The Power of Four: Musings on The Bletchley Circle

As I think I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog I have been a long time devotee of Sunday's Masterpiece Theatre and Masterpiece Mystery, formerly known as Mystery, which once upon a time ran on PBS on Thursday nights. I watched Upstairs Downstairs (ITV, 1971-1975) when it was first broadcast nationally on PBS in the mid-1970s and have, save for a period in the 1980s and 1990s when I didn't have a television, watched PBS on Sunday quite regularly.

I have been heartened to see that the recent success Masterpiece has had with the ok if addictive Downton Abbey (ITV) and the excellent Sherlock (BBC, 2010-) has led the network to branch out into further British fictional programming by showing Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012-) before Masterpiece on Sunday and The Bletchley Circle (ITV, 2012-) after Masterpiece's Mr. Selfridge (ITV, 2013) recently. Of the superb Call the Midwife, the very good Mr. Selfridge, and The Bletchley Circle it has been Bletchley which has been my recent favourite among PBS's wonderful British Sunday night lineup.

There are a number of reasons why Bletchley has been my favourite though some of these reasons also apply equally to Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and to other shows like Foyle's War (ITV, 2002-), the most recent series of which will appear on Masterpiece Mystery this fall. I am a history nut and Bletchley nicely captures the ambiance and atmosphere of its time. Bletchley's historical costumes are magnificent. Bletchley is superbly and intelligently written. Bletchley is superbly filmed. I loved the circle motifs that ran throughout the show including in the show's music. Bletchley's actors are superb including Upstairs Downstairs alumnus Simon Williams who plays the head of Bletchley's psychological warfare unit who does take the circle seriously.

What, for me, made Bletchley particularly appealing beyond its fine writing, outstanding cinematography, and superb mise en scène, was its girl power, something which, as one reviewer of Call the Midwife, notes, can also be said of Call the Midwife, "that", as she writes, "mythical unicorn of a show, the one that has a mainly female cast, with diverse characters, women who aren’t defined by their relationships with men, and a high quality of production". Bletchley's circle of women are four, Susan (Anna Maxwell Martin), Millie (Rachael Stirling, Diana Riggs's daughter), Lucy (Sophie Rundle), and Jeanall (Julie Graham), all of whom served in secret at the famed Bletchley Park deciphering World War II German secret messages. Now that the war is over and Britain has returned to domestic bliss, for some, and domestic hell for others, a serial killer has stirred the intellectual passions of our Bletchley circle from, in two cases, their not so domestic bliss, in another, a monastic like library retreat, and, in still another, a life on the bohemian margins of polite society, to life, in order to track him down using their skills of doing puzzles, mapping, memorisation, and leadership. Along the way they encounter husbands who don't understand them, husbands who abuse them, male employers who want to manipulate them, men who don't take them seriously or only partly seriously, and a serial killer who is as intelligent as they are.

There is so much to love about The Bletchley Circle. I loved that the women are nerds but are not the stereotyped and caricatured nerds of so many American television shows these days including that dreadful mediocrity The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007), a show the innovative and smart nerd sitcom Spaced (Channel 4, 1999-2001) is vastly superior to. I loved the nicely built up roller coaster ride to the end. When I saw the first episode on PBS I couldn't wait for the next so went directly to YouTube and watched the remaining two ITV episodes. I loved the portrayal of the research the circle did and their skills at doing research, a positive portrayal of the power of research and analysis that reminded me so much of the positive portrayal of research and nerdy research skills in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003), a show I much loved for many of the same reasons I loved The Bletchley Circle. But most of all, I think I loved the feminist girl power aspect of the Bletchley circle, the girl power of four intellectually powerful and deeply humane women working together who would not let anything stand in their way of stopping a serial killer from murdering woman after woman and setting up patsies to take the fall, patsies the police were sure were the murderers despite the protestations of Susan. Finally, I love that Bletchley has been commissioned for a second series by ITV.

