TV Programs Worth Watching
Sun August 18 — Sat August 24

The GDR documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann made two feature-
length films about Cambodia under Pol Pot: — Cambodia Year Zero and 
The Angkar. Intently political filmmakers, the East German unit 
found the fact that Pol Pot's genocide was carried out under the banner of 
the hammer and sickle "an affront to every Communist".

The GDR Communist filmmakers characterised the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot as a 
gross distortion of scientific socialism "of petty bourgeois origin" and in 
Cambodia Year Zero showed its historical and class origins.

Heynowski and Scheumann were among the very first foreigners to enter 
Cambodia hard on the heals of the victorious Vietnamese who defeated Pol 
Pot and saved the Cambodian people. Sadly, their two films are virtually 
unknown.

Their class analysis of the Khmer Rouge experience in Cambodia would 
probably have been helpful to the makers of the three documentaries that 
make up the series "Pol Pot And The Khmer Rouge (SBS 8.30pm Sundays).

This examination of Pol Pot's reign of terror relies on Western, 
essentially anti-Communist, "experts" like David Chandler, author of a 
biography of Pol Pot.

The first in the series, Power And Terror, follows a team of young 
Cambodians compiling evidence of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, aiming to 
bring about an international war crimes tribunal.

Power and Terror traces the beginnings of the Khmer Rouge in 1968 
and the way they were manipulated by Prince Sihanouk in his disputes with 
the US government through to their seizure of ultimate power and their 
campaign of mass liquidations and torture.

The ABC this week begins screening a new adaptation of John Galsworthy's 
trilogy of novels known as The Forsyte Saga (ABC 8.30pm Sundays). 
Like so many previous Granada and BBC period dramas, this Granada series 
concerns the upper (very upper) middle class, in this case in the last 
decades of the 19th century.

Galsworthy, who died in 1933 at the age of 66, wrote a relatively large 
number of plays, novels and stories, many of which (especially the plays) 
were broadly concerned with social and moral issues. He dealt with such 
themes as the effects of poverty, the constraints of convention and the 
cruelty of the justice system of his day.

Poverty — the fear of it or the threat of it — plays a part in The 
Forsyte Saga, as do of course the constraints of convention (and the 
consequences of flouting them). A "sequence" comprising three novels and 
two interludes, it is the sometimes convoluted story of three generations 
of the relatively well-to-do Forsyte family.

The first Forsyte novel, The Man of Property, was written in 1906. 
Galsworthy then wrote a number of other novels including Fraternity 
and The Dark Flower, and plays including Strife, about 
workers and management in a factory, and Justice, about a petty 
criminal who is destroyed by an uncaring and inhumane legal system.

He did not publish the second of the Forsyte novels, In Chancery, 
until 1920. However, the third, To Let, followed soon after in 1921.

Sumptuously mounted, the series has an impressive cast, featuring Amanda 
Root, Ioan Gruffudd, Damian Lewis, Rupert Graves, Corin Redgrave, Gina 
McKee and Gillian Kearney.

Personally, however, Galsworthy is not my cup of tea. He depicts the 
stultifying conventions and snobbery of his subjects and their time, not to 
mention their pursuit of wealth, with an unrelieved intensity that I find 
hard to take. As Hollywood producers were wont to say, there's not a lot of 
laughs in it.

As fly-on-the-wall documentaries go, Shanghai Vice (ABC 10.25pm 
Sundays) is a fascinating series. Shot by a British crew given unhampered 
access to the Shanghai police as they go about their duties, it is a warts 
and all picture of an often alien police and justice systenm at work.

The expectations of the chain-smoking police, the judges and the offenders 
are sometimes surprising and the series as a whole has been very 
interesting.

Earlier this year US energy giant Enron collapsed ignominiously and badly 
shook the confidence of the US business community. Now the hi-tech giant 
WorldCom has gone belly up in a collapse that makes Enron look like very 
small potatoes indeed.

With its financial markets fuelled by speculation instead of production, 
the US is very vulnerable to investor jitters. Meanwhile, with corporate 
collapses occurring on a weekly if not daily basis, many of the people who 
operate the capitalist system for the very rich are beginning to question 
just what is wrong with it.

Unfortunately, the accountants, investment advisers, consumer advocates and 
the like who are raising the question are looking for the answer in the 
wrong place, seeking to fix the blame on the innumerable (and very real) 
rorts that go on in the cosy world of big business.

As yet they are not prepared to acknowledge that the ills of capitalism 
today are inherent in the system — and are going to get worse.

So we have programs like Bigger Than Enron on The Cutting 
Edge (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) which examines how "the systems of control 
[have been] eroded by conflicts of interest among the watchdogs".

Jim Chanos, Manager of Ursus investment fund, told the PBS program: "Many 
of these so-called corporate watchdogs are paid by the corporations 
themselves. The corporations pay the auditors.

"The bond rating agencies have an agenda where they, too have consulting 
arrangements and are paid in many cases by the issuing corporations. 
Analysts are paid often on the basis of investment banking fees that their 
firms bring in for the companies that they are either recommending to buy 
or sell. So we have all kinds of conflicts of interest that revolve around 
who is paying who."

"If you go back and look over the last half dozen years, investors have 
lost probably close to a hundred billion dollars", says Lynn Turner, former 
chief accountant of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

True Stories: Fortress Australia: The Secret Bid For The Atomic Bomb 
(ABC 10.00pm Thursday)" delves into the hush-hush efforts of successive 
Australian governments to obtain or build our own nuclear arsenal.

Set against a backdrop of cold war paranoia and fear of Asian aggression, 
the film shows how Canberra aided both Britain and the United States in the 
hope of sharing their nuclear secrets.

Made by Film Australia, this groundbreaking film brings to light the secret 
role of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in the quest for nuclear 
weapons — in particular, the ill-fated Jervis Bay Nuclear Reactor Project, 
which could have enabled Australia to build as many as 30 nuclear weapons a 
year.

Great Military Blunders: Who's Sorry Now? (ABC 1.00pm Saturday) 
examines how racial prejudice (and one might add class prejudice) led the 
British and the French to badly underestimate the capabilities of their 
colonial subjects in Africa and Indochina fighting for their independence.