Seeds Of Deceit: The Sperm Doctor Donor review – The victims of this cruel predator deserve better than smutty jokes, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Seeds of Deception: The Sperm Doctor Donor
Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator
Most true crime shows are obsessed with serial killers. But there is no word for their opposite: the weirdo who hunts his victims to create lives.
Dr. Jan Karbaat, who ran a fertility clinic near Rotterdam, used his own sperm to impregnate dozens of women over more than two decades. And that's just the starting point for Seeds Of Deceit (BBC4), a three-part investigation that spirals into weirdness like a psychedelic DNA strand.
This subtitled Dutch documentary not only interviews several victimized women and their children, now young adults who have inherited Karbaat's wide-open eyes and wide mouth.
It tries to recreate the creepy clinic, with a replica of the dingy tiled room where its patients were treated – and in many cases sexually abused or even raped.
BBC4's Seeds of Deceit is a three-part investigation into the story of Dr Jan Karbaat, who used his own sperm to impregnate dozens of women at his fertility clinic in Rotterdam
But the documentary makers don't seem to think about whether they too are guilty of exploiting these mothers, whose interviews they show to expose family dramas and encourage viewers to judge.
Women were invited to lie on the medical couch, on a sheet of disposable tissue, and stare at the ceiling as they remembered their ordeals. These segments were interspersed with images of chickens laying eggs and taps dripping. I'm going to attribute it to the slightly twisted Dutch sense of humor.
Karbaat was a complete rat, there's no doubt about that. With nine children from three marriages and others from an affair, he targeted women desperate for babies and exploited them mercilessly.
His insemination techniques were more suited to a cattle shed, although they were clearly effective – when he wanted them to be. Some women had to attend five times a month for a year: he injected them with sterile water instead of sperm, and explained to a nurse: “I have to make money.”
Many women suspected his motives, but decided to continue to trust him, even though they did not dare to tell their husbands what happened in the clinic. 'What could I do?' one asked. 'I wanted children so badly.'
The documentary makers do not seem to consider whether they too could be guilty of exploiting these mothers, who are now desperate to tell their stories. The interviews are spliced in a way that exposes fractures in the family, heightening the drama but also inviting us to judge.
Karbaat died in 2017 at the age of 89, and the second installment of this double bill brought together some of his adult children. They compared hands and faces, but many shared more than just his physical features.
A common characteristic, many of them agreed, was that they were highly sexed. Two of the half-brothers went into the red light district of Amsterdam for an adventure during their first meeting.
It makes some evolutionary sense that this could be an inherited trait. But the documentary wasn't interested in exploring that; it was just treated as a bit of a dirty joke.
If the more selfish and cruel elements of the human personality are passed down, we probably inherited most of them from the Romans. Their devious filth is on full display in Julius Caesar: The Making Of A Dictator (BBC2).
The devious meanness of the Romans is on full display in Julius Caesar: The Making Of A Dictator (BBC2)
One of the villains was a senator named Clodius. “He's a skunk. There is nothing good about Clodius,” said American professor Shelley Haley, one of the loquacious historians who embellished this story. “He's a manipulator, a sociopath, a psychopath.”
Clodius did not last long. Most of the attention in this second episode went to the triumvirate of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus, who sound like a 1960s supergroup at Woodstock.
Their story was told with a lot of slo-mo reenactment. There were swords being waved, blood dripping, birds staring into the camera with beads, and it all looked like a classic rock video. Exaggerated but nice.