And now for something slightly different, I have been trying to ascertain whether the PBS DVD release of The Bletchley Circle is the original UK edition or the PBS broadcast version. I want an answer to this question because I have heard that PBS may have made a few cuts to the original British version because of the supposedly "sordid" nature of a few of the scenes. American over the air television even at the 10 pm hour Sunday slot still has to operate within certain puritanical bounds in the 21st century. I say may have cuts because though I watched both the ITV original and the PBS broadcast versions I didn't recall the ITV version well enough to compare and contrast the two. I wrote PBS but while they answered my initial inquiry, as they did when I inquired about archival materials they might have on a BBC show Masterpiece Theatre broadcast in the 1970's, the superb Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), a show about the history of the suffragist movement in the UK, and they promised aid, they never wrote back. So I still have no answer to my question. This question matters to me because it will determine whether I buy the Acorn UK The Bletchley Circle or the PBS release. I have, you see, an all region DVD player as should every cinephile worth his or her filmhead salt should.

Thinking About The Carrie Diaries

I watched the first episode of The Carrie Diaries on Monday. I, who usually avoid the CW like the plague, actually enjoyed The Carrie Diaries and I found some of it--Carrie and Mouse commiserating about the crap men do, for example--very Sex and the City. And while I wasn't blown away by The Carrie Diaries I did enjoy it and as Pauline Kael reminded us long ago, and Roland Barthes reminded us again later, watching film and television is fundamentally all about passion in some way, shape, or form.

I am not alone in my enjoyment of The Carrie Diaries, Metacritic, the film and television review website which summarises and brings together critical reviews of TV shows and films, shows 11 favourable reviews for the series. A few of these have compared The Carrie Diaries to My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks. Others, positive, middling, and negative, have compared The Carrie Diaries to what Buffy Summers calls the John Hughes teen oeuvre. Still others have run colder and cold about The Carrie Diaries. According to the summary at Metacritic 8 critics have had a mixed response to the series while 4 have reacted negatively to it. One reviewer who gives The Carrie Diaries a big thumbs down, Matt Zoller Seitz of Vulture, says it dishonours its source, Sex and the City and that its characters are bland. Another, Patti Greco, also of Vulture, accuses The Carrie Diaries of violating Sex and the City continuity.

As I read these reviews, particularly the negative reviews, I kept thinking about what most of the reviewers didn't do and what they really should have done. They needed to compare The Carrie Diaries television show with its actual source, the teen Carrie books written by Candace Bushnell--The Carrie Diaries (2010) and Summer in the City (2011)--the same writer who wrote Sex and the City, the book on which the HBO book was based. I haven't read the Bushnell's teen Carrie series books but a quick glance at a website which summarises the Carrie series reveals that the television series is following the books pretty closely at this point. When the book and the television show begin Carrie's mom has recently died. In the book and the television show Carrie has a younger sister named and Dorrit is jealous of Carrie's relationship with their now dead mother. In the book and the TV show Dorrit steals stuff from Carrie and her youngest sister Missy who is missing from the television show. The Freema Agyeman (she who was one of the Doctor's companions) character, Larissa Loughlin, seems to be absent from the book. In the book and the television show Carrie's friends have sex with their boyfriends before she does making her wonder if she is the only virgin in Carrie Diaries land. The books, published by Harper Teen, are pitched to a teen audience. So it should be no surprise that the television series is, as most of the shows on the CW are, as well. The moral of the story: if you want to blame someone for Daddy, Dorrit, or the The Carrie Diaries blame executive producer and author Candace Bushnell.

One last thing before I go, the Guardian's Emma Keller claimed that The Carrie Diaries New York City bore no relationship to the real New York City while Bagelandlox, who contributed a post under Keller's "review", noted pointedly that Carrie's Manhattan, was not the real down and dirty and crime ridden Manhattan of the 1980s. Of course, Carrie's Manhattan is not the real Manhattan of the 1980s. The Manhattan of The Carrie Diaries, like the Manhattan of grown up Carrie in Sex and the City, is a fairy tale Manhattan. Needless to say Carrie is not the first nor will she be the last to romanticise The City.

