Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem – this shameless, crack-smoking politician’s life makes for car-crash TV

Drugs, gun-runners, fridge-freezer maintenance … Netflix’s look at the wild life of the one-time Toronto mayor Rob Ford – and the lessons it tries to learn about our current politics – is gripping viewingCanadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary about Rob Ford, the bellicose former conservative mayor of Toronto. Ford’s 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 “an everyman … without a shred of credibility … who turned city hall into a circus”. That seems unfair. Circuses aren’t that bad, and I refuse to believe every man smokes crack cocaine.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’m not sure. First-hand sources are film-maker’s 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? Continue reading...

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