TV programs worth watching
Sun February 29 — Sat March 6

The English photographer Lewis Morley, who lived and worked in 
Australia in the '70s, is famous for his photo of Christine 
Keeler, naked on a chair. Not, you will notice, for his "seated 
nude" or even "naked woman on chair".

The photo is only memorable because of the notorious society 
prostitute, made well known by her involvement with a cabinet 
minister, who posed for it. Nevertheless, under the title 
Photographer: Lewis Morley (ABC 2.00pm Sunday), you can 
see an "extended interview" with Mr Morley, intercut with "many 
of his best photographs".

What is an "extended interview" anyway? One that's longer then a 
short one but shorter than a long one?

The Origin of AIDS: A Scientific Controversy (SBS 7.30pm 
Tuesday) is a piece of journalism, not science. It popularises 
the views of Edward Hooper, a former BBC journalist turned 
author.

Hooper claims an inadvertent contamination of an experimental 
oral polio vaccine being used in Africa in the late 1950s became 
the vehicle by which a simian precursor of HIV/AIDS carried by 
chimpanzees was able to jump the species barrier into humans.

Hooper's evidence is purely circumstantial. Meanwhile, 22 million 
people are already dead, 40 million infected and a continent, 
Africa, devastated.

What is needed in a crisis of this magnitude is not journalism 
but a multi-national investigation by the World Health 
Organisation.

The revolutionary upsurge in the USA in the late '50s and the 
'60s manifested itself in a variety of ways. Among the non-white 
— African-American, Hispanic and Native American — population, 
the upsurge saw the formation of the Black Panthers and the 
American Indian Movement, the Civil Rights movement and the 
unionising of Mexican-American farm labourers.

The bourgeoisie would fight back, wiping out Panther leaders like 
Fred Hampton and others in a hail of FBI and police bullets, 
framing AIM leader Leonard Peltier and railroading him to prison 
where he has been left to rot to this day.

Eventually, Martin Luther King would explicitly preach about 
revolution, and shortly thereafter he too would be killed.

It was in this climate that a group of black poets in Harlem, New 
York, formed The Last Poets. Their work was based on strong, 
direct ideology and revolutionary ideas.

They combined rhythmic poetry with music in a way that would be 
highly influential on rap and hip-hop. They performed their 
poetry, speaking to the condition of Black people in America 
using street language and percussion, and challenging people's 
preconceptions about poetry.

The Last Poets, on Masterpiece (SBS 10.00pm 
Tuesday), uses archives from their performances to illustrate the 
brutal strength and provocative nature of their work. It also 
compares them with early hip hop artists like Public Enemy who 
continued the ideological message of the Last Poets.

The original members however are dismissive of later movements 
like "gangsta rap", where the revolutionary message has been 
replaced by using crime to get a "piece of the pie".

As one of them notes, "Today the message is no longer important, 
so long as it sells. It's not taking us to a higher level."

This week, Stalin: Three Faces Of Evil (SBS 8.30pm 
Thursday) attempts a demolition job on Stalin as military 
commander in WW2. It trots out all the standard anti-Soviet 
propaganda nonsense: "Stalin weakened the Red Army on the eve of 
the war by purging its best generals", etc.

He did this, it says, because he was "fearful of a coup", 
suggesting that the coup was all in his fevered mind. But, as I 
have shown in Culture & Life as recently as late last 
year, the reality of the coup attempt has been confirmed in books 
published in the West by some of those who participated!

The disinformation produced at the time and repeated since about 
the Russo-Finnish War (the War Against the White Finns, as it was 
called in the USSR) is all dished up again as fact. And of 
course, Stalin is accused of being "blind to Nazi aggression" so 
that the German attack took him by surprise.

This kind of rubbish can only be produced by ignoring all the 
memoirs and other texts by Soviet diplomats and military leaders 
which clearly show that the government and high command were only 
too well aware of what Germany was preparing to do.

But the perpetrators of anti-Soviet propaganda like this series 
are not interested in ascertaining the truth. The program is an 
anti-Communist propaganda weapon with wide-ranging application, 
and facts cannot be permitted to blunt its effectiveness.

There is an interesting documentary to be made on the subject of 
contemporary women's cinema. Women Film Desire (SBS 
10.00pm Friday) is not it.

This French documentary by award winning filmmaker Marie Mandy 
has a strictly petty-bourgeois view which limits women 
filmmakers' concerns to "the body, love, sensuality and 
sexuality".

In the post-modernist gobbledegook favoured by Marie Mandy, 
today's women filmmakers "directly engage the sexual politics of 
cinematographic choice".

If you are interested in debates "about the body as the contested 
ground of cinematic production" and similar pretentious nonsense, 
then this is for you.

What a pity about Fireflies (ABC 7.30pm Saturdays) eh? 
There is so much inherent drama in the subject (the highs and 
lows in the life of a volunteer Bush Fire Brigade) that you would 
think it could hardly fail. But it has.

Nothing wrong with the acting or the cinematography. The problem 
is with the script. Instead of drama drawn from real life we have 
soap opera "drama" drawn from other TV programs the series' 
creator, AWGIE-winning writer John O'Brien (MDA, Water 
Rats), has seen.

In fact, although it was set in a rural town and dealt with the 
fire brigade, the series' scripts could with little effort be 
adapted to the water police, a rural police station, a team of 
paramedics, etc. Because the drama does not arise from characters 
in conflict in this specific situation but from trite, 
melodramatic contrivance as irrelevant here as anywhere else.

For me, comedy films about someone who is put upon by fate, 
tradesmen, etc, are only funny if you don't cringe for the poor 
boob. In Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby Cary Grant was 
severely put upon by Katharine Hepburn's ditzy socialite, but the 
film was hilarious and never made you cringe.

On the other hand, I find HC Potter's 1948 film Mr Blandings 
Builds His Dream House (ABC 10.30pm Saturday) more 
cringeworthy than hilarious. Cary Grant plays an advertising 
executive who tries to move to rural Connecticut and build his 
dream home.

James Agee, a leading contemporary critic, accurately identified 
the film's audience as "middle class middle-brows".