Capsule Television Reviews: The Education of Michelle Rhee

I watched the PBS Frontline documentary on Michelle Rhee on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon. As is almost always the case Frontline's "The Education of Michelle Rhee" was, as is typical of PBS programmes, enlightening, educational, and thought provoking.

I had heard the name Michelle Rhee before, largely, I suspect because of NPR coverage of the controversies swirling around her during her three year tenure as the chancellor of the Washington, DC Public School System from 2007 to 2010. I really didn't know much about her and the reforms she proposed and initiated in the DC schools, however. Thanks to the wonderful "The Education of Michelle Rhee" I now know something about the educational reform ideology of Michelle Rhee.

The Ann Arbor born and Cornell and Harvard educated, in Government and Public Policy, Rhee, as she tells us during the "The Education of Michelle Rhee", is a Korean who, when she was appointed by the newly elected mayor of Washington DC Adrian Fenty to run the DC school system, had never run a school system before. Rhee did have teaching and educational reform experience, however. She taught for three years through the non-profit Teach in America programme, an organisation she learned about while watching PBS, in what she describes in "The Education of Michelle Rhee", as one on the toughest elementary schools in Baltimore. After a successful three year teaching stint Rhee founded the New Teacher Project in Philadelphia in 1997 to train professionals to teach in urban schools primarily in New York, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia. It was Rhee's experience as head of the New Teacher Project that led the DC school system to ask her to redesign its hiring and recruitment process. From there it was but a short jump to the chancellorship of the Washington DC Public School system.

Chancellor Rhee granted Frontline educational reporter John Merrow extensive access to her and to her attempts to change Washington's schools during her tenure as chancellor, something that is hard not to read, at least in part, as an act of self-promotion and publicity seeking akin to her appearance on the cover of Time Magazine with broom in hand. In "The Education of Michelle Rhee" we see Rhee talk to faculty and administration. We see Rhee walk through Washington's schools. We see Rhee interact with students. We see Rhee initiate a test to measure teacher performance based on student performance on the DC CAS, Comprehensive Assessment System. We see Rhee take on the teacher unions and the tenure system. We see Rhee take on parents. We see Rhee grease the political wheels in order to acquire almost absolute authority over the DC school system including the right to unilaterally hire and fire. We see Rhee close schools whose enrollment is too small. We see Rhee do many of the things some educational reformers, particularly on the American political right and in corporate board rooms, had been urging schools and politicians to do for years. We even get to see Rhee fire a principal whose face has been technologically ghosted just like one of those perp pervs on one of those stings of child and teen predators we used to see regularly on NBC's Dateline. When asked by Merrow if she felt "compassion" for the man who she just terminated Rhee said "no" but rather she felt good because she had just let someone go who wasn't doing his job.

At first, as Merrow and "The Education of Michelle Rhee" tells us, Rhee's reforms seemed to work. Test scores and graduation rates in one "the worst school system in America" rose. Rhee's reforms and her treatment of employees of the DC Public School System and parents made her a number of enemies, however, particularly among DC's teachers, teacher unions, administrators, parents, and politicians. Eventually Rhee's enemies banded together and after the defeat of Fenty by Vincent Gray, a Washington City Councilman who initially supported Rhee's reforms but then turned against our White Knight, at the polls, Rhee resigned as chancellor of DC's schools. Rhee went on to found StudentsFirst in 2010, an organisation that lobbies for educational reforms Rhee favours, drafts educational reform legislation consistent with Rhee's reform proposals, and backs political candidates that share Rhee's reform perspective.

