TV programs worth watching
Sun July 4 — Sat July 10

Crime (and detection) dominates this week's offerings on the 
ABC: period crime, contemporary crime and military crime in 
foreign parts. Let's start with the period crime, Death On The 
Nile (ABC 8.30pm Sunday).

Agatha Christie was phenomenally popular as a writer of mystery 
fiction. I could never see the appeal, myself.

There are much more engaging detectives and more rewarding 
mystery stories in the work of some of Miss Christie's 
competitors.

Her puzzle-plots usually sheeted the blame home to the one person 
who we have been led to believe could not possibly have done it, 
or to some similarly preposterous variant. In Murder on the 
Orient Express everyone did it!

Character development, either of suspects or detectives, was not 
her forte. Her great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, forever 
bragging about his "little grey cells", was all too often a bore.

Peter Ustinov, in the 1978 movie version of Death on the 
Nile, refused to take the character seriously and, to the 
displeasure of Miss Christie's devoted fans, played Poirot for 
laughs. It improved the film, but could not save it.

However, there is no denying the fact that, in the hands of a 
competent scriptwriter and director, her stories can make fast 
paced and quite pleasing movies and television.

Hercule Poirot made his film debut in 1931 and his television 
debut in 1962 (in the US). Tony Randall, Albert Finney and Peter 
Ustinov had all appeared as Poirot before London Weekend 
Television began telecasting, in 1988, its now long-running 
series of feature-length Agatha Christie mysteries with David 
Suchet playing Poirot.

Now we have the latest Suchet adventure, a new version of 
Death On The Nile. Suchet is a credible Poirot without 
being a caricature (difficult, given the way Christie wrote him) 
and the period atmosphere, accents and costumes are just right.

With the exception of Simon Doyle (played by JJ Field) and his 
wife Linnet (Emily Blunt), who are simply inadequate, the cast is 
first rate. James Fox makes an excellent Colonel Race, arriving 
in style here.

The Egyptian sequences were shot on location and the film deftly 
captures the atmosphere of wealthy foreigners at the beginning of 
the '30s taking their leisure languidly viewing the Pyramids and 
cruising the Nile (on a marvellous vintage) ferry.

It's a great setting for murder. There's even a Communist on 
board, although, since he's also an extremely rich titled lord, 
he seems to be having a foot in everybody's camp.

Despite the best efforts of Britain and the US to destroy 
Zimbabwe's economy and blatantly interfere in its elections, the 
government of ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe has survived.

Imperialism does not easily give up, however, when there is 
profit at stake, and efforts to undermine the Zimbabwe government 
and bring about its overthrow continue. The propaganda war 
against the country is unceasing (even cricket is dragged into 
it).

Cutting Edge: Secrets of the Camps (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) 
purports to be "a groundbreaking investigation by the BBC's 
Africa correspondent, Hilary Andersson who has uncovered the 
horrifying background to the creation of Robert Mugabe's feared 
youth militia.

"In their training camps the Zimbabwean Government is subjecting 
thousands of innocent youths to rape, brainwashing and brutality. 
It is all part of a process designed to mould youths loyal to 
Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party."

Yep, that's how left wingers build political movements all right.

It would make you laugh if this stuff wasn't so unrelenting, so 
serious and so successful.

Birth Rites, a documentary that draws a powerful 
comparison between birth issues in outback Australia and the icy 
regions of Arctic Canada, screens in the Storyline Australia 
timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Thursday) in NAIDOC Week.

Lack of resources, funding, skilled staff willing to live in 
remote towns and the fear of litigation mean that there are no 
birth services in smaller outback towns in Australia, while the 
medical establishment dismisses Aboriginal women's desire to have 
their babies within their own communities and culture.

This situation is contrasted with the position of the Inuit women 
in remote Northern Canada. The Inuit now have a treaty with the 
Canadian government and have more control in health areas 
resulting in a more appropriate birth system for their own 
people.

They have stopped being evacuated to centralised hospitals in 
distant centres for births because they now have a remote birth 
centre in their small town. Indigenous midwives have been trained 
locally and provide the benefits of both Western medicine and 
their own culture.

Says director Jennifer Gherardi about the Australian situation: 
"The lack of culturally appropriate birthing facilities is a 
national issue. There's no government support, financially, to 
alleviate the problem."

The military detective series is of course the new season of 
Red Cap (ABC 8.30pm Fridays). The first series was set on 
or around British army bases in Germany and concerned the efforts 
of SIB, the army's detective unit, to solve crimes by or against 
British personnel.

Its right-wing militarist bias was relatively easy to ignore for 
the sake of a well filmed crime drama, with some complicated 
personal relationships thrown in for good measure.

Despite some overly tricksy flashbacks, this is an extremely 
well-made show. Shame about its overt militarism.

The new series opens in Bosnia and the politics of the show 
("Serbian atrocities", Russia supplying arms to terrorists, etc) 
are more up front than usual and harder to ignore. But at the end 
of the first episode they are all off back to Germany, so it will 
be interesting to see if the political spin changes at all.

A credit at the end of each episode says that the show is made 
with the full co-operation of the British Army and Ministry of 
Defence. It doesn't glamorise the army, but for the sort of 
people the army want it must still function as an animated 
recruiting poster.

Last week's feature-length pilot for New Tricks was as 
unrealistic a cop show as could be found. But like similar shows, 
such as Frost or Pie in the Sky, it was rendered 
entertaining by the writing of the characters, both coppers and 
villains.


Alun Armstrong, James Bolam and Dennis Waterman are the three ex-
detectives brought back into service under Superintendent Sandra 
Pullman (played by Amanda Redman) to reopen old cases and 
generally make themselves unpopular.

The series proper starts this week (ABC 9.30pm Fridays) and 
although it is necessarily less thoroughly developed than the 
longer pilot, it is still good — if undemanding — fun.