TV programs worth watching
Sun October 12 — Sat October 18

Diana: The Night She Died (ABC 9.30pm Monday) is reviewed in 
Culture & Life this week.

Staunch unionism is the subject of this week's episode of A Big Country 
Revisited (ABC 8.00pm Tuesdays), I'll Never Change Sides. It takes up
the story of two union activists who were first looked at by A Big 
Country in 1974.

Well meaning though the original program probably was, it does tend to view 
the unions as antiquated, even eccentric, rather than fundamental to our 
society.

The second skein (Episodes 5 to 10) of David Attenborough's epic natural 
history series The Life Of Mammals begins this week on The Big 
Picture (ABC 8.30pm Wednesdays) with an episode intriguingly called 
The Opportunists.

Like all of Attenborough's wildlife series it is scientific in its approach 
while warmly human in its appreciation of the diversity and intricacies of 
the natural world. As the Observer put it: "One of the best natural 
history series ever made for television. Compulsory for old and young 
alike."

On the intensely variable Dead Ringers (ABC 9.30pm Thursdays) this 
week, 'Tony Blair confesses they have been looking in the wrong place for 
Weapons of Mass Destruction, which they now believe can be found at the end 
of the rainbow.

"George Dubya Bush" addresses the Aborigines in Africa, Crimewatch 
highlights heinous crimes against plausibility in TV and film plots, and 
Dead Ringers exposes early examples of product placement in such classic 
films as Psycho, Casablanca and The Graduate.

The True Stories program this week is Hired Assassins: Political 
Cartooning In Australia (ABC 10.00pm Thursday). Unfortunately, the 
cartoonists chosen for this study are all "embedded" in the bourgeois 
press.

They are Bill Leak from The Australian, Warren Brown from The 
Daily Telegraph, David Rowe from the Financial Review, Geoff 
Pryor from the Canberra Times and Rod Emmerson, whose work is 
syndicated in Australian Provincial Newspapers.

For this conservative bunch to view themselves as "performing the role 
Socrates chose for himself: a stinging gadfly on the rump of the social 
animal" borders on the delusional.

Had the more outspoken of the mainstream newspaper cartoonists — Moir, 
Tanberg and Leunig — been included, the program would have had more 
substance.. One observation is worth repeating, however: Often what 
cartoonists say is more poignant and honest than the political observations 
on the page next to their drawing.

When I was at high school, our guest speaker for one weekly assembly was a 
genial racist from the NSW Aboriginal Welfare Board. This patronising, 
paternalistic git happily informed us that Aborigines were not as 
intelligent as "us", by which he meant the white population.

As proof of this he informed the school that "for many years in Queensland 
there has been a scholarship for an Aborigine to go to university but", 
with a condescending smile, "no one has been able to take it up yet".

That this might have more to do with educational opportunities and 
Aborigines' enforced social and economic position was clearly not a factor 
in his thinking. I like to think that today he'd be booed off the stage.

The excellent Aboriginal program Message Stick (ABC 6.00pm Fridays) 
this week deals with the centenary of the Cherbourg State School, an 
Aboriginal school that is a model for Queensland and Australia as a whole. 
The documentary tells the story of the rise of the Cherbourg State School 
from a situation of aimless despair and chaos to an institution with a 
sense of purpose, direction and unity.

Recent years have produced exceptional educational and social outcomes at 
the school, since the arrival of a dynamic new teaching staff led by Chris 
Sarra, the school's first Aboriginal principal. The film captures the new 
sense of achievement, the innovative curricula, the new-found pride in 
Aboriginality.

The Australian-made telemovie Martha's New Coat (SBS 8.30pm Friday) 
is being screened in a new SBS slot "Friday Night Drama". It stars Matilda 
Brown, the daughter of actors Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward, as Martha, a 
young girl growing up in a small town with her younger sister Elsie, their 
pregnant mother (Lisa Hensley) and their mother's seemingly unsavoury 
boyfriend.

Rachel Ward never cut it for me as an actress, but lately she has begun a 
new career as a director. Martha's New Coat is her first feature 
film, and is based on her research last year while making a documentary 
film in Lismore about disadvantaged youth.

I have not seen her new film, but her previous short The Big House 
won the award for Best Short Film at both the 2001 AFI Awards and the 
2001 Film Critics' Circle of Australia. So Martha's New Coat should 
at least be worth a look.

"RKO made some of the screwiest of the screwball comedies and Bringing Up 
Baby (ABC 10.20pm Saturday) is one of the best" (Ronald Haver, American 
Film Institute).

Written by Dudley Nichols and directed at breathless pace by Howard Hawks, 
it details what happens when a dog runs off with one of the bones Cary 
Grant, a mild, absent-minded scientific chap, needs to complete the 
assembly of a large dinosaur skeleton. The dog belongs to a madcap hieress 
(a splendid Katharine Hepburn) who seems to live on another planet to 
everybody else.

A bewildered Cary finds that to retrieve his bone he has to help the 
heiress recapture an escaped leopard (the "baby" of the title). Of course 
they all end up in jail (where else?).

There are numerous delightful sequences in this classic example of 
screwball comedy of the late '30s: Hepburn posing as a female gangster to 
bamboozle the local sherrif or (my favourite) character actor Charlie 
Ruggles demonstrating "the mating call of the she leopard" with unexpected 
results!

But it is Hepburn's ditzy heiress and Grant's long-suffering 
paleontologists that make the film work so well — that and Hawk's 
brilliant direction.