If the story ended here it would be a tale of a White Knight who rode into town to bring much needed change and reform but who was stymied in doing so by entrenched bureaucratic interests looking out for their own petty interests and by parents who just didn't get it. But the story doesn't end there. As "The Education of Michelle Rhee" goes on to tell us, those vaunted test and graduation rate achievements during Rhee's reign--increased elementary and secondary school standardized test pass rates in reading and math and increased system-wide high school graduation rates--are not necessarily what they at first seem. The US Department of Education Inspector General and a USA Today study found high rates of erasures of wrong answers and their replacement with right answers on the DC CAS at one "model" school, something the USA Today reporter who wrote the story calls the statistical equivalent of winning the lottery. A former employee of the school system, Adell Cothorne, claims she witnessed teachers changing wrong answers to right ones one evening after school-- remember student achievement on the tests is what determines whether teachers and principals will be kept on--and that once she changed the locks on the storage units in which tests were stored test scores went down. A private company, Caveon Test Security, was hired to look at the issue of erasures and it along with an investigation by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education headed by a Bush appointee could find no evidence that cheating went on in DC's schools. Both of those investigations, as "The Education of Michelle Rhee" notes, however, were limited. Rhee's success in DC, in other words, may not be the success she and others have touted.

While there is much to admire about Rhee--her commitment to improving education and her commitment to improving student achievement, for instance, a commitment her biographer Richard Whitmore calls zealotry in the documentary, a zealotry that I think borders on self righteous messianism--her approach to educational reform is not beyond criticism. First and foremost, Rhee seems to place most of the blame for student underachievement on tests on teachers. She does this in part, I think, because she tends to do what we humans often do, she sees her ability to improve the grades of her troubled Baltimore students in those three years that she was a model teacher, as something that every teacher has the potential ability to do if only those teachers would be more like her and do more like her. Rhee the fetishiser. The problems with this perspective are several. First, yes there may be some bad teachers out there. Yes many of these bad teachers may be bad because they have burned out out there. The reasons for teacher burnout, however, may be less that they are bad teachers than that they have found out after years of teaching that the interest of some students in a liberal arts education is limited if not non-existent. Some teachers may feel, in other words, that they are banging their heads against a brass wall of student disinterest. Second, it is simply easier for Rhee to blame teachers for student failure than to blame the students themselves or their parents because god forbid that we wreck the self-esteem of little Dick and Jane, god forbid that we offend the parents whose political support we may need, and god forbid that we take a critical look at a school system that mandates a one size fits all educational model. Third, there is the issue of Rhee's success itself. As Frontline reminds us Rhee or Rhee's principal, the person Rhee blames for the what turns out to be exaggerated claims that her students at Baltimore’s Harlem Park Elementary moved from the 13th to 90th percentile on standardized tests over the two-year period while she was a teacher in Baltimore, and one of the Bee Eater's--a name Rhee acquired after she reportedly killed and ate a bee in her Baltimore classroom--own students said in an interview with Frontline that she was one of the few who really took learning to heart during her tenure in Rhee's class.

I give Frontline an A+ for "The Education of Michelle Rhee". I give Rhee an A for effort, a D for her educational reform philosophy, and a D- for her failure to really take seriously the broader contexts in which students and schools are embedded, things like TV, music, computers, mp3 players, cultural capital, class, status, poverty rates. I give her a F for not recognising the role parents play in schools and student education, don't forget that many American parents believe evolution and global warming are myths and that the creation myths of the Bible are true--45% in a recent poll said they believe in creationism--and that many of these same parents while proclaiming the divinity of the American Constitution out of one side of their mouth try to undermine the constitutional separation of religion and state out of the other. I give her a F for thinking that education in all its complexity can be measured solely by a test that teachers spend, unfortunately for real education, most of their time teaching for because their livelihoods depend on it. All of these play important roles in student motivation just as much if not more than teachers do. In the end it is hard to escape the conclusion that Rhee herself is part of the problem with education in the United States because she doesn't recognise that the very reforms she is pushing, particularly the notion that you can measure educational achievement or the lack thereof via a test, is itself undermining the very thing it presumably hopes to save, true liberal arts education. The Michelle Rhee School of Educational Administration, after all, is the educational version of Taylorism. Taylorism, which is all about numbers and humans as mental automatons, and its simple minded postivist understanding of the social sciences, humanities, and arts, kills any semblance of critical thinking. Welcome to Rhee's brave new world.

