Television

Defend the BBC!

Most of us are acquainted with the phrase: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Yet when the Government announce that they are going to scrap the licence fee there is a resounding lack of fuss. Because the licence fee is unfair right? It’s a flat tax that spreads the load evenly among an uneven populace. However, with the much-maligned licence fee we actually have something beautifully valuable: a stake in our broadcasting. Let’s be fair it is a small stake for a corporation that produces a dizzying array of output on a daily basis and can compete with much better funded and much less public...

80 Days and the US West

Sacha Ismail’s TV review of Around The World in 80 Days ( in Solidarity 620 ) motivated me to watch the rest of the series. Initially, judging by the first episode, hadn’t thought much of it. It does get better as the story develops and Fogg and his companions further circumnavigate the globe. The programmes make a good stab at adventure drama which can be enjoyed by both adults and children. I certainly don’t recall the updated political themes, particularly the anti racist stance, cropping up in the 1956 version starring David Niven, which I saw as a kid at The Astoria, Old Kent Road. I was...

Converting TV to the US model?

The Minister of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries, has proposed scrapping the BBC licence fee. She backtracked quickly, but maybe not for long. The BBC charter is up for renewal in 2027. Dorries talked demagogically about old age pensioners not longer being “carted off to jail” for not paying their TV licence (but in fact the government itself confirmed last January, no-one was in prison for non-payment). Even the strongest of the BBC’s supporters would agree that the Corporation needs to change to adapt to online streaming, pay-on demand, channels such as Sky, and the end of...

20,000 days: a history of life expectancy

Throughout history, life expectancy (LE) has been around 30 years, sometimes lower, e.g. with the adoption of agriculture, plague, or cramming the new industrial working class into slums (described in Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England ; he called their accelerated deaths “social murder”). Marx predicted increasing immiseration of the working class relative to the ruling class so it is doubtful whether he could have predicted what would actually happen to all classes, LE more than doubling in under 200 years, an average extra 20,000 days of life. A sharp change Though the rich...

A radical adventure

Sacha Ismail on Around the World in 80 Days (BBC1, all episodes on iPlayer) I read it a long time ago, but I remember finding Jules Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days distinctly underwhelming. Did I miss something? A new television adaptation, co-produced by French, Italian and German public broadcasters and currently showing on BBC1, shares the 1872 novel’s basic premise. A rich Englishman, Phileas Fogg, circumnavigates the world for a bet of £20,000 (over £2m in today’s money). The series is very enjoyable and politically surprising. As far as I can tell, the series’ creator Ashley...

The Dreyfus-deniers of the French far right

The Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894, is a cause célèbre that refuses to go away. The framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges split public opinion in France into pro and anti Dreyfusard camps. What gave the case added resonance and placed it high on the list of historic miscarriages of justice was the overwhelming stench of anti semitism surrounding the entire episode. France was recovering from the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) and the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Ultra-nationalists in particular were out for revanche (revenge) against Germany to win back the...

The counter-revolution has been televised

I have never been a fan of Halloween horror movies like Nightmare On Elm Street and would rather watch anything else when 31 October comes around. However, this year I sat through Four Hours at the Capitol , a documentary account of the 6 January assault on the United States Congress which provided far scarier viewing than anything Freddie Kruger come up with. The film graphically documents the attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government by storming the building holding its legislative branch. A misguided belief that such an event could never happen in the USA provides a partial...

Kino Eye: Where the power is

The difference between “power” and “elected office” (letter in Solidarity 600 ) is well illustrated by the 1982 TV drama A Very British Coup , based on a novel by former Labour MP Chris Mullin. Harry Perkins (Ray McNally), Labour MP for Sheffield Central and a former steelworker, leads Labour to a landslide victory. The new Prime Minister promises sweeping changes which includes nuclear disarmament and neutrality. The whole British establishment is in shock. Plots against Perkins are set in motion, including fake reports of looming financial disaster, press speculation about his state of...

Women's Fightback: Batman and “heroes don’t do that”

The internet is alive with debate on Batman’s sex life, specifically cunnilingus and the caped crusader. Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacher, co-creators of HBO Max’s adult animated series Harley Quinn , shared why a scene of Batman performing oral sex on Catwoman got removed. “It’s incredibly gratifying and free to be using characters that are considered villains because you just have so much more leeway,” they said. “A perfect example of that is in this third season of Harley [when] we had a moment where Batman was going down on Catwoman. And DC was like, ‘You can’t do that. You absolutely...

Spy stories from the fall of Stalinism

Deutschland ‘89 (currently available on All Four) is the last series in a trilogy following Martin Rauch through the 1980s. He is an East German border guard who has been coerced into becoming a spy for the HVA, the external wing of the Stasi. Each of the three series is concerned with a major crisis of the East German state: 1983 with NATO’s stationing of nuclear missiles in West Germany; 1986 with the desperate need for foreign currency that leads the GDR into supplying arms to the South African apartheid government and pimping its citizens as guinea pigs for West German Pharma companies to...

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