit Pakistan years later after their internment.

The genuine delight and attachment they feel for these parts of Asia, whilst still having the character of Midlands lads is a vivid insight into the complexity of the multi-racial present-day world. The display of this makes the piece a work of cinema art rather than television reportage. Learning from this is a matter of absorbing images rather than collecting facts and information.

Their motives for being in Asia might be unclear because they are complex and half-formed in themselves.

Being apprehended in a battle-zone might explain the US Army treatment of them initially, but not to continue for over two years and include extensive deceptions and persecutions by the captors. The reconstructions in the filming are very inventive and persuasive; and amusing (despite the NS writer's denial of this), in the way that Heller's Catch-22 and Kafka's The Trial are comedy.

The Camp X-Ray scenes are riveting, farcical in the way guards continually tell broodingly-silent inmates to shut the effing-well up, revealing in the sense that it conveys the captors being imprisoned in their own political and linguistic nonsensical nowhere-land.

Anyone of military experience will be reminded of the wooden, dehumanizing factors of training and punishment, though my National Service square-bashing was not quite so bad as Camp X-Ray. Soon after that in the 1960s I hitched around France during its crisis over The Algerian War and I was locked up by the police and The French Army a few times. Then back in Britain I joined in the Direct Action phase of the Anti-Nuclear Campaign and again got jailed for short spells.

Nothing like the adventure of The Tipton Three, but when young, a fulsome revolutionary fervour infuses one and actions can be illogical, dangerous and unconsidered, yet propel people into commitments to ideals and experiences not to be denied.

In its vital flavours, The Road To Guantanamo has reminders of Ken Loach's work (Family Life - schizophrenic factors; and Land and Freedom- amateur bravery in The Spanish Civil War), notably the anarchic spirit, the sense of ridicule amid the damage caused by Establishment forces. The USA uses the harm of 9-11 to justify all their overt oppressions, yet Britain experienced the equivalent several times every week for five years in the 1940s and nearly always treated prisoners well. I met German and Italian prisoners-of -war working on Yorkshire farms and observed this to be so.

At a time when USA are trying to supersede the United Nations and run the whole world the way they want, any work of critique against that is most valuable.

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