Suggestions for Further Reading:
Diane Ravitch's Blog: A Site to Discuss Better Education for All
Taking Note: Thoughts on Education from John Merrow

Capsule Television Reviews: The Abolitionists

I am sure that many of you know by now that I am a PBS junkie and a documentary junkie. I watch a lot of PBS and I watch a lot of documentaries particularly on PBS.

Last evening I watched part one of the three part documentary The Abolitionists which made its debut on PBS last night. The Abolitionists tells the tale of the American abolitionist movement that, while it has precedents from the late eighteenth century, really became a force in American cultural, intellectual, and political life between the 1820s and the Civil War. The Abolitionists tells its tale of those who wanted an immediate end to slavery in America by focusing on five of its most prominent "members", Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké. All five were, to use a metaphor, the large planets around which the anti-slavery movement, immediate and gradualist, revolved, and as such a focus on each of them allows the documentary to tell the broader tale of the immediate and the gradualist anti-slavery movements. The Abolitionists recounts it epic saga through the tried and sometimes true methods the history documentary--talking academic heads, photographs, newspapers, and, in The Abolitionists case, re-enactments.

Truth be told I am not much of a re-enactment sort of guy. But there is, as there was in PBS's wonderful six part God in America series from 2010, a lot to like in the re-enactments in The Abolitionists. There's so much to like, in fact, that, as I was watching, I couldn't help but think about how wonderful it would be if the makers of The Abolitionists had made a Downton Abbey style television epic called The Grimkes of Charleston. I can see it in my mind's eye now, The Grimkes of Charleston, an epic tale of love, honour, morality, immorality, human meanness, human compassion, and social and cultural change complete with action, adventure, beautiful stately homes, strong willed mothers, strong willed daughters, electra complexes, driven sons, wicked slave holders, horrid slave quarters, gorgeous costumes upstairs, romance, disappointment, back stabbing, seeking after power, edge of your seat escapes, and tragedy, a tragedy of such dimensions it has impacted the United States ever since. Move over Downton Abbey.

There was much to like about part one of The Abolitionists beyond its re-enactments and my dreams of it becoming an American dramatic and soapy television show. It was entertaining. It was informative. It was nice to see the filmmakers pay attention to the religious motivations of many of our five abolitionists all of whom, in some, way, shape, or form, were impacted by Quaker ideology and Quaker practise--the Quakers, after all, were the first group to outlaw slave holding among its members. The Abolitionists is well worth watching as are most of the documentaries on PBS whether they are part of the American Experience, as was the case here, Frontline, Independent Lens, Global Voices, POV, or America Reframed series. I can't wait to see more of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown in the upcoming episodes. Highly recommended.

Capsule Film Reviews: Borat and When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat

2006’s Borat: Cultural Learings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, director, Larry David)—note that USSRish subtitle—is the most recent in a long line of mockumentaries. The mockumentary, the faux documentary, goes back at least to the noted marxist and surrealist auteur Luis Bunuel. Bunuel reacted to the documentary realism of famed documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922, Moana, 1926, Man of Aran, 1934, Louisiana Story, 1948, and Tabu, 1931, co-directed with German auteur F.W. Murnau)—a documentary realism that was actually part fiction since Flaherty like Edward Curtis before him staged scenes in his documentaries and added fictional narrative elements to them by satirising and parodying the adventurer/ethnographic film subgenre to humourous effect in his documentary anti-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pain (1933). In Las Hurdes Bunuel takes his camera into the poverty ridden Les Hurdes region of Spain and forces viewers to confront the ethnocentric arrogance and single voice paternalism he saw as inherent in the cinematic form including the cinematic form of documentaries. Bunuel’s deconstruction of ethnographic imperialism, by the way, would prove prophetic. Forty years after Les Hurdes anthropologists themselves would go all reflexive and ask whether their ethnographic discourse itself, because it was written in the objective voice of a Western ethnographer by a Western ethnographer, was itself imperialist.

