The Guardian 14 June, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun June 18 — Sat June 24
This week on Jericho (ABC 8.30pm Sundays), Robert Lindsay as the rumpled 1950s London police detective becomes interested in track and field when British athletics star Johnny Swan (played by William Ash) defeats the Soviet champion, Vladimir Vukic, in the 5,000 metres at White City.
Days before his rematch with Vukic, Johnny and his bride Lizzie Way (Annabelle Wallis), a showgirl, are found dead in their hotel room. Johnny’s head has been caved in, leaving him unrecognisable, and Lizzie has been strangled.
The plot involves some crude Cold War style Russian sports "heavies", English good-time girls and homosexuals. The writer and director are better at handling the gays and the attitudes of the time towards homosexuals than they are with the caricatured Russians.
What country has the fastest growing HIV infection rate in the world? The answer is post-communist Russia. (Chalk up another achievement for capitalism!)
Russia: Sex, Needles And Roubles, screening in the Cutting Edge timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), examines the background to this critical situation which hinges on the combination of drug addiction and prostitution.
I found the note provided by SBS for this program very interesting: "For most Russians", they say, "the fall of Communism has come at a heavy price. Tight social controls have vanished, giving way to a pleasure-seeking economy, burgeoning prostitution and corruption.
"Unemployment is rife and access to healthcare and social services limited." Did you note that last comment: "access to healthcare and social services [is now] limited"?
And this in the former Soviet Union, the home of free health care, cradle to grave! The millions who built the USSR and who died to defend it must be turning in their graves.
AIDS first appeared in Russia in Gorbachev’s time. A former post-Soviet brothel owner is quoted in the program: "St Petersburg saw an upsurge in prostitution around the time of Perestroika. It became an acceptable thing to do."
The petty-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionaries who embraced Perestroika and glasnost, also embraced the "sexual revolution" (decades after it had been through the West). As in other countries, pornography was held up as somehow "revolutionary" and "liberating", a defying of "bourgeois conventions".
In Russia, although the program does not show it, the leaders of the Young Communist League, not wishing to miss out, took up the publishing of pornography. And, as the program does show, prostitution exploded.
Like those in other countries, many of Russia’s prostitutes are addicted to heroin and share needles with other addicts. Ostracised and stigmatised by society, their main refuge comes from harm reduction groups running needle exchange programs.
But many politicians oppose these programs. Moscow’s otherwise popular Mayor, Yuri Lushov, believes they lure young people into a life of addiction and has banned them from Moscow.
Other specialists implicitly welcome the HIV epidemic as a biological solution to a social problem. "Why should we give them cotton wool to absorb their drugs?" questions Dr Aleksey Mazus, Head of the Moscow Anti-AIDS Centre!
Many suspect a more sinister motive behind opposition to helping addicts. Currently, Russia’s annual health budget would only cover the cost of treatment for 500 AIDS patients. In 2007, there will be an estimated seven million.
"The distinction between those who should be treated and those who can be treated will create very serious problems", warns a government critic in the program. Sounds like an under statement, if you ask me.
This documentary by Chloë Mercier was an Official Selection for the Prix-Europa Television awards and the 1001 Documentary Festival in Istanbul in 2005.
The Snow Queen (ABC 4.55pm Wednesday) is a part-live, part-animated hour-long adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale. A British-Canadian co-production, it has a distinctly Scandinavian feel to it.
But it also has — most noticeably — an unfinished feel. In fact, the film looks like a sort of draft of an intended film or a preliminary rough cut to be shown to potential investors in the final film.
Many scenes appear to have been cut or glossed over while others are shown in full. An alternative explanation could be that this is a cut down version of a full-length feature or even of a series.
It is frequently very beautiful, but also frequently looks disjointed and abbridged.
This week’s episode of Silent Witness (ABC 8.30pm Fridays) begins with a drive-by shooting in which a queue of young people going into a club are shot with a machine gun — a weapon firing over 30 rounds a second!
A police forensics expert is called in to help and discovers that someone in the queue had fired back at the attackers — and that the unknown "defender" and the attackers had used guns that had been illegally made up by the same gunsmith.
At the same time, the discovery of another — badly decomposed — body in a warehouse leads Nikki (Emilia Fox) into a prickly investigation with a bored detective who doesn’t want to be bothered with the deaths of junkies.
Meanwhile Harry (Tom Ward) forms a relationship with a young boy who finds a gun and his part-time prostitute mother. The disparate threads all eventually come together, although there is no happy ending.
My only complaint about this episode is that Tyronne Lewis, playing local Jamaican gang leader T Boy Thomas, has such a thick accent he really needed subtitles.
Sugihara: Conspiracy Of Kindness (SBS 8.30pm Saturday) tells the story of Japan’s Consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who issued thousands of transit visas to refugees anxious to escape the Nazis.
He only stopped when Lithuania joined the USSR and all foreign embassies and consulates accredited to Lithuania had to close. Until that time, up to 6000 Sugihara-stamped passports had allowed hundreds of families to flee through Russia to safety in Japan.
Directed by Emmy Award winner Robert Kirk, Sugihara: Conspiracy Of Kindness includes interviews with Sugihara’s family, survivors he assisted and their descendants, and features home-movie footage, photos and papers from the time.
After the war, Sugihara was pressured to resign from the Japanese foreign ministry, something he blamed on his decision to grant the unauthorised visas.
Sugihara: Conspiracy Of Kindness won Best Documentary at the 2000 Hollywood Film Festival. It also won the prestigious 2000 International Documentary Association Pare Lorentz Award.