The Guardian 26 April, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun April 30 — Sat May 6
POPaganda: The Art And Crimes Of Ron English (ABC 2.00pm Sunday) looks at Ron English, a US artist/activist who paints satirical variations on corporate ads (a typical one shows a grossly overweight "supersized" Ronald McDonald and an anti "phat food" slogan).
He doesn’t alter existing billboards, like Buga-up used to do. He simply appropriates some company’s entire billboard and pastes his own painted-to-measure art-work over it.
Naturally, the advertising companies think he’s a criminal. Ordinary people admire his work (except for the god-fearing New Yorkers who took exception to his billboard urging viewers to "kill god" — they brought out their baseball bats and tried to bash up his team).
The two-part dramatised documentary Holy Warriors (ABC 7.30pm Sundays) compares the leaders of the two sides — Christendom and Islam — in the Twelfth Century Third Crusade.
For some comments on the contemporary relevance of this conflict see this week’s Culture & Life.
The two leaders were Salah al-Din (called Saladin by the English) and Richard the Lionheart, the English king who could barely speak English (he spoke French).
Written and Directed by Richard Bedser, Holy Warriors is allegedly based on the latest research from both Christian and Muslim sources and leading experts.
It portrays two men divided by religion, driven by honour and obsessed with fame and power.
Witches: Myth, Mystery and Truth, a three-part documentary series screening in the Lost Worlds timeslot (SBS 7.30pm Sundays), investigates the historical and mythological roots of people’s belief in witches and shows how primeval human fears of magic and evil — the unknown and the inexplicable — culminated in the fanatic persecution of supposed witches.
During the Thirty Years War in Germany in the late 17th Century, when chaos, famine and misery abounded, 60,000 people were burned at the stake for "witchcraft" and sorcery.
Both Catholics and Protestants persecuted supposed witches and sorcerers. The last witch to be burned in Europe perished in Switzerland in 1782.
In perverse confirmation of the ignorance, obscurantism and superstition at the heart of the belief in witches, the Nazis established a secret task force, headed by Heinrich Himmler, to research witches and try to prove that witches celebrated an ancient "Aryan" religion, which they wished to revive for their own purposes.
Alan Clark was a Minister during the Thatcher years in Britain. He was what the bourgeois media call "colourful" (although they usually spell it "colorful").
An arch conservative, he was ambitious, lazy, vain and not overly bright (although he was cunning and could be a good speaker when sober). He was also a philanderer, as notorious for his love affairs as he was for his gaffes.
A less than successful politician, Clark’s claim to fame rests on the fact that he kept — and subsequently published — a diary. The Alan Clark Diaries (ABC 8.30pm Sundays) reveal Thatcher’s Conservative Party government in all its tawdry shallowness, through the eyes of a sex-obsessed and self-obsessed mediocrity who really didn’t give a rat’s arse about any of it.
Written and directed by Jon Jones, the BBC series stars John Hurt as the bon viveur politician.
Malaria: Defeating The Curse, screening in the Science timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Sunday), reports on the fight to destroy a disease that is one of the biggest killers on the planet: malaria.
More than once thought eradicated, malaria keeps reviving. Today, 3,000 people, mainly children, are killed by it every day. But now science is fighting back with unprecedented drugs and vaccines.
Artemisinin, the most effective anti-malarial drug ever produced, was conceived by Chinese doctors using traditional Chinese science and medicine 30 years ago at the height of the Cold War.
Now laboratories across the world are desperately searching for an artificial, synthetic version of Artemisinin that can be produced in vast quantities at a fraction of the cost of the natural version, and this year trials of a promising new candidate began in Thailand.
And trials of an experimental vaccine in Mozambique last year showed promising results. If successful, the combination of a malaria vaccine and anti-malarial drugs could stamp out the disease altogether.
The new three-part series Vincent, The Full Story (ABC 9.30pm Sundays) was two years in the making, and includes footage filmed in nine countries. It is the first comprehensive biography of the artist Vincent van Gogh.
The series is presented by the art critic Waldemar Januszczak, who is nothing if not enthusiastic about his subject.
The first episode traces the artist’s childhood and exposes an emotionally disastrous three years spent in England as an art dealer and teacher, where Van Gogh first fell in love — first with a woman, and then with religion — only to be rejected by both.
The revelation for me was his concern for the poor, first in the slums of London and later in the coalfields of Belgium, where he actually became a Christian missionary, only to be sacked for identifying too closely with his flock.
On this week’s Time Team: Lopen And Dinnington (ABC 6.05pm Thursdays), a Somerset farmer’s daughter unexpectedly unveils a mosaic floor under her father’s fields. When Tony Robinson and the Time Team are called in to investigate they are gob-smacked to discover that they are digging up the tiled floors and foundations of one of the ten or so largest Roman houses in Britain, a huge structure built, rebuilt and enlarged over some three hundred years.
It is hard to see how they will ever be able to plough that field again.
Saving Andrew Mallard (ABC 8.30pm Thursday) confirms everything you ever feared about the morality, integrity and honesty of the police in Australia (specifically, in this case, Western Australia).
It is the true story of police suppressing evidence in a murder case, altering witness statements, and generally making sure that the bloke they’ve decided probably did it gets convicted for it, regardless of evidence, including their own forensic evidence, that he could not have done it.
Andrew Mallard was only sprung from jail after ten years’ hard work by a varied team of people who refused to give up, convinced that an innocent man had been locked up for life.
The documentary, The Brothers Of The Forest (SBS 8.30pm Thursday) gives a highly biased account of the "exploits" of two Estonian brothers, Ulo and Aivar Voitka, who in 1986, when Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union, stole a tractor and fled into the forest to avoid being called up for military service.
For the next 14 years they lived by stealing, their crimes becoming more violent as time passed. This program, and the post-Soviet Estonian media, tried to portray them as some sort of anti-Soviet "Robin Hoods", but they were hunted for their crimes by the post-Soviet authorities too.
It is surely no accident that the title of the program, The Brothers Of The Forest, is what the anti-Communist fascist terrorists in Estonia at the end of WW2 called themselves.