Television

The China business

Dan Nichol reviews the BBC’s China Week This was perhaps the BBC’s way of recompensing for not adequately covering what was one of 2004’s biggest stories — China’s explosive economic growth. The country will soon outstrip Britain and become the world’s fourth biggest economic power. Most of BBC’s China week focused on the exclusively “business” side of the story but a report on BBC2’s Newsnight showed the human side of what is happening to the country. The report showed Tianjin, China’s third largest city, undergoing massive redevelopment to ensure the city keeps pace with growth in the rest...

Where abuse is the norm

The way western governments internationally — the US and the UK in particular — flout the rule of law was well demonstrated in Channel 4’s series of programmes about the torture of terror suspects. Torture and human rights abuses do not just extend to terror suspects. The fourth programme in the series, screened after Solidarity goes to press, shows that abuses like those documented in Abu Ghraib are commonplace in the USA’s overcrowded and understaffed prisons. Prisoners are shackled and hooded “for their own protection”; pepper spray is used as an alternative to physical force, but in...

Twenty years too late

Mick Duncan reviews "Faith" , BBC1, 28 February The Tory Party complained about William Ivory’s Faith, claiming it painted Margaret Thatcher in a bad light. Ivory is a talented writer, and this feature length drama of love and betrayal, set in an anonymous Yorkshire town during the miners’ strike, certainly had its moments. But painting Thatcher in a bad light? It would take the dramatic talent of Shakespeare coupled with a god-given gift for abuse equivalent to that of Hunter S Thompson to achieve that. You can’t make the devil more evil than he already is. So it is with Thatcher. What this...

Global torture

Rosalind Robson reviews “The Dirty Business” , 1 March, Channel 4 Andrew Gilligan’s investigation was part of a series of Channel 4 films about the US’s organisation and sponsorship of torture around the world. Officially both the US (and the UK) condemn the use of torture and human rights abuses. But it is fair weather opposition. What would Gordon Brown have said if any reporter had bothered to ask him whether, on his recent visit to China, he had given the government an ear-bashing about their abuse of human rights? He might have replied like this: “Well, er, as mindful as I am about those...

Jihadis of the 1640s

Dan Nichols reviews “blood on our hands: the english civil war”, Channel 4 Channel Four’s programme on the English Revolution broke new ground in its portrayal of a nation at war with itself. It was based around letters from the period and featured actors playing the roles of those who had written the letters. The programme’s approach certainly had an impact. It brought home just how destructive the conflict was and how much people suffered. It also highlighted the role that “foreign fighters” from North America played in the conflict. A lot of Puritan settlers apparently returned to their...

Just say "yes"?

Cathy Nugent reviews “Cocaine”, Channel Four, and “If… drugs were legal”, 12 January, BBC2 In the Peruvian Andes, a young woman dances in a seedy night club. Little by little she is slipping towards becoming a sex worker. Her father is a coca farmer, but lately his precious leaves have been damaged by US-financed crop-sprayers. He can no longer afford to pay for his daughter’s education. She must find money where she can. The pink fungus spray that kills the coca crop also sometimes kills children. And damages the “alternative” crops, avocados and bananas, that the farmers have been told to...

Reactions to Racism

Dan Nichols reviews “Yasmine”, Channel 4 Channel Four’s drama, Yasmine, was an intelligent look at the tensions that exist among today’s British Muslims. The programme followed a young Asian Muslim woman from Yorkshire as she struggles to fit in to both the conservative world of her family and the very different world of her workplace. The drama was Ken Loach/“kitchen sink” in style, and written by Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy. He based his script on interviews he had done with residents of Bradford. The drama was a lot heavier than The Full Monty, but with a few light touches, such as when...

Challenging consensus on Islamophobia

Sacha Ismail reviews “Are Muslims hated?”, Channel 4, 8 January In the 1980s, writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik was a member of a peculiar left group called the Revolutionary Communist Party, which always, for reasons one could not trust, took up what they would have called “iconoclastic” views. Perhaps it should be no surprise how sharply the ideas he develops on racism, religion and the idea of “multiculturalism” are in conflict with the conventional wisdom of much of today’s left. But that does not necessarily mean he is wrong. From the official anti-racists of the Commission for Racial...

Jerry Springer Row: Defend Free Speech!

1.7 million people watched the BBC2 screening of the award-winning Jerry Springer, The Opera on Saturday 8 January. Prior to the broadcast, the BBC received 47,000 complaints from people organised by fundamentalist Christian groups who regard the musical as blasphemous. The Christian Voice Group has threatened to take out a private prosecution against the BBC for blasphemy. And apparently BBC chairman Michael Grade sought personal assurances from director general Mark Thompson that the show did not breach blasphemy laws. No doubt these organisations would have been happy to see the opera...

Shameful

Television over the Christmas period? Well, it was the usual rubbish. Lists of the top 100 Christmas repeats.… Gone are even the Only Fools and Horses type specials. Let alone the Morecambe and Wise classics. (Well, they aren’t gone, of course, because they are… repeated. But, I mean, new programmes of that quality are gone.) One bright spot, however, was the Christmas special of “Shameless”. I enjoyed the hilarious happenings that resulted when the Gallaghers’ estate was quarantined by the army after family friends Kev and Lip sold a stolen lorryload of poisoned meat around the area in the...

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