TV programs worth watching
Sun February 9 — Sat February 15

Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For (ABC 2.00pm Sunday) 
chronicles the life and career of singer Ella Fitzgerald.

Ella Fitzgerald was born into poverty (like most African-Americans) in 
1917. By the time she died in 1996, she had become one of the greatest jazz 
vocalists ever.

She recorded over 2000 songs, including a 19-volume series of "song books" 
which she recorded between 1956 and 1967 in which she interpreted nearly 
250 outstanding songs composed by Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, George 
Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Johnny Mercer.

A band singer in the '30s, who created a solo cabaret act in the '40s, Ella 
became the star attraction for many years of jazz impresario Norman Granz's 
Jazz at the Philharmonic. Here she displayed her mastery of improvisational 
"scat" singing, where the vocalist uses her voice with the imagination and 
skill of a modern jazz horn player.

The six-part series Ape Man: Adventures In Human Evolution (ABC 
5:00pm Sundays) more or less speaks for itself. It not only brings to life 
the early humans and the endless struggle of their existance, but it also 
brings to life the detective work by scientists throughout the ages in 
their attempt to piece together the truth about our distant ancestors.

This week's episode recounts modern efforts, some — like using research 
into hallucination — rather outlandish, to decipher the meanings of Ice 
Age cave paintings and to use them to provide a window to our past.

The documentary series Empires this week and next deals with Rome In The 
First Century (SBS 7.30pm Sundays).

The series acknowledges that among the problems besetting the Roman Empire, 
such as "violent coups, assassination, overarching ambition, civil war, 
clashes between the sexes and questions of personal freedom versus 
government control", were also "clashes between the classes".

However, it does not in any way treat the contradiction and struggle 
between the classes as fundamental to the development of the Roman Empire, 
and is consequently obliged to fall back on the "great men make history" 
approach.

This week's episode concentrates on Caesar Augustus, but does include the 
experiences, memory and writings of the people both famous and uncelebrated 
who helped build the empire.

Next week, it's the turn of Tiberius, Caligula and provincial troublemaker 
Jesus.

After all the nature programs we've seen about Africa, you could be 
forgiven for thinking that no new images could be discovered that would be 
fresh and startling. But as last week's first episode of Wild Africa 
(ABC 7.30pm Sundays) showed, such is not the case.

That episode, Mountains, featured awesome footage of heavily coated baboons 
perched on cliffs four kilometres up in the mountains of Ethiopia. More 
importantly, it made clear the vital relationship of the wildlife with the 
physical environment and showed how both are part of the process of 
evolution.

Intensely scientific in approach, exquisitely beautiful in execution (some 
of the footage is just breathtaking), this series is a tribute to BBC 
Bristol which produced it. My only quibble is the overly portentous music, 
which tries unsuccessfully to be as imposing as the visuals.

This week's episode is Savannah, and deals with what is in fact the newest 
and most dynamic of all Africa's environments, the grasslands that are home 
to a wonderful variety of big cats as well as the greatest herds on earth 
today.

The energy turnover in the savannah is faster and more furious than 
anywhere else, enabling it to support this vast number of animals. 
Paradoxically, termites on the savannah are responsible for consuming more 
grass than wildebeest, zebra and elephants combined.

The BBC documentary series Allies At War (SBS 8.30pm Sundays) deals 
with the often stormy relationship between the war-time leaders of Britain, 
France and the USA.

Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle were essentially three imperialist 
leaders forced into an alliance to defend bourgeois democracy against Nazi 
German fascism while never relinquishing their own imperialist interests. 
They also endeavoured to act as a bloc in their relations with the fourth 
member of the anti-fascist alliance, Soviet leader Stalin.

That Churchill despised De Gaulle is well known. The extent of Roosevelt's 
opposition to the French general is less well known. Even now, the story is 
so sensitive that the British Public Records Office has not yet released 
MI5 's files on the wartime surveillance of de Gaulle

The progressive and outspokenly anti-Nazi actor-director Leslie Howard was 
shot down by German aircraft and killed while flying back to Britain from 
neutral Spain in 1942.

The last film he made before his death was a typically low-key, gentle but 
effective contribution to the propaganda campaign to change male attitudes 
towards the role of women in the war.

To many men in 1939, the idea of a woman driving a heavy truck was unheard 
of, and hence unthinkable. It wasn't safe and it wasn't proper, they 
maintained.

Women knew better (and so did many men, of course) but attitudes among the 
populace at large were slow to change, and women were needed to fill jobs 
that men could no longer be spared for.

The Gentle Sex (the title is of course ironic) came out in 1943. It 
was originally intended for screening to military personnel, but was 
considered so good it was released theatrically. Its original purpose 
probably accounts for its strong documentary approach, although it is 
entirely dramatised.

The story of seven girls from different backgrounds conscripted into the 
Auxillary Territorial Service (to become army truck drivers or anti-
aircraft gunners), whom we first meet on a train. Howard's voice picks out 
each of them amongst real servicemen and women on Victoria Station.

The film introduced and made stars of Lilli Palmer, Joan Greenwood and 
Rosamund John.

In the early 1940s, Val Lewton made some classic horror films at RKO, 
probably the most atmospheric of which was Cat People (ABC 10.30pm 
Saturday), a psychological monster movie that never showed the actual 
monster.

The film abounds in brilliant touches, such as in the sequence when the 
heroine (Simone Simon), walking down a dark street, hears the panther 
following her. When the sound actually stops, and she no longer knows 
whether the panther is behind her or in front, beside or even above her (in 
the overhanging trees), you feel the hair on the back of your neck prickle.

The bravura sequence with the audible but unseen panther in the indoor 
swimming pool is another famous highlight of a very imaginative piece of 
genre filmmaking.