The Guardian 17 May, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun May 21 — Sat 27 May
I was not favoured with a preview tape of the ABC’s new two-part miniseries Answered By Fire (ABC 8.30pm Sundays) so I cannot say what it’s like. I can tell you that it stars David Wenham and that it’s set in East Timor in 1999, at the time of the referendum on the country’s independence from Indonesia.
Mark Waldman (David Wenham) is an Australian policeman who volunteers for the United Nations mission in East Timor. At the UN base in Nunura, he meets Julie Fortin (Isabelle Blais), a Canadian policewoman on her first overseas mission, and Ismenio Soares (Alex Tilman), the young Timorese translator assigned to work with the unit.
Answered by Fire is the first drama co-production between ABC TV and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Written by Barbara Samuels and Katherine Thomson, it is directed by Jessica Hobbs.
Over the past five years, there has been a significant changeover among radical far-right extremists. Just as the majority of today’s fascists do not dress like Nazis, so the majority of racists no longer dress like the Ku Klux Klan.
Many don’t even dress as skinheads. In the era of globalisation and digital communication white supremacist movements have changed their tactics and style.
New ideologists are emerging all over Europe, North America and Russia.
Under the slogans "White Power" and "The New Racists", the new breed of white supremacists have created corporations, distribution companies, music clubs, magazines, publishing houses, internet sites. They have replaced the old symbols with new ones.
In a "post modernist" world, where nothing is "true" and everything is an "interpretation", neo-Nazi ideology seems to have found fertile ground for its propaganda. For too many young people, the past is virtual history where the real cannot be distinguished from the fake.
In White Terror, screening in the Cutting Edge slot (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), filmmaker Daniel Schweizer, director of acclaimed documentary Skinhead Attitude, investigates the most active extremist groups.
His program reveals the international links between them, from Stockholm to Dallas and Moscow.
It also shows how the spreading of racist propaganda via the internet and the growing number of racist books, pamphlets, magazines, CDs, audio and video tapes are reaching an ever expanding audience.
Miriam Makeba In Australia (ABC 10.00pm Tuesday) is a brief, straightforward interview with the great South African singer by ABC Radio National broadcaster, Ramona Koval.
The interview was recorded during Miriam Makeba’s recent visit to Australia as part of her Farewell Tour — performing in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The interview that is the substance of Miriam Makeba in Australia, is interspersed throughout with news footage and clips from movies and TV, to give a rather jumbled overview of her life and career.
Asked at one point by Ramona Koval about what it was like being "a black artist under apartheid", Makeba sharply corrects her: "We were never artists under apartheid, those of us that were black.
"We were vagrants. Artists were those who were performing classical music [for white South African audiences] and they were subsidised by the state. We were just vagrants."
Rapper Snoop Dogg is a high-profile advocate for liberalisation of marijuana laws. However, he is anything but a desirable advocate for legalising weed.
Snoop has the distinction of being a former pimp who still — prominently — advocates pimping as the acme of achievement for a cool dude. He has influenced the whole "gangsta rap" scene to the extent that gangsta rap has now evolved into "pimp rap" of which he claims to be "the king". Now there’s an achievement to be proud of.
Snoop also has the distinction of being an unpleasant, crude misogynist. All of his attitudes and "knowledge" about dope, life, women and everything seem to be second hand — someone has told him and he retells it as his own.
Capitalist show business has made this wretched individual a youth "icon". If you want to catch him "on tour" (though I can’t think why anyone would), watch Bigg Snoop Dogg’s Puff Puff Pass Tour (SBS 10.00pm Tuesday) in the Hot Docs slot.
The new half-hour satire Absolute Power (ABC 9.00pm Wednesdays) is so fast paced that one has difficulty catching the allusions and the plot machinations.
Directed by John Morton at a cracking pace, it stars Stephen Fry and John Bird (as Charles Prentiss and Martin McCabe), two unscrupulous scheming spin doctors who run the blue chip PR agency, Prentiss McCabe.
They will tell lies and invent situations to make anyone look good (if they have the money). For somewhat more money they will even dig people out of potentially career-destroying scandals, turning them into career high-points instead!
In the first episode, a tabloid tells them it has proof that one of their clients, a prominent TV historian, is a fraud who fakes his historical sources. Undeterred, Prentiss (Stephen Fry) offers the paper a deal: kill their story and he will provide them with a much juicier one showing the historian is a serial sexual exhibitionist.
The fraud story was true; the sexual exhibitionist story has to be manufactured. And is, making their client more well known than he has ever been.
Absolute Power has — or at least strives for — the feel and tempo of another media oriented show, Drop The Dead Donkey. Unfortunately, I found the new show hard to follow; too often I was saying "who is this fellow and what the deuce is he doing that for?".
I am not normally slow on the uptake but this show left me floundering. Less doddery viewers will presumably not have this trouble.
Rocket Man (ABC 7.30pm Saturdays) is about a group of former workmates who lost their jobs in the old carriage workshop when the steel mill closed. They now undertake a variety of soul-destroying occupations (picking faulty chocolates off the production line at Blossom’s Chocolate Factory for example).
One of their number is George Stevenson (played by Robson Green), a widowed father of two who is obsessed with building a rocket to fulfil his promise to send his wife’s ashes into space.
George’s project seems impossible, given his lack of resources and money, not to mention his struggle to keep his children out of trouble at school. But his former workmates discover a new sense of purpose, community and optimism as they are drawn into helping with his project.
It is a tribute to the effectiveness of the portrayals that you actually care about these people. Which is a good thing because the series frequently seems humourless and often teeters on the brink of being inconsequential.
Persevere with it, I think you’ll probably like it.