Mrs Peel, We're Needed

Nicky reminded me that I had forgotten another Charles' household Christmas classic - the 1965 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees.

By the time this episode aired on Christmas Day 1965, the playful nature of John Steed and Emma Peel had been established and the early season prickliness between the two characters - a hangover from the earlier seasons with straight-laced Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) - had completely evaporated.

This season marked Diana Rigg's first with the franchise and with her on-screen chemistry with Patrick Macnee and a deft touch to directing by Dennis Spooner, the show became a truly international hit with US audiences fascinated by this piece of television which was part drama, part comedy, part romance, part fantasy.

Enjoy Too Many Christmas Trees:

Symbiotic Redemption?

It's the story of redemption from the most unexpected of sources:

A dirty, disheveled Keith Peeler had been living on the streets for nearly a year when a crew of 20-somethings with cameras jumped out of a van and headed straight for him. Some of Peeler's homeless buddies wanted to run.

But the young people had an offer: $10 a day, plus close to minimum wage, to appear on what they were calling "Homeless Real World," an Internet spoof of MTV's reality show.

What was almost certainly conceived to be a vicious, unkind, exploitative piece of trash TV ended up being something quite different:

Four of the six cast members, including Peeler, have gotten off the streets with help from the producers.

After shooting was completed last spring, ManiaTV's filmmakers drove several cast members to detox centers, some more than once, and drove another to job interviews.

"It was time to come in from the cold," Peeler, 53, said recently. He and fellow cast member Johnny "Sgt. Stutters" Kibodeaux, 51, have been sober for almost nine months and are living at rehab centers, where they are working as kitchen managers.

Producer Darwyn Metzger said the filmmakers became attached to the homeless.

"Once you make that personal connection with them, you feel you have to go above and beyond," Metzger said. "I think we were all inspired by the fact they were very honest and had good hearts."

The kicker is in the story's last paragraph:

"I'm not proud of the fact I was drunk on the streets," Peeler said. "It's not who I really think I am, but I don't want to forget that's where I come from. I always have the option of going back there. I have to always be aware of that."

Read it all.

-- Nora

Those Who Can Do, Those Who Can't Watch Californication

The comments to Andrew Bolt's column piece about David Duchovny's new show, Californication has been interesting, amusing and dismaying all at once.

Interesting because it shows a societal shift away from what is considered to be 'appropriate'. Once talking about sex or explicit public displays of sex were taboo, not necessarily because people were prudish but rather there was broad agreement that certain things were private. Not for public consumption.

However context has been sacrificed in the drive for 'edgy', 'groundbreaking' and 'controversial' - all drugs to be taken in every increasing quantities for the jaded generation.

Amusing, because none will address their secret shame - if they're getting their jollies by watching a TV show - then they're not likely enjoying the real thing.

Amusing, because all of the supporters for the show try to deflect the nakedness of their own voyeuristic desires by repeating the mantra, 'if you don't like it, don't look'.

Well, where does that stop?

Let's not be outraged by crime - if you don't like it don't look.

Let's not blink if someone drops their drawers and defaecates in the street - if that sort of thing offends you, then don't look.

And that's where the dismay comes in.

That sort of reductive logic is nilistic is the extreme. Ironically it also results in a society which is the polar opposite of tolerant. If everyone's opinion is right, then no-one's is, which means there is no common ground to build social order on.

-- Nora

You Are Charged With Reporting A Crime

Earlier this year, a TV documentary called Undercover Mosque exposed Muslim preachers in the UK celebrating the death of a British soldier in Afghanistan and calling for the establishment of sharia law in Britain under which women would be hit if they didn't cover up and homosexuals would be 'thrown off the mountain' or crucified.

As a result of all this, people, including, I believe, local MPs, asked the police to investigate the preachers to see if prosecutions for crimes of racial hatred could be brought against them. C4 (the broadcasting TV station) itself did not ask for these investigations, but co-operated with police inquiries.

