The Guardian 26 January, 2005
TV Programs worth watching
Sun January 30 - Sat February 5
Television is a visual medium, so it is natural that there are a relatively large number of programs about visual art. Regrettably, many of these are made up of pseudo-experts spouting reams of pretentious art-speak babble, persiflage designed to obscure the shallowness of the speaker or, in many cases, the subject itself.
On the basis of its first episode, the new series The Private Life Of A Masterpiece (ABC 2.00pm Sundays) is of a different mould. Each episode deals with a specific work of art, from conception, through its execution and what happened after it was finished, taking in the politics and social legacies of each work.
The first episode, The Kiss, traces the history of Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture, a lovely, sensuous work which Rodin eventually turned into a sort of industry. It had made his name and his career, but by then he must have been very bored with it.
The program, however, is anything but boring: it is consistently interesting, revealing all sorts of fascinating details about the sculpture or about Rodin's methods. The experts that have been gathered are also interesting and, in the main, mercifully free of pretention although inevitably there are one or two who are rather full of themselves.
I enjoyed the program and look forward to the next in the series.
On the other hand, Amazon: Super River (ABC 7.30pm Sunday) is a disappointment from the BBC. It looks like something they bought rather than made themselves, and we shall doubtless see more such compromises in future.
The program is poorly, even amateurishly, edited. Satellite photographs and ritzy special effects are used frequently but to no great effect. At times it looks like several short films on the subject have been cobbled together to produce one longer, general film.
But the Amazon is such a subject that it almost defies poor filmmaking. Consider the statistics: up to 16 kilometres wide in places, the Amazon contains a fifth of all the river water on Earth.
Three-quarters of the planet's species grow in the Amazon basin. Over 3000 different species of fish have made their home in the river.
Despite the excellent wildlife photography, one is conscious that the filmmakers seem unaware that any of this is under threat. You would never know from this program that any land clearing was going on in the Amazon Basin at all.
In a recent Sex and the City storyline (at least in the US, I don't know if it has been shown here yet) one of the characters became a poster-boy for Absolut Vodka. Guess who proposed that particular storyline to HBO? None other than Absolut's public relations agency.
It's called "branded entertainment", and it is simply a sophisticated form of product placement, designed to overcome viewer resistance to advertising. As the Cutting Edge documentary The Persuaders (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) indicates, the advertising industry expects the future to bring a "seamless blend" of marketing and entertainment. Whoopee!
The program also looks at how the techniques of advertising are used to determine the outcomes of elections not to mention government policy.
And we learn that, as consumers grow more resistant toward marketing, the persuasion industries are refining techniques to reinforce an emotional attachment between consumers and their purchases!
In fact, the techniques that marketers in the US are developing are truly startling and include the hiring of anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists, and brain researchers to plumb our unconscious desires to better influence our "choices".
Not surprisingly, there are people who worry that as advertising becomes more deeply integrated into television, movies and music, those cultural forms will become ever more homogenous. Now what would make them think that?
One of the most talked about non-fiction films of last year after Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was producer/director Robert Greenwald's dynamic, fast-paced and powerful piece of TV journalism, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (ABC 9.20pm Tuesday).
The title indicates the program's partisan approach. After watching Fox News at work for a while however, you wonder at how mild the title is.
For this is a scarifying expose of right-wing propagandists masquerading as news reporters, deliberately misleading the US (and world) public and waging a class war on behalf of corporate heavies. And determining Fox's policies and approach is the man at the top, the media moguls' media mogul, Rupert Murdoch.
The program is mainly concerned with revealing the ways Fox News distorts news, wages co-ordinated character assassination campaigns and basically presents "News" as entertainment, devoid of responsibility or journalistic ethics.
Murdoch's willingness to cosy up to the dreaded "Chinese Communists" in order to get his toe in the burgeoning Chinese market is presented as the epitome of corporate immorality, which seems to reflect a certain amount of paranoia on the part of the filmmakers themselves.
Murdoch's move was certainly cynical, but if he was trying to cosy up to Hitler they could not have been more outraged. Fortunately, this is a relatively tiny part of an otherwise outstanding piece of real committed journalism.
Murder Investigation Team returns in an expanded format this week for a second series (ABC 8.30pm Fridays). It's a curious episode, in which the method of killing (an icepick in the back) is identified as a "speciality of the KGB".
References to Trotsky are used to support this otherwise unsubstantiated claim. I suspect it shows the relative youth of the scriptwriter, who has obviously heard of Trotsky (who was killed with an icepick to the head) but seems totally unaware that an icepick into the back was the method of choice of the US gangster "murder for profit" outfit Murder Incorporated in the '30s and early '40s.
The second series, like the first, is relentlessly modern: dialogue that's hard to catch, a society that is unquestionably decadent and killers who are clearly psychotic and prone to multiple murders. Of its type it's not bad, if you like that sort of thing.
It's not fair really, but what can you do? A couple of weeks ago, during The Guardian's well-earned New Year break, the subject of Living Famously (ABC 7.30pm Saturdays) was Paul Robeson. Now we're back in operation the subject (this week) is Benny Hill.
Like all episodes of Living Famously, this one devotes as much time to Benny's personal life as to his career, but it still makes for a program that's interesting, surprising at times and also rather sad. Watch it and you'll see why.