Eventually others would follow in the parodic and satricial faux documentary footsteps of Bunuel. In 1967 director Jim McBride gave us David Holtzman's Diary, a mock documentary about several days in the life of a documentary filmmaker. In 1969 director Woody Allen's gave us his mockumentary about a small time criminal and his run of bad luck, Take the Money and Run (ABC). In 1978 Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, who did some hilarious faux mockumentaries for the Monty Python sketch show on the BBC including 1969's hilarious Hell's Grannies, gave us a mockumentary about a Beatles like group called the Rutles, All You Need is Cash. In 1984 Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner gave us, This is Spinal Tap (MGM), a mockumentary that follows a legendary but past their prime hard rock band on its hilarious, pretentious, pathetic, and perhaps final gig across America. One of the writers of This is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, went on to make a number of highly regarded improvisatory mockumentaries with a stock company of actors including Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003), which poked satiric and parodic fun at the theatre, dog shows, and folk music respectively.

Mockumentaries have not, in the post This is Spinal Tap era, been a monopoly of Christopher Guest and his mock doc stock company. Noted New Zealand directors Peter Jackson and Costa Botes made the mockumentary Forgotten Silver which satirized, sometimes savagely, Kiwi nationalism and gullibility in its tale of a forgotten New Zealand filmmaker who invented the tracking shot, colour film, and who shot film of the first man to fly, a New Zealander, the last seemingly corroborating something many Kiwis had long believed, that a New Zealander was the first man to fly. Forgotten Silver was taken by many Kiwis as the gospel truth when it was shown on TV NZ 1 in 1995. It was aided and abetted in this by one of New Zealand’s leading television and radio publications, The Listener, which played along with the joke by publishing an article in its pages which suggested that New Zealanders watch this wonderful documentary about an unknown Kiwi hero. Not every Kiwi found the joke humourous, however, as the film hit a tender spot in New Zealand culture, its ethnocentric nationalism, angering many in the process as the angry letters TV New Zealand received from disappointed viewers who wanted to believe the old myth that New Zealand was first in flight show. Many viewers wanted to believe in the faux filmmaker discovered in Forgotten Silver because they wanted to believe that his achievements were New Zealand’s achievements.

Satire and parody wasn’t only the province of mockumentaries. The “documentaries”, if you can call them that, of the American Michael Moore and the Briton Louis Theroux, who works in the documentary unit of the BBC, continued the Bunuelian tradition of satire through “documentary”. Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Sicko (2007), and his television shows TV Nation (NBC/BBC2, 1994-1995) and The Awful Truth (Channel 4/Bravo, 1999-2000) “documented” and simultaneously satirised and parodied everything from corporate tyranny and criminality, the American obsession with guns, the Bush presidency, American health care, American homophobia, and beyond. Theroux, who worked with Moore on The Awful Truth, in episodes of his Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends (BBC, 1998-2000) and in his BBC2 specials like The Most Hated Family in America>, “documented”, satirised, and self-righteously parodied everything from American right wing religion, American racists, American wrestling culture, American UFO nuts, and Westerners who went to Thailand looking for young brides. Theroux, by the way, in his When Louis Met… (BBC2, 2000-2002) series, met Jimmy, Jimmy Savile, and asked him about rumours of his penchant for young girls.

