TV programs worth watching
Sun July 25 — Sat July 31

Early in the episode of Visions Of Space devoted to 
Hitler's favourite architect, Albert Speer: Size Matters 
(ABC 2.00pm Sunday), Robert Hughes intercuts his own arrival 
in Nirnberg by air (in an aging DC3) with Hitler's similar 
arrival in the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi 
propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The parallels become 
so marked you wonder what Hughes can possibly be thinking.

Soon after, he tries to excuse Speer's devotion to Hitler by 
references to Speer's youth (he was almost 30 when he first met 
Hitler) and that Hitler was the country's leader, with grand 
plans for Germany's capital, plans which apparently would have 
seduced any architect.

But Hitler was not Chancellor when Speer joined the Nazi Party 
(in January 1931). Speer was an enthusiastic Nazi who, as the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, "so impressed the Fuhrer by his 
efficiency and talent that, soon after Hitler became chancellor, 
Speer became his personal architect".

Speer, whom Hughes is so intent on at least partially excusing, 
is a convicted war criminal, and not because he planned a 
grandiose new Berlin (to be called Germania and filled with 
monuments to German victories in wars they had not yet fought but 
were already planning).

Nor was he convicted for designing the Nurnberg rallies to 
impress the German people with Hitler's godlike status and 
Germany's invincibility. No, he was convicted for his dedication 
in enabling the German armed forces to kill millions of people, 
and for his use of slave labour to achieve his ends.

For Speer was more than just an architect. He was by 1942 
Reichminister of armaments and munitions, a title enlarged the 
following year to Reichminister of armaments and war production.

To ensure supply of raw materials and maintain production of war 
material, Speer expanded a system of conscript and slave labour, 
supplied primarily from concentration camps.

Speer was lucky to receive a 20-year jail sentence as a war 
criminal, but like other prominent Nazis, when he was released 
into Adenauer's West Germany in 1966 was treated as a celebrity. 
Hughes himself interviewed him in 1979 for his series Shock of 
the New.

Hughes claims this episode of Visions of Space explores 
architecture as a response to the power of the state. In the 
course of it he laments the obliteration of Nazi buildings and 
especially Nazi statues, memorials and memorabilia. He derides 
the fear that neo-Nazis would make Hitler's bunker into a shrine.

On the other hand, he has enough perspicacity to see that the 
absolutely enormous dome and surrounding buildings that were to 
be the centre-piece of Speer's new capital were intended to dwarf 
people, to render them insignificant and powerless.

Robert Hughes is the kind of presenter who rates himself as the 
main attraction, not the work he is showing you. So he puts 
himself in front of the camera at every opportunity. He becomes, 
very quickly, a pretentious bore.

The National Geographic special Dawn Of The Maya 
(ABC 7.30pm Sunday) deals with the pre-history of Mayan 
civilisation, one to two thousand years before the classic 
period. Previously dismissed as a primitive era, it is now 
revealed as a time of awe-inspiring development.

The program also deals with the destruction of modern day 
Guatemala, by fire and land clearing, and parallels this with the 
demise of the Mayan civilisation, ironically from, at least 
partially, from the felling and burning of thousands of trees to 
make the lime with which the Mayan rulers covered their multitude 
of temples and tombs.

This environmental devastation brought the Maya to their knees 
and the archeologists standing on the ruins of their 
civilisation, amidst the smoke from 100,000 acres of burning 
rainforest, see a tragic repitition taking place.

Spanning more than two millennia, the world of the Maya evokes 
images of ancient pyramids soaring over the jungle, giant carved 
stones covered with hieroglyphics, and a sudden mysterious 
demise.

The program includes an account of the Soviet soldier who rescued 
a book of Mayan hieroglyphs from the burning Berlin National 
Library and then spent the next 30 years cracking their code. His 
ultimate discovery enables Mayan temples and tombs to be "read" 
like books.

While the ABC is digging up the early Maya, over on SBS at the 
same time they are digging up a Bronze Age settlement destroyed 
by Vesuvius 1700 years before Pompeii.

The First Pompeii (SBS 7.30pm Sunday) uses computer 
graphics, artefacts and interviews with experts to reveal the 
cataclysmic events of that day in 1680 BC.

Coffin Joe: The Strange World Of Jose Mojica Marins (SBS 
10.00pm Tuesday) is typical of much of what passes for "cult" 
movie-making on SBS: decadence presented as entertainment.

Josi Mojica Marins is described as Brazil's most famous horror 
film director. He not only writes and directs his own movies but, 
inevitably, also stars in them.

He also writes and draws his own comic books. His most famous 
creation, Zi Do Caixco or Coffin Joe, is easily 
recognisable with his black top hat and black cape, his thick, 
heavy black eyebrows and black beard, and his long, curly, 
clicking fingernails.

Marins affects a "method" approach to acting and direction (such 
as covering actors with live rats, snakes, lizards, and scorpions 
supposedly to test their ability to withstand his frightening 
sets).

"Magic Realism" was an aesthetic movement in Brazilian literature 
and cinema that was a reaction to the decadence of capitalist 
society in that country. Marins and his films are an expression 
of that decadence.

This week's Message Stick episode, Faith Thomas 
(ABC 6.00pm Friday), recounts the life of Faith Thomas, one 
of the first Indigenous nurses to graduate from the Royal 
Adelaide hospital, and the first Aboriginal nurse in South 
Australia to become a public servant and run a hospital.

Faith was also the first Indigenous person to be selected to play 
cricket for her country, the first Indigenous woman to be 
selected to play any sport for Australia and is the only 
Aboriginal woman to play international cricket for Australia.

Finally, the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and 
consequent scandal that exposed and brought down "Tricky Dick" 
Nixon (but left the system unharmed) is the excuse for 
Watergate Plus 30, a two-part series in the As It 
Happened slot (SBS 7.30pm Saturdays).

Made in association with the Washington Post, and claiming 
to tell the whole story, it includes interviews with numerous 
Nixon aides (there's nothing like unbiased comment, is there) as 
well as Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein.

In the light of the overt behaviour of the Bush Whitehouse, 
Nixon's covert activities seem almost benign.