TV programs worth watching
Sun November 7 — Sat November 13

In the movie Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough uses 
dinosaur DNA from the blood of a mosquito entombed in a piece of 
fossilised amber to recreate dinosaurs in his theme park.

In The Amber Time Machine (ABC 7.30pm Sunday), his real-
life brother David examines the reality of DNA and other things 
preserved in amber for 150 million years.

His starting point is a piece of amber he was given as a child 
and which he was fascinated to discover had insects buried within 
it. Amber, he explains, is pine resin, and the insects become 
trapped when the sticky resin seeps over them from a wound in the 
tree.

While the program shows that recreating dinosaurs from amber is 
just a fantasy, there are nevertheless plenty of discoveries 
still to be made using amber as the vehicle, a translucent little 
time machine allowing a glimpse of plant and animal life in the 
distant past.

A few years ago, a portable jukebox was discovered which belonged 
to John Lennon in the 1960s.This jukebox contains a fascinating 
tracklist of 40 records — Soul, Rhythm & Blues and Rock 'n Roll 
— written in Lennon's own handwriting. These are the songs that 
shaped Lennon's musical education, and they reveal many of his 
original sources of inspiration.

In John Lennon's Jukebox (ABC 9.30pm Monday), presenter 
Melvyn Bragg and director Christopher Walker took Lennon's 
jukebox back on the road to meet the artists featured on it who 
influenced Lennon and The Beatles.

I found the program a surprisingly interesting and informative 
way to walk down memory lane, and the portable jukebox itself is 
a remarkable little marvel.

Young, Muslim And French, screening in the Cutting 
Edge timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), looks at the lives of 
young Muslims in France and the introduction of a law banning the 
wearing of headscarves in schools. 

France now has five million Muslims, the largest community of 
Muslims in Western Europe. Islam is now the second largest 
religion in France, Catholicism being the largest.

Hate crimes against Muslims are increasing while, in turn, at 
least five imams have been expelled from France in the past year 
for inciting hatred. The law on headscarves, which came into 
effect in February this year, has polarised the country.

The law bans the wearing of headscarves in schools. It also bans 
the wearing of Jewish skull caps or prominent Christian crosses 
but debate has centred on the issue of headscarves.

The government has defended the law as upholding the secularism 
of the French state.

Young, Muslim And French interviews members of the 
community of Dammarie Les Lys where the majority of the residents 
are Muslim. 

Up to 30 per cent of young people living in this neighbourhood 
are unemployed. Many of them claim they are discriminated against 
because of their background and religion.

Several express their frustration that despite the fact they were 
born and grew up in France, speak French, vote in France — and 
in many cases are third generation French — they are still being 
asked to "integrate" into French society.

I have always liked Michael Palin. He was excellent in his 
various Monty Python incarnations — who can forget his poverty-
stricken but oddly self satisfied Edwardian parent in a grimy 
North Country tenement telling his rather large brood that 
because the mill had closed "there's nowt for't but to sell you 
all for scientific experimentation"?

He was equally splendid sending up British literary cliches, 
whether displaying absurd stiff upper lip heroism in Across 
The Andes By Frog or with equal absurdity supporting the 
local football team from one disaster to the next.

These latter programs were in a tradition of poker-faced deadly 
serious leg pulling exemplified in print by the classic Ascent 
of Rum Doodle (if you ever come across it in a second-hand 
bookshop, grab it — its delicious verbal and pictorial farce).

But then he went off at a tangent into a new career as the modern 
world's best known eccentric traveller. Although the various 
travel series he has done tend to teeter on the verge of being 
less about the places visited than about Michael Palin visiting 
those places, they usually manage to do no more than teeter.

As a presenter, he shares with David Attenborough the ability to 
seemingly invite the viewer to share the experience with him, 
unlike the bronzed, coiffed and ever-smiling professional TV 
presenters on most travel shows.

His new six-part series, Himalaya With Michael Palin (ABC 
7.30pm Saturdays), sees the intrepid ex-Python on a 2000-mile 
expedition through the Himalaya.

As usual, it includes things the tourists get to see and — since 
tourists rarely have a camera crew in attendance to impress the 
local dignitaries — things and people tourists rarely if ever 
get to see.

The three-part series from Wales, The Power of Gold (SBS 
7.30pm Saturdays), should be interesting to Guardian 
readers. It purports to tell the history of one of mankind's 
most intoxicating obsessions: gold.

The first episode deals with gold in the ancient world; the 
second looks at gold in the age of the Arab and Spanish traders 
and conquerors and the third episode deals with gold in the 
modern era, from the industrial revolution onwards.

According to the ABC, Spooks (ABC 10.20pm Saturdays) is 
"the hit drama that takes us into the thrilling world of MI5, 
Britain's clandestine security service". There are, however, 
other ways to describe MI5 — and programs about it.

It has always been an anti-people organisation — whether trying 
to hunt down "Soviet agents" within government or "Communist 
agitators" in trade unions and community movements — its role 
has been one of bolstering by whatever means were necessary a 
reactionary state apperatus.

More recently, its ostensible target has become "terrorists", but 
it is just as indifferent to such niceties as onus of proof and 
assumption of innocence as it ever was. It is apparently as 
willing to frame a suspect (or a "target") as its US counterpart 
the FBI.

TV programs that glorify MI5 and gloss over or excuse its illegal 
activities are in effect a form of government propaganda aimed at 
making the loss of civil liberties and democratic rights 
acceptable and "justified".

A badly made program on the subject would have a negative effect, 
so the best people are hired and money spent to make this kind of 
series a success. Spooks for example won the award for 
Best Drama Series at the 2002 Broadcast Awards and the Best Drama 
Series award in the 2003 Bafta TV Awards.