The latest in this long line of mockumentary satirists and parodists is the Brit Sacha Baron Cohen. The latest in a long line of Cambridge educated and Jewish actor-comedians, Cohen uses his characters of Borat, Brüno, Ali G, and the dictator Admiral General Aladeen to document, mock, and shock audiences of The 11 O’Clock Show (Channel 4, 1998-2000), Da Ali G Show (Channel 4, 2000, HBO, 2003-2006), and more recently on the big screen in Borat (20th Century Fox, 2006), Brüno (Universal, 2009), and The Dictator (Paramount, 2012). Like many of his mockumentary forebears Cohen uses his sketches to mock the sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and nationalist prejudices of those they chose to document. Whether those Cohen wants to mock share the prejudices of Borat, whether they are laughing at Borat and his political incorrectness, whether they are being patronising, or whether they are trying to maintain good manners, however, is a question worth asking and exploring.

Borat, which I watched recently, tells the tale of a Kazakh documentary filmmaker and his producer (Ken Davitan) who come to the United States to learn from America, "the greatest nation in the world", and take the lessons learned back to Kazakhstan. While in America, however, Borat falls in love with someone he sees while watching TV in his hotel room, C.J, Pamela Anderson, one of the faux breasted Baywatch babes on the American television show Baywatch (1989-1990, syndicated, 1991-2001). So its off to California to find her and marry her in Kazakh style—Borat as road movie mockumentary. Along the way Borat meets a driving instructor, interviews American politicians, goes to a rodeo where he enraptures than offends the audience in a speech that sounds a bit like Mark Twain's "War Prayer", is interviewed on a local news show, trains in the fine art of etiquette, stays at a bed and breakfast run by a Jewish couple, visits an antique shop run by a couple whose shop reflects their devotion to their idea of the Confederacy, and catches a lift from a group of University of South Carolina frat brothers. For those watching closely, by the way, it is clear that the journey as represented in the film is geographically and chronologically out of order.

Borat is funny, sometimes very funny, because it shows, a la Theroux, just how sexist, racist, homophobic, and nationalist, and bizarre some Americans are. But it also shows, as Christopher Hitchens noted in an article in Slate, just how patient many Americans are with Borat despite his limited English and his political incorrectness, none more so than the supermarket clerk who tells Borat when he asks again and again what this—cheese, butter, margarine and horseradish—what this is in a scene cut from the final film but which can be found as an extra on the DVD of Borat. One presumes that this scene was removed because it shows just how patient the supermarket clerk was in the face of Borat’s interminable questions about what each packet of cheese, butter, and margarine and didn't have the shock value of the other sketches. What patient supermarket clerk says about the American customer is always right retail mantra and the consumerisation of the US and the West, by the way, I find terrifying.

Some were apparently taken in by Cohen’s masquerade and weren’t, in retrospect, happy about it. Cohen was sued by a driving instructor from Baltimore that he went to in order to learn how to drive for misrepresentation. He was sued by two of the drunken, sex obsessed, and misogynous University of South Carolina frat boys he met on the road for defamation of character, a rather absurd charge since they clearly defamed themselves thanks to booze more than Borat. These controversies almost certainly added to Borat's box office receipts as controversy, free publicity, almost always does for a film.

Not everyone was apparently taken in by Borat. Pamela Sue Anderson apparently knew what she was getting in for and it may have cost her her marriage to the annoying Kid Rock. Nor did everyone find Borat’s joke humourous in the first place. Many in Kazakhstan found the depiction of their nation as a backward country of horses, horse drawn cars, prostitutes, abortionists, raging wives, and ethnocentric nationalist anthems—it touched nationalist nerves after all—offensive.

