Update on Tom's TV picks 21 August

Just a quick note for those following this blog. I am currently (12 August to 9 September) on leave in the Northern Territory and have very intermittent access to the internet. Next TV Picks will be posted on my return to Brisbane probably on Sunday 11 September. Apologies for the interruption!

Tom's TV picks w/b 14 August

A week since I wrote my last TV picks and in the meantime the world seems to have blown up. First on Friday, the financial speculators who have enjoyed an enormous surge in their incomes in the past two years took time off from buying gold plated yachts and Mercedes limousines to sell off in bulk from the world's stock markets, driving indices down around the world in the biggest slump since 2008. And then on Saturday night the youth of Britain, particularly but not exclusively black youth, rose up in an insurrectionary wave of revolt which spread quickly from Tottenham to cities across the country and stretched from one night to the next. Condemned to a life of police harassment, joblessness and no future, these youth went out and took their revenge on the society that has condemned them to the scrap heap. Two apparently quite disconnected events, but actually both intimately connected, both the product of a capitalist system deep in crisis.

The media of course completely avoided seeing these developments as in any way linked and treated those who have destroyed whole economies as respectable pillars of society, those who have burned down a few shops as mindless criminals deserving nothing less than water cannon, rubber bullets and lengthy jail terms. From the shock jocks to the "serious" news on the BBC, Al Jazeera and ABC, the coverage of the British riots has been nothing less than scandalous, any pretence at "objective" journalism thrown to the wind. So god knows what DATELINE on SUNDAY night at 8.30pm on SBS1 will come up with. The title of the segment "ANARCHY IN THE UK" suggests that we should expect the worst!

Race is also a consistent theme of some of the better stuff on TV this week. On WEDNESDAY night at 10.20pm, ABC2 is screening SKIN DEEP: THE STORY OF SANDRA LAING. This is a remarkable documentary which tells the true story of Sandra Laing, a child born in South Africa in the 1950s to staunchly Nationalist Afrikaaner parents but who is, as racial classifications go, to all intents black. This is of course a huge embarassment to her dad who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to try to prove that she is in fact white. Sandra is sent to an all-white school where she is mercilessly taunted and abused and eventually thrown out. In her teens she forms a relationship with a young black man and is told by her father that she must choose between her boyfriend and her family. No Spencer Tracy woolly liberalism ("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner") here - no doubt it doesn't help that her beau is a vegetable peddler not a jet-setting Yale-qualified MD. Much to her credit, Sandra tells her dad to get stuffed and is promptly cut off. She then goes to live with her new husband in a black village. A tale of true courage but also immense cruelty as people are judged not by their character but the colour of their skin, to use Martin Luther King's turn of phrase.

And then on SATURDAY, we're back with Sidney Poitier for a second double billing on ABC2 to follow up on THE DEFIANT ONES and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? (showing on 13 August). This week it's IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (8.30pm) and TO SIR WITH LOVE (10.20pm), both shot in 1967. The first is a classic. It won five Oscars and, like The Defiant Ones, teams Poitier up with a racist who gradually softens. Unfortunately in this case, it's not two prisoners on the run, but two cops - Virgil Tibbs, Poitier's detective from the north, and the Rod Steiger character, a redneck Southern sheriff - who are at the centre of the story. It's a murder mystery but also a look at the deep racism of Mississippi in the 1960s. TO SIR WITH LOVE is altogether different. Sentimental and largely ignoring the issue of race, it features Poitier playing an engineer from Guyana who, unable get work in his profession, winds up teaching in a "dead-end" school in London's East End. As usual with these sort of inspirational stories of wonderful teachers who win over a group of tough kids, you are really expected to hope that the classroom experience will triumph over the crushing adversity that these young people face on the outside. The riots in Britain this past week, however, tell a rather different and more sober story.

Back to MONDAY, to finish off, SBS1 is showing SECRET OF THE GRAIN (2007) at 10.30pm. A film about a Tunisian-French shipyard worker in the south of France who is cast aside in his early 60s by his employer as "non-economic" and who turns in his enforced "retirement" to opening up a restaurant featuring North African food . Slimane quickly enlists his family members and friends in his new venture which is created in the upturned hull of a ship. A slow moving slice of life with quite a bit of improvisation that gives it a documentary feel at times. Something of a tragicomedy with desperation alongside moments of humour and optimism it's worth a look.

