TV programs worth watching
Sun Dec 14 — Sat Dec 27

During WW2, the British Government's agency for carrying out 
assassinations and other dirty work was the Special Operation 
Executive (SOE), which officially didn't even exist. It was SOE 
that sent a team into Czechoslovakia that assassinated Heydrich, 
against the wishes of the Czech Resistance and at the subsequent 
cost of hundreds of Czech lives.

The two-part docu-drama Killing Hitler (SBS 7.30pm Sundays 
Dec 14 and 21) reveals the formerly top-secret Operation Foxley, 
an SOE project to assassinate Hitler himself.

They didn't get to do it, so the matter is essentially academic, 
but the program intersperses its recreation with "expert 
commentary on the likelihood of it being a success".

Hitler alone did not cause WW2: his death would not have stopped 
it. German imperialism would still have wanted fascism at home 
and imperial conquest abroad.

Only the defeat of fascism could — and did — bring WW2 to an 
end.

How do you get your camera up really close to an elephant herd? 
You miniaturise it, make it remote controlled, mount it on a 
little mobile platform (like a remote controlled toy car) and 
cover it with dry elephant dung (either real or simulated). The 
result is "dung cam" and it produced some amazing footage for 
Elephants: Spy in the Herd (ABC 7.30pm Sunday Dec 14).

At one point an elephant picks up the camera (the dung with the 
odd smell and whirring noises) and walks around with it, still 
filming: "Elevision", archly announces narrator David 
Attenborough.

Like some of the classical Greek dramatists, Thomas Hardy's 
themes tended to be buffeted by an indifferent force that rules 
the world and inflicts on humans the sufferings and ironies of 
life and love.

The following line, referring to Michael Henchard, the central 
character in Hardy's 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, 
could equally apply to the characters of most of his novels: 
"Through a combination of unhappy circumstances, troubles 
accumulate."

In Henchard's case, he goes from drunken poverty to position and 
wealth through hardwork and sobriety, then, through greed, back 
to poverty.

The two part British ITV adaptation (ABC 8.30pm Sundays Dec 14 
and 21) treats the work as a moody love story, which is probably 
as good as any other approach.

I have not seen Dreaming in Motion (SBS 9.30pm Sunday Dec 
14), a package of five contemporary Australian short films, the 
result of SBS Independent's Third Indigenous Drama Initiative, 
but they sound excellent: "wickedly funny", "moving", "poetic", 
"deeply moving yet humorous", and so on.

The work of five young Aboriginal writer-directors they star 
actors like Sophie Lee (The Castle, Muriels Wedding), 
David Gulpilil (The Tracker, Rabbit Proof Fence) and Aaron 
Pederson (MDA, Water Rats).

The German-made documentary, September 11: The Intelligence 
Failures, screening on Cutting Edge (SBS 8.30pm 
Tuesday Dec 16), recounts numerous occasions during the '90s, 
when US and foreign intelligence services received specific 
warnings about plans to crash planes into major New York 
buildings.

In fact, as SBS puts it, "a joint Congressional enquiry found 
that US intelligence agencies knew the plan, the goals, even the 
perpetrators, and could have prevented the terrorist attacks of 
9/11". Why didn't they then?

According to the program, the reason is a mixture of scandals and 
lies "in a litany of mutual distrust, non-co-operation and 
dreadful ignorance".

If there were also those in the US Government and intelligence 
community who did not want the attacks thwarted, this program is 
not going to venture an opinion.

Directed by Oscar, Emmy and Royal Television Society award-
winning documentary filmmaker Vikram Jayanti, The Christmas 
Truce (ABC 8.30pm Monday Dec 22) recalls an event on the 
Western Front in 1914.

On Christmas Eve, during a lull in the fighting, troops on both 
sides came out of their trenches, tentatively at first and then 
in droves, and "fraternised". They exchanged tobacco and mementos 
with the enemy, sang carrols and played football together.

The Christmas Truce, made for the notoriously unreliable 
History Channel, maintains that this spontaneous (temporary) 
rejection of war "almost transformed the course of world history 
forever". That is nonsense, but it did send shivers through the 
top brass, governments and big business on both sides in WW1.

The moving story of the Christmas truce is brought to life 
through cinematic recreations, never-before-published photos, 
rare archival film footage, first-hand oral histories from the 
British Imperial War Museum and exclusive interviews.

