About TomsTVpicks

Most TV programs are crap, reflecting the fact that TV programming is designed primarily to keep advertisers happy or, in the case of the ABC, to reproduce the values of Australian nationalism. In this blog I try to sort out the wheat from the chaff. If you know of programs coming up that you think a left-wing audience would be interested in hearing about please contact me, Tom Bramble, at tombram@gmail.com. Please "follow" this blog by inserting your email in the box below to the right if you'd like to be sure of getting posts in your email inbox, and tell your friends about this blog (or "share" it on Facebook) if you think they'd like to read it too.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

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.


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