Tom's TV picks w/b 7 August

So DEADWOOD is heading towards its finale, the penultimate episode this MONDAY on ABC2 at 9.30pm. It says something about the quality of this series that, although many of its leading characters are so unpleasant, parasitical or otherwise highly objectionable, it is so damned involving and such unmissable TV. The town of Deadwood is divided between the "Good" Guys (very broadly defined!), ranging from the saintly (e.g. Doc Cochran and Trixie) to the scoundrels (e.g. Swearengen), and the Complete Bastards (e.g. Hearst, Woolcott and Tolliver). But none of them is perfect (well, perhaps with the exception of the Doc) and all of them are such well-drawn characters and so well acted that you follow them all with interest. One of my favourite characters is the utterly loathsome E.B. Farnum, the hotel-keeper, a reptilian figure, a toady to the rich and powerful, a tyrant to the weak - a creation worse in these regards even than Mr Collins, Jane Austen's vile country parson in Pride and Prejudice - another of my "so awful he's a pleasure to watch" crew. And Al Swearengen - an all-time great creation of TV played so well by Ian McShane. Hardly plausible that a brothel owner would speak like a character out of Shakespeare but what force he gives to his words!

Deadwood is not just an enjoyable tale of rivalry on the Western frontier but also a metaphor for the rise of monopoly capitalism. Deadwood in its buccaneering heyday of independent prospectors and brothel owners illustrates the notion that "anyone" can make it rich on the frontier. There's no bank, no laws, no government, so the small bourgeois in the town (Tolliver and Swearengen) get to make the rules. But threats keep emanating from the east in the form of Government (Yankton and Montana) and Big Capital (Hearst). Big Capital brooks no obstacle and is willing to use Pinkertons and other strongarm methods to get its way. So Hearst murders union organisers and squeezes out rival business operators in order to sew up the whole town - you can see from the outset that Alma Garrett's friendly neighbourhood bank is either going to have to get big or go under. The Sioux and other Native Americans are also virtually wiped out. The independent prospectors are bought out or forced off and replaced by wage labour under the command of Big Capital. Eventually, the takeover is complete and Big Capital (in the form of Hearst) moves on to conquer new territories on its way westwards towards the Pacific Ocean and the subjugation of the American continent.

Well, that turned out to be a bit of an essay, so less detail on what follows...

MONDAY night (SBS2 at 10.30pm) also features THE COLOUR OF PARADISE (1999), a beautiful and touching film about a blind young Iranian boy, Mohammed, who returns home from his school in Tehran to his village for a three month summer break to the joy of his grandmother and sisters but the chagrin of his dad who regards him as an embarassment and a potential obstacle to his pending marriage. Dad, Hashem, tries to palm him off to the village carpenter for an apprenticeship. But all Mohammed wants is the love of his father. Great camerawork, impressive acting and heart-rending material.

Another great movie on WEDNESDAY night (SBS1 at 10.05pm) - THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006) which tells the story of an East German intelligence (Stasi) operative who is sent to spy on a "dissident" playwright and who, through his growing disgust with his assignment, gradually "turns" on his masters. This film just gives some small inkling of the degree to which the East German government penetrated the lives of almost everyone and therefore some idea why the East Germans were so keen to throw off "socialism" (really state capitalism) in 1989.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against apartheid Israel is getting more and more coverage in the media as right wing pundits and politicians - from Andrew Bolt to Kevin Rudd - work themselves up into a lather throwing around accusations of anti-semitism. It was not so different in the early days of the campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa. Nowadays even the most right wing politicians say how much they admire Nelson Mandela. Forty years ago figures such as John Howard were arguing that sanctions against South Africa were a communist plot to bring the country under Soviet control. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT JOHANNESBURG? (THURSDAY, 1.30PM, SBS1) tells the story of the sporting boycott of South Africa from its earliest days and the shit that *they* had to put up with at that time.

Finally, a double bill on ABC2 on SATURDAY night. Both directed by Stanley Kramer, both featuring Sidney Poitier and both confronting the issue of racism in the United States. THE DEFIANT ONES (1958) at 8.30pm and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? (1967) at 10.05pm. Although the latter is by far the better known, the former, about two prisoners, one black (Poitier), one white (Tony Curtis), on the run from jail, is better in my opinion. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is just a bit too stage-y and just too white-bread - the characters are all squeaky clean, the Poitier character most of all. And while Poitier, who plays an upper middle class, Yale-qualified doctor, and his white girlfriend only have to win over her ever-so-liberal middle class parents in the latter film, in The Defiant Ones, the Poitier character is forced to challenge a tough-nut hardcore racist jailbird who in the end makes far more of a sacrifice for the black man than simply giving his daughter's hand in marriage.