But then, on Wednesday, without any warning to Channel 4, the CPS and the West Midlands police issued their fatwa. Not only had they investigated, and decided, as they were entitled to do, that there were no charges to bring against people featured in the programme: they also announced that they had investigated the programme itself for stirring up racial hatred.

Again, they had decided not to press charges. But, said West Midlands police smugly, they had pursued the making of the programme "with as much rigour as the extremism portrayed within the documentary itself". They had concluded that comments had been "broadcast out of context" and so they and the CPS had complained to Ofcom (the UK television regulator).

London Telegraph reporter Charles Moore asks of the West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service:

Are they fit to protect us?

The answer is kind of obvious.

-- Nick

A Conceited Affair

Jealousy is such a curse isn't it?

The latest outrage filled episode of the reality TV series A Current Affair was heavily promoted as "Australia's Richest Religions - And How They're Targeting Your Kids".

But the real agenda was revealed in the "report" and confirmed on A Current Affair's own web site - "Hillsong Expose".

For those not in the know, Hillsong is what the Americans would describe as a "megachurch" based in Sydney, filled with that most terrifying demographic - young evangelical Christians.

Worse than that, they've done the unthinkable - filled stadiums with people - when everyone knows that churches are supposed to virtually empty on Sunday because we're enlightened folk who know the real 'truth' is in Sunday trading hours and hangover recovery time.

Not only that, they've also embraced 'teh interweb' and multimedia thingie to the point they do their own TV and music stuff - including more than 30 gold and platinum album sales worldwide.

John Lennon may have famously said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but on the strength of those sales numbers Hillsong appears to be making Jesus more popular than The Beatles.

Awful isn't it.

And that's just the beginning of shocks as the church leadership says quite openly that it needs money to carry on its work which includes bulkbilling medical centres in poor local communities, micro-enterprise development funding, counselling services for victims of sexual assault and drug/alcohol abuse.

And why not, research has proved time and again that regular church-goers are far more generous with their time and money than the irreligious.

A Current Affair thinks all of this is a bad thing - bad religious people: how dare they do good things in the community, have fun and earn a quid?

These nutters should be more like them. You know, like Ray Martin who earns $2million a year for... well, who knows what he does for the money or maybe like the Big Brother slappers who are willing to strip for a quid.

Just like all reality TV shows, A Current Affair can't do anything original. The story concept used footage ripped off from the little watched, taxpayer funded sheltered workshop known as Andrew Denton's Enough Rope in which the ABC breaks its own taboo of spruiking commercial product in order to interview a disaffected former Hillsong member.

Gee, no agenda to see here, is there?

-- Nora

TV's Snuff Porn

In the intro to the book of her 1990 documentary Bodywork, Australian Chris Pip recalled the words of social historian Michael Gorer* in 1955:

"Pornograph would appear to be a concomitant of prudery... whereas copulation has become more and more 'mentionable', particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more 'unmentionable' as a natural process."

The emphasis (probably added by Pip) in this quote from Gorer's essay The Pornograph of Death highlights a disturbing development just over half a century later as television shows led by CBS' CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) break one of the final taboos of the small screen.

Gorer was writing of natural death, that which comes from old age or, distasteful as it may seem to many in the early 21st century, disease, which is, after all, a natural process.

Pip observed:

I was in my mid thirties. I had never seen a dead body in my life. In other cultures and in other times contact with a corpse would be commonplace at my age. Had I been born a century earlier I would no doubt have borne six children, half would have died before the age of five and I would have dressed, wrapped and buried those bodies myself on the family property. As it was I had never even seen the body of a close relative.

But what she had seen had also been observed by many others:

At the same time violent deaths reported in the media, and shown 'live' on television news, have become commonplace on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the fantasy offered to the populace.

Seventeen years later, the fantasy is a full-blown orgy, played out with realistic prosthetics and sophisticated computer generated imagery on prime-time TV.

