TV programs worth watching
Sun June 20 — Sat 26 June

This week's "wonder" on Seven Wonders Of The Industrial 
World (ABC 7.30pm Sundays) is London's 19th century sewers, 
built to a plan by a man dubbed "the sewer king", Joseph 
Bazalgette.

By ending the killer epidemics of cholera that ravaged London, 
killing 30,000 in the mid-19th century, Bazalgette is credited 
with saving more lives than any other Victorian official.

Bazalgette "impossibly ambitious" scheme called for the use of 
318 million bricks to link over 1000 miles of street sewers with 
82 miles of main sewers. His vision required extraordinary and 
novel engineering solutions to set the bricks into watertight 
tunnels and create vast steam pumping engines, installed in 
gothic cathedrals of engineering.

The saga of the construction of the sewers is inter-cut with the 
scientific detective story to uncover the source of the cholera 
epidemics that bedevilled the city.

SBS did not provide me with a preview tape of the four-part drama 
series Jean Moulin (SBS 7.30pm Sundays) so I have not been 
able to see it, which is a pity because its worth to some extent 
depends on just what line it takes towards its subject.

The series is based on the life of Jean Moulin, who died at the 
hands of his Nazi torturers in 1943. He had been the first 
Chairman of France's National Resistance Council.

Set up on May 27, 1943, on the initiative of the Communist 
Resistance group the FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans), the 
Council united some 33 representatives of all the political 
parties and organisations participating in the Resistance 
Movement.

Even while WW2 was on, and certainly in the decades since, the 
bourgeoisie has been at pains to down-play the role of the 
Communists and to portray the Resistance as being inspired, 
guided and organised almost solely from London.

The reality was that in virtually all European countries, it was 
the Communists who united the various Resistance groups, led the 
Resistance and built up the partisan armies that fought the 
Nazis.

Moulin was, I think, a bourgeois democrat. It will be interesting 
to see how the series portrays his relationship with the 
Communists.

I am not a fan of Andrew Davies' television adaptations of 
classic English novels. His first big success in this field, Jane 
Austen's Pride and Prejudice, showed that he did not 
understand Austen's world or what she was saying in her book. His 
adaptation presented Austen's 18th century work exactly as though 
it was a modern historical novel.

The success of that adaptation owed much to the cast, the sets 
and the music, and to the innate qualities of Austen's original 
which even a misguided and miscast adaptation (in the case of 
Elizabeth's mother, at least) could not wholly obscure.

Since then Davies has taken to adaptations of less popular works, 
so that this week we have the first part of his two-part version 
of Anthony Trollope's 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right (ABC 
8.30pm Sundays).

Does anybody read Trollope these days other than university 
English students? I suspect not many.

He Knew He Was Right is the tale of a jealous husband's 
persecution of his innocent wife for a perceived infidelity. 
Trollope was a close friend of feminist writer George Eliot and 
his novel is a moving portrayal of a wife's helplessness at the 
time at the hands of a vindictive husband.

Another good-looking period adaptation is on view in Stanley 
Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (SBS 9.30pm Sunday). Its looks are 
in fact its only recommendation.

As Time Out so aptly said: "Given the singular lack of 
drama, perspective or insight, the way the film looks becomes its 
only defence — a triumph of technique over any human content."

Another SBS program I was unable to preview for this week is the 
new British comedy series The Boosh (SBS 8.30pm Mondays). 
Described by SBS as "weird" (seldom a good sign in my 
experience), the eight-part series brings to television the 
comedy of UK comedians Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding.

Barratt and Fielding, AKA The Boosh, won the Perrier Award 
for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998. In 2000 they 
performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and won 
the Barry Humphries Award.

In 2001 their BBC Radio show The Boosh was awarded the 
Douglas Adams Award for innovative comedy writing.

What can I say? Try it and see.

There are plusses and minuses about the ABC's new Australian-made 
crime drama, Loot (ABC 8.30pm Friday). On the plus side, 
everything about the show is very professional.

The photography is crisp and good looking, the acting is first 
rate (this is genre film-making not Chekhov or Shakespeare, so 
great depth is not required) and there is definite chemistry 
between the two leads, Jason Donovan and Anita Hegh.

Technically, it can hold its own with cop shows from anywhere. As 
someone who finds too many Australian television dramas strained 
or even feeble, I was impressed and pleasantly surprised by the 
competence of Loot.

On the minus side however is the program's concept: white collar 
crime, especially the sort that requires accountants to 
investigate, does not make for very exciting television or very 
exciting exposition.

The credit for "original concept" as well as "associate producer" 
goes to Allen Blewitt. When he's not conceptualising TV dramas Mr 
Blewitt is the Chief Executive of the Association of Chartered 
Certified Accountants, so all is perhaps explained.

The plot involves the "ramping" of a share float, other dodgy 
share transactions and money laundering, all requiring much use 
of computers to investigate. It's a tribute to director Shawn 
Seet and writer John O"Brien that it's as interesting —visually 
and dramatically — as it is.

On the other hand, it is easy to get lost in the arcane world of 
finance and company rorts that is on display here.