A few weeks ago, Living Famously included a dreadfully 
superficial, inaccurate and dull account of the life of Marlene 
Dietrich. The Masterpiece documentary Marlene Dietrich: Her 
Own Song (SBS 10.00pm Tuesday Dec 23) may be considerably 
more interesting.

Directed by J David Riva, Dietrich's grandson, it allegedly 
explores her "political mission", the way both sides in WW2 tried 
to use her for propaganda, and her own private agenda.

The film that made her famous, Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue 
Angel (shot in Berlin in English and German versions), 
screens as the Cinema Classic this week (SBS 11.30pm Sunday Dec 
28).

Little Wolf's Book Of Badness (ABC 8.00pm Christmas Eve) 
is a children's cartoon based on Ian Whybrow's best-selling 
books. Although it has a certain charm, it has, sadly, been 
animated with little imagination.

Simply making the characters in Whybrow's illustrations move 
across the backgrounds does not take advantage of the 
possibilities of the cartoon medium. It's as though the great 
animators of the Warner Brother's cartoons had never existed.

There are no less than eight guests on the Parkinson: 
Christmas Special (ABC 8.30pm Christmas Eve). Three of them 
are worth bothering with.

One is Barry Humphries, who relies on blue humour to get him 
through two stints as first Dame Edna and then as Sir Les 
Patterson. Another is Jamaican poet Benjamin Zephaniah who is a 
funny man, and the third is magician Mark Paul, who combines card 
tricks with a "mind reading" act that is damn good.

Otherwise, the show is tedious.

Literal interpretations of the Bible are a great source of time 
wasting. The Mystery of The Three Kings (SBS 8.30pm 
Christmas Eve) spends an hour "searching for the truth behind the 
mystery". It ponders such weighty questions as: Were there really 
three of them, or more? Were they kings — or astronomers?

Best of all, could a star have guided the kings to Jesus in a 
stable in Bethlehem? (Neat and very precise piece of celestial 
navigation if it did!) And more of the same pointless 
speculation.

If Christmas Eve is a bit of a televisual waste of space, 
Christmas Day and Boxing Day are a sackful of repeats, some of 
them for the umpteenth time. Merry Christmas, Mr Bean (ABC 
8.00pm Xmas Day) is amusing as always, but how many times can you 
watch Rowan Atkinson spectacularly stuff up the stuffing of a 
turkey?

Me And Mrs Jones (ABC 8.30pm Xmas Day) is a lightweight 
romantic comedy-drama featuring Robson Green as a tabloid 
journalist who gets to bed the (female) Prime Minister, Caroline 
Goodall, with the reluctant aid of his best friend (Michael 
Maloney, who played the psychotically devoted manservant Albumen 
in Believe Nothing). It's froth, with pretensions to be 
something deeper, but I've enjoyed it a couple of times now.

My Family (ABC 8.00pm Boxing Day) was and remains a very 
forced series that struggles for laughs. Robert Lindsay's long-
suffering husband does better than Zoe Wanamaker's steely wife 
but the kids have the best jokes. This episode's about average.

Dalziel And Pascoe (ABC 8.30pm Boxing Day, part 2 
screening 8.30pm Friday Jan 2) is the episode about murder at the 
fox hunt, with the aggressively uncouth Dalziel right in his 
element (or out of it) and enough suspects to singlehandedly 
solve unemployment among British actors.

Also getting another repeat, possibly more welcome, is the three-
part Series Five of Silent Witness (ABC 9.25pm Boxing 
Day), beginning with World Cruise, the episode about anti-
Semitism and unpunished Nazis. Amanda Burton is at her prickly 
best as forensic pathologist, Sam Ryan.

The Wright Brothers' Flying Machine (SBS 8.30pm Saturday 
Dec 27), screening to mark the centenary of the world's first 
powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, reveals the popular 
image of the Wrights as amateur bicycle mechanics who tinkered 
their way into the sky to be a total myth. This BBC documentary 
by Ben Southwell explores their astonishing inventiveness and 
methodical approach to the problem of powered flight.

It features exhilarating footage of flights by exclusively 
commissioned replicas that use the same original materials and 
the only existing Wright engine for the frail craft that first 
propelled humans towards the clouds.