The Guardian 5 April, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun April 9 — Sat April 15
In 2004, an Australian team of paleoanthropologists discovered an 18,000-year-old, one-metre tall female skeleton in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Closer examination showed that her cranial sutures were stitched up and she had twin-rooted teeth, unlike modern human beings.
Further digging of her surroundings uncovered spear points scattered amongst the bones of pygmy elephants. More intriguingly, her brain was the size of a chimpanzee’s.
The team concluded that their find, whom they called a "Hobbit", was a hitherto unknown species of early human being. It was heralded as a scientific sensation.
It certainly aroused extraordinary professional jealousies and rivalries. Indonesia’s eminent paleoanthropologist, Professor Teuku Jacob, stunned the scientific world by taking the fossil without permission and putting it under lock and key in his own laboratory.
Jacob claims the Hobbit is neither a new species of human nor even a sub-species. He claims that Flores was once home to pygmies and the Hobbit’s descendants could still be alive.
Another group, led by Professor Ann Maclarnon, believes that the Hobbit was a modern day human being who suffered from microcephaly, which results in dwarfism of the body and reduced brain size. She claims these characteristics could easily be mistaken for primitive features.
To prove her theory she compares the Hobbit’s brain dimensions to a similar skull that she found in the Royal College of Surgeons.
The Mystery Of The Human Hobbit, screening in the Science timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Sunday), examines the dramatic events that have followed the discovery of the Hobbit.
In an attempt to find further evidence which will support their claim that the Hobbit is an unrecorded species of early human being, the Australian discovery team of Professor Mike Morwood and Peter Brown return to Flores where they discover the remains of nine other Hobbit individuals that also have twin rooted teeth.
Still faced with international scepticism, the Australians leave Flores with an intention of returning to start lengthy excavations that they hope will ultimately prove their claim beyond doubt. However they warn it could be a long time before they can confidently say who the Hobbit was.
Clever system, capitalism, isn’t it? It imposes economic blockades and restrictions on socialist countries so that their prosperity and standard of living suffers, and then institutes a massive propaganda campaign to tell the world what a low standard of living the socialist countries have.
It has always been thus. Those who live in socialist countries were and are subjected to non-stop propaganda to the effect that life is better elsewhere and that dissatisfied people should flee to these other places.
If people fall for this and go, it is held up as proof that the propaganda is in fact true. And, as a side benefit for capitalism, it disrupts the economy of the socialist country (a planned economy is vulnerable to economic sabotage).
If the people who leave at the promptings of professional propagandists are caught and returned, they then become another part of the propaganda, being portrayed as "innocent refugees" being conveyed to "concentration camps".
As in the past, illegal émigrés are helped in their "flight" by pastors from the more anti-communist American churches. In Seoul Train, screening in the Cutting Edge timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), we follow a group of 12 émigrés from the DPRK as they attempt to get to Mongolia.
The group is led by Chun Ki-won, a "pastor and businessman" (naturally), whom the program dubs "the Asian Schindler". It claims he has helped more than 400 North Koreans escape from China.
In the 1950s and subsequent decades, architecture in Europe and elsewhere fell under the sway of the "brutalist" fashion. Although frequently reminiscent of Nazi architecture, brutalism was not so named for any perceived "brutality".
These buildings were made of unadorned concrete and the term Brutalism actually comes from the French for raw concrete: berton brut. Concrete was the new wonder material of the time.
Planners, politicians and property developers liked concrete because it was quick and cheap. The architects they employed claimed to like it because of the way it could be used to create "sculptural, flowing shapes".
That may be OK for bridges, but for buildings in which people are going to live, work or find their entertainment, brutalism too often resulted in large, sterile edifices lacking human scale and devoid of those points of visual interest that break the monotony and provide discoveries for the eye.
The architects of brutalism brushed aside such "uninformed" criticism. They pointed to the marks left in the concrete by the timber form work into which it had been poured and boldly cried that that was more than adequate decoration.
Then, in 1984, British authorities decided to build an extension to the National Gallery, and selected a "modern", brutalist design to be abutted up to the left-hand side of the Gallery’s classic Victorian façade.
Prince Charles, a Trustee of the Gallery, informed a gathering of the Royal Institute of British Architects at which he was making a speech that the proposed extension was like a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
That put the fat well and truly into the fire. The BBC invited Charles to make a TV film on the subject of Britain’s architectural heritage and what was happening to it.
After Charles’ film was broadcast, the BBC’s Daytime Live program invited viewers to send in photos of buildings which they felt had ruined the towns that they lived in. Hundreds responded and the BBC decided to exhibit them.
The Building Centre refused to exhibit them. When the exhibition finally found a site (and, believe me, some of the buildings photographed had to be seen to be believed) the Building News called it a "smelly little show".
I have not seen Charles’ film but I do have A Vision of Britain, the book he wrote to accompany it. And it’s a splendid piece of work.
However, Tim Dyckhoff, the presenter of I Love Carbuncles (ABC 10.00pm Tuesday), would not agree. Tim, and his program, as the title suggests, think brutalism is just marvellous.
"It’s fun!", proclaims Tim of the interior of a building that looks like a prison crossed with a bomb-shelter. He sees the lines left in the concrete by the timber formwork and cries in ecstasy: "It makes you want to go up and touch it!"
Well yes, with a paintbrush — or perhaps a sledge-hammer.