TV programs worth watching
Sun Oct 17 — Sat Oct 23

When John Mortimer, author of Rumpole of the Bailey, 
was asked by Associated Television some years ago to write six 
plays on the life of Shakespeare, he naturally consulted some 
experts. "The first professor I asked said that everything known 
about the life of Shakespeare could be written on a postcard and 
you would still have room for the stamp."

But, as Michael Wood's series In Search Of Shakespeare 
shows, and as Mortimer himself admits, "in fact we know a 
great deal about him, quite enough to cover a whole packet of 
postcards".

We even know quite a bit about the period Mortimer calls 
Shakespeare's "blank years", between his "leaving Stratford and 
turning up in the London theatre". It's that period that is the 
subject of this week's episode of In Search Of 
Shakespeare, called The Lost Years (ABC 2.00pm 
Sundays).

In terms of concrete fact, apart from the records of the birth 
and christening of his three children, absolutely nothing is 
known for certain about Shakespeare's life between the ages of 18 
and 28, but Wood uses the history of the early Elizabethan period 
to flesh out a number of intriguing clues.

Patrons, actors, other writers and Elizabethan spies, even The 
Queen's Men, a travelling theatre troupe presenting government 
propaganda plays, are all linked together in a splendidly 
coherent and watchable account.

Wood reveals the relationship between Shakespeare's life and — 
although Wood does not use these terms — the fierce struggle of 
the new English ruling class against the power of a foreign 
Church ("the Church of Rome") and Britain's principal imperial 
rival, His Most Catholic Majesty Phillip of Spain.

Refreshingly, Wood recognises at one point that Shakespeare's 
fellow actors were all — also — artisans, "carpenters, 
tinsmiths, grocers". They were of the same class as the bulk of 
their audience.

And a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company notes that when 
Shakespeare began to write, English audiences had had theatre for 
less time than we have had television. An exciting, innovative 
time to be a young actor-writer.

Compared to other television histories or biographies, Wood makes 
greater — and better — use than is usual of authentic locations 
as well as Tudor maps, guidebooks, parish records and recently 
re-discovered Victorian-era photos of old London to make 
Shakespeare's presence and his life real and believable.

The series should lay to rest the idea that Shakespeare was 
practically uneducated and barely able to write his own name.

It leaves little room for any credible conjecture as to 
Shakespeare's works having been written by someone else. As John 
Mortimer says, the author "was either William Shakespeare or 
someone else with exactly the same name."

Terrorism: Ellen's Journey, screening on the Cutting 
Edge (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), follows Ellen Sarancini, whose 
husband, a pilot, died in the September 11 hijackings. Since his 
death Ellen has become a public figure in the US, campaigning for 
pilots to be armed and joining a law suit, involving 700 families 
of September 11 victims, against al Qaida.

At the same time Ellen is on a personal quest for understanding 
and amongst those she speaks to are an Iraqi school teacher whose 
husband was killed during an American bombing attack.

She comments, "Americans have come into our country and killed 
our people — come in saying they would take away injustice but 
brought more injustice. Saddam didn't interfere with my life, 
children, husband. Americans killed my husband, destroyed my 
life."

A woman whose husband and parents were murdered in the Sabra and 
Shatila massacres by Israel says, "The international community 
denounces the terrorism of 9/11 but should have addressed the 
problem earlier.

"You have to see the reasons for terrorism — if justice and 
freedom existed there wouldn't be terrorism. I hope Ellen that 
you have the strength to save your children from racism  we want 
equality between your children and ours."

Ye gods! Yet another program about those boring bloody British 
royals: a two-part series Looking For Victoria (ABC 7.30pm 
Saturdays), in which actress Prunella Scales (Basil Fawlty's 
viperish wife in Fawlty Towers) "sets out to discover the 
truth about the monarch she plays in her one woman show".

Despite the efforts of numerous TV productions in recent years, 
Victoria's essential irrelevancy as anything but a figurehead 
cannot be escaped. Can the ruling class really find nothing 
better to inflict on us than investigations of the minutiae of 
royal lives?

Throughout the 1950s, US strategists strove to get the drop on 
the Soviet Union and to "roll back" Communism. The Korean War was 
fought and the Hydrogen bomb developed.

The US and the other colonialist powers — Britain, France, 
Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium — actively and 
aggressively waged open or covert war against Communist-led 
governments and national liberation movements (or even ones that 
were merely sympathetic to socialism) that emerged during the 
decade in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The US had a significant superiority in numbers of nuclear 
weapons, but the USSR constantly outmanoeuvred the US 
diplomatically, pushing forward the need for peace and refusing 
to be drawn into military confrontation with the US and its 
allies despite numerous provocations.

Nevertheless, US long range nuclear bombers ringed the territory 
of the USSR in preparation for nuking the country. But in 1957 
the USSR demonstrated its new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile 
by launching Sputnik 1. Now the US was vulnerable to nuclear 
retaliation.

The US hastily stationed medium range missiles in Turkey and 
"Hawks" in the US administration continued the policy of trying 
to "roll back Communism".

In 1960, the CIA prepared to invade Cuba, where the Revolution 
had triumphed the year before. At the same time, the US aided the 
Belgian Government in overthrowing the Lumumba Government in the 
newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo.

The USSR promised to provide Cuba with military support. In 
January 1961, Lumumba was murdered, in April the USSR launched a 
man into space and, a week later, the US launched the Bay of Pigs 
invasion of Cuba.

The Bay of Pigs invasion proved abortive, but clearly the US 
would try again with a bigger force, so the USSR proceeded to 
install missiles in Cuba capable of hitting targets in the US.

The Kennedy Government in the US went ballistic (if you will 
pardon the pun). Still smarting from their humiliation over the 
Bay of Pigs fiasco, US Hawks tried to provoke nuclear war with 
the USSR over the "Cuban Missile Crisis".

For six days the world was close to full-scale nuclear war, but 
in the end Soviet Premier Krushchev agreed to remove the missiles 
in return for a US pledge never to invade Cuba.

Although the Yanks like to present the crisis as one that they 
"successfully withstood", in fact they were once again ultimately 
outmanoeuvred, and their plans for further Bay of Pigs adventures 
in Cuba had to be abandoned.

The US "take" on the affair is seen in detail in the two-part 
Cuban Missile Crisis Declassified (SBS 7.30pm Saturdays). 
Nevertheless, the perception of the crisis is very interesting.

"If we had invaded Cuba, nuclear war would have broken out. 
Absolutely no question about that. The one certainty is that the 
risk was very much greater that we ever imagined", says Robert 
McNamara, US Secretary of Defence 1961-68.