When Gorer incisively noted the pornographic nature with which death had been imbued in mid-20th century culture, a person depicted as being shot on a TV show might be shown grasping their white-shirted chest and slumping to the ground with not a hint of blood.

Today, we are treated by CSI and other shows to multiple replays from multiple angles of not only the moment of death but also the bullet's eye view, the passage of the projectile as it pierces clothing, skin, bone, muscle, organs. Then into the mortuary and the lab where, in graphic detail, we see autopsies in detail, learn to recognise the techniques of the post mortem examination and soon nod knowingly at phrases like 'medium velocity blood spatter'.

I've been considering the removal of the last taboo - the showing of corpses, gratuitous rather than glimpsed - in TV dramas for some months. In many ways, it's less the lingering on the freshly-deceased on the sidewalk that disturbs me (although we're lingering longer than we did and that does disturb) than the obscene fascination with the charnel house work of the mortuary technician, the Y-incisions and the laid-bare internal organs.

Someone, somewhere, years ago noted it somewhat ironic that in pornographic movies it was necessary to deny the usual reality of the sex act by withdrawing at the moment of ejaculation to demonstrate that the act was real. No doubt someone with access to miniaturised technology or CGI has attempted to overcome this but the fact is, for the vast majority, sex loses its allure once the observation of it is more than skin deep.

However, the new pornography of death is all internal, all the time, the point of view cutting rapidly from the orgasmic agony of the object's face to slow-mo replays of blades and bullets penetrating.

It's an oft-used excuse for porn that watching the sex act is life-affirming, it's natural; so what is watching death with the same degree of avidity? It would be natural if we were to be intrigued by the passing of a person after a complete life - after all, when we are able however briefly to stop denying that death awaits us too, it is the death we hope for - but a fascination with unnatural death is, well, unnatural, not to mention obscene.

Snuff movies are, quite rightly, regarded as amongst the worse of perversions yet shows like CSI are virtual snuff movies that top the ratings.

What will be their impact in years to come?

-- Nick

*Michael Gorer or Geoffrey Gorer? The author is identified as the former in the book of Pip's documentary Bodywork - Confessions of the Funeral Trade but as Geoffrey Gorer in this UCLA sourced essay.

The Best Selling Show

The last few weeks has helped retore my faith in British television production.

Nicky and I have become fans of Primeval and Life On Mars.

The first is a rollicking little sci-fi, the second is an intriguing psychological drama.

Highly recommended.

-- Nora

Eee, When I Were A Lad...

There's an obesity epidemic among kids because they eat too much junk food and watch too much TV, right?

Wrong:

"If you look at the decline in walking and cycling among children it is far more dramatic than any changes in TV watching trends. The average length of commute to school has doubled in the last 20 years. That is probably a function of educational policy."

The researchers also carried out a review of around 50 previous studies on the relationship between the amount of television watched by children and physical activity. "We found the association is close to zero," Prof Biddle said.

The researchers concluded lack of exercise rather than diet was to blame for the rising childhood obesity levels in Britain.

We'll drink to that. Here's a Big Fluffy Zombie.

Mix, drink, repeat...

-- Nick and Nora

But It's OK To Watch Big Brother, Kids

Multiple madness:

AN award-winning TV commercial showing a toddler driving a four-wheel-drive has been pulled off the air... "Many of the (80) complaints were from parents concerned that the ad would encourage copy-cat behaviour in young children and might lead to accidents." The board also found that the fact the toddlers were wearing seatbelts - instead of approved child restraints - also breached safety recommendations.

Yes, we must protect the cheeeeldren:

QUEENSLAND'S top doctor wants junk food to face similar advertising bans as cigarettes... chief health officer Jeannette Young said it was time for a crackdown on junk food ads. She won backing from state Liberal leader Bruce Flegg... "From a medical point of view, junk food is far more harmful than most people realise. As with smoking, there's got to be some hard decisions," Dr Flegg said. "Unfortunately, it will impact some businesses and so forth..."

But McDonalds are already hurting from all the toddlers who can't drive-through any more...

-- Nick