TV programs worth watching
Sun 4 April — Sat 10 April

All right, I'll confess at once: I am not a fan of Fellini. I 
find his films shallow, grotesque and tedious.

Of all the bright young filmmakers who began their careers in the 
glory days of Italian neo-realism following WW2, Fellini drifted 
from it faster — and further — than any of his peers.

His first couple of films, although beautifully made, were 
already trying to put a sentimental spin on neo-realism. Soon 
after, he revealed himself to be an artist with nothing to say.

Fortuitously, this suited the bourgeois critics of the time, 
desperately searching for a new aesthetic to replace the social 
consciousness espoused during and after the War, under the 
influence of the anti-Fascist coalition.

With the help of young middle class French and American critics 
(and later filmmakers) they found their new aesthetic in the 
concept of the director as auteur and in the elevation of style 
over content, indeed often to the exclusion of content 
altogether.

Fellini, with nothing to say but a very distinctive style, was 
made to order for them, and they lauded him to the skies. He has 
been a "creator of cinematic masterpieces" ever since.

Personally, I find only Antonioni to be more consistently 
boring. However, The Magic Of Fellini (ABC 2.00pm Sunday) 
takes the contrary view.

Someone should tell the BBC that the whizz-bang technical 
wizardry and state of the art computer imagery of programs like 
Lion Battlefield and Shark Battlefield are no 
substitute for uncluttered images and clarity. That's what you 
want in a wildlife program.

The recent Shark Battlefield was an irritating parade of 
visual effects, some of them useful, most of them apparently 
there for no other reason than that the computer could do them.

Now we have Polar Bear Battlefield (ABC 7.30pm Sunday) 
with every technical gimmick under the sun getting in the way of 
what could have and should have been a very interesting program.

The Sahara desert was not always as big as it is today. In fact, 
the lands that now form its fringes were once the granary of the 
ancient world. They were destroyed in the Roman era by 
overcropping with goats.

The French made documentary Lost Worlds: Libya's Rock Art 
(SBS 8.30pm Sunday) deals with an even earlier time. 
Exploration for oil in what is now the desert of Messak, 
Southwest Libya, has unearthed one of the most important 
archaeological deposits ever to be brought to light in northern 
Africa.

As far as the eye can see are the relics of prehistoric camps, 
tools, domestic containers, bones of thousands of sites. Engraved 
in the stone of waadis are 6000-year-old reproductions of 
elephants, giraffes and human silhouettes.

The new series of Bedtime (ABC 10,00pm Tuesdays), the 
acclaimed half-hour comedy-drama written and directed by Andy 
Hamilton, introduces new neighbours on either side of Timothy 
West and Sheila Hancock (retirees Andrew and Alice Oldfield).

Bedtime is a Hat Trick production, and to my delight, two 
of the new neighbours (one on each side) are played by a pair of 
excellent actors from an earlier Hat Trick serial also written by 
Hamilton: 1997's splendid Underworld. The actors in 
question are Alun Armstrong and Kevin McNally.

Andy Hamilton's writing, whether back in 1997 or now, is 
incisive, quirky and engrossing. In Underworld he managed 
to be comic while dealing realistically with psychopathic 
violence, rape and casual murder. In the new series, his themes 
include the fear of Alzheimer's disease, racism, gutter 
journalism, sexism, even germ warfare.

It is the measure of his skill as a writer, that these assorted 
topics are raised in a way that is dramatically satisfying while 
deftly comic.

In the years immediately following WW2, the US enjoyed a nuclear 
monopoly. But even then, US and British scientists were striving 
to perfect weapons of mass destruction that would kill the enemy 
but leave the enemy's economic wealth unscathed, ripe for the 
plundering.

German and Japanese research was added to their own to produce 
new generations of chemical and biological weapons. Early 
versions of the latter were tried out in Korea.

Undaunted, US and British scientists went on developing ever more 
virulent biological agents and stockpiling tonnes of nerve gas, 
but the USSR kept abreast of their activities and the "free 
world" could never manage to get sufficiently ahead to be able to 
risk launching any kind of "germ war".

Nowadays, two lines are put forward about this subject: one is 
the old Cold War line that these terrible weapons had to be 
developed purely as a defence against the Soviet germ warfare 
program for world conquest, or something like that.

The second line is more sophisticated and says the development of 
biological weapons was "Cold War madness", indulged in equally by 
both sides. This is more subtle, but still anti-Soviet 
propaganda.

Deadly Enemies, screening on Untold Stories (ABC 
9.30pm Wednesday), is an ABC production, written and directed by 
Susan Lambert, which follows the second line.

I was struck by the former Soviet scientists who worked in this 
field and who were interviewed for the program. Dr Kanatjan 
Alibekov and Dr Serguei Popov both cleared out to the USA after 
the overthrow of socialism in the USSR.

Alibekov is now the vice-president of a major biotech company and 
heads the US National Centre for Biodefence. Popov now also works 
for a private US biotech company.

As recently as the 1950s, no less than thirty US states enforced 
laws that prohibited or restricted the sale of contraceptive 
devices. Without an effective means of controlling their 
fertility, young women faced the prospect of three decades of 
child bearing.

In 1953, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, 71, teamed up 
with heiress Katharine McCormick, then 78 years old, to develop a 
simple birth control pill. Sanger's own mother had been pregnant 
18 times, had 11 children, seven miscarriages, and died at age 
49.

Sanger and McCormick engaged a brilliant but discredited 
biologist, Gregory Pincus, to do the research. McCormick would 
eventually contribute millions of dollars towards the project.

But in the end, Pincus would be able to persuade pharmaceutical 
company G D Searle to manufacture the Pill. Within five years, 
six million American women had made it a part of their daily 
lives.

The Pill (SBS 10.00pm Friday) explores the story behind 
the development of this revolutionary contraceptive and features 
personal accounts from the first generation of women to have 
access to the Pill.