The village that masqueraded as Borat’s Kazakh hometown, Glod, Dâmboviţa, Romania, was not happy either. They sued Twentieth Century Fox and Cohen for misrepresenting the village as ignorant, incestuous, and a home to prostitutes and abortionists. Filmmaker Mercedes Stalenhoef tells this tale in her 2008 documentary When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat (BBC/PBS) along with tale of the dreams and finally shattered dreams, of a 17 year old resident of Glod, Ionela Carmen, whose father, apparently one of the wealthiest residents of the village, travels to London along with three other villagers in order to sue Borat and 20th Century Fox for their depiction of Glod. The suit, as the film tells us, was another of these failed dreams. The suit was thrown out of court. It is these failed dreams, Carmen’s failed dream of getting out of Glod so she can live a life like that she sees in the Spanish telenovela she watches on television and Glod’s failed dreams of making lots of money from Borat, that makes When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat so powerful and finally so pathetic. In the wake of the fall of communism, a fall Carmen’s father laments at one point in the documentary, the only hope rural Glod, and one imagines other places in rural Eastern Europe, seems to have is that it win the lottery by winning a suit against a Western conglomerate or that it will get a hand out from the West. Welcome to the modern world of corporate globalisation. In a way, Stalenhoef’s documentary with its depiction of rural Eastern European poverty and the despair and defeat it breeds takes us back to the serious part of Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes. The more things change the more they stay the same. Poverty remains alive and well in the midst of greater and greater wealth of the few. And that, dear unreaders, is not funny.

I give Borat and When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat three stars each. Recommended.

The Epic That Was: Musings on the BBC's "I Claudius"

When I think about my favourite television programmes, as I sometime do, one of the TV programmes at the very top, if not the top of my best television programmes of all times list, is the BBC's 1976 12 or 13 part (the BBC transmitted the first two parts as one, PBS as two) I Claudius.

I Claudius was not the first time ancient Rome had appeared in fictional form on British television screens. Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-1989, 2005-) took the Doctor and his companions back to ancient Rome in the fourth serial of the second series, "The Romans" in February of 1965. ITV's The Caesars took viewers back to the Rome of Augustus through Claudius in 1968. Frankie Howerd brought his comedies Up Pompeii and Further Up Pompeii to the BBC in 1970 and 1975.

Nor was the BBC I Claudius the first attempt to adapt Robert Graves's faux memoirs of the Julio-Claudian Roman Emperor Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (41-54), I Claudius and Claudius the God (1934 and 1935) for the screen. That "honour" belongs to producer Alexander Korda, his London Films, famous director Josef von Sternberg, and noted actor Charles Laughton, who attempted to bring Graves's classics to the big screen in 1937. That attempt failed, however, thanks, in large part, to a run of bad luck that included an injury as a result of an automobile accident to one of the stars of the film, Merle Oberon, who was to play Messaline, a string of bad luck that gave rise to the belief that there was a curse associated with the attempt to adapt I Claudius for screens big or small. In 1965 the BBC incorporated 25 minutes of the existing footage of the Sternberg I Claudius into the documentary The Epic that Never Was. This fascinating documentary can be found on the BBC and Acorn 35th Anniversary DVD box sets of I Claudius.

It wasn't until the 1970s that another attempt was made to break the I Claudius "curse". Adapted by Jack Pullman, who had been working in television since 1958 and who gained a reputation as an adapter-extraordinaire thanks to his critically acclaimed adaptions of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (BBC, 1965), Henry James's Portrait of a Lady (BBC, 1968) and The Golden Bowl (BBC, 1972) and Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (BBC, 1973), and directed by the Austrian born Herbert Wise, who had been working in television since 1956, I Claudius finally hit the small screen on 20 September 1976 breaking the I Claudius curse, though not without a few scary moments during taping, once and for all. Though I Claudius was, like many British programmes of the era, studio bound "electronic theatre" and recorded on videotape, Wise and his cameraman, as Graham Nelson notes in his superb analysis of the show, used a moving camera and interesting camera angles to bring a dynamism to the production that makes, along with the magnificent stage sets and the superb costumes, I Claudius an interesting mise-en-scene watch even today.

I Claudius starred a cornucopia of noted British actors of stage and screen at the time along with a number of up and coming ones, many of whom had cut their acting teeth on the stage. The then relatively little known Derek Jacobi played Claudius. Another relative newcomer John Hurt, who had just finished playing Quentin Crisp in the superb ITV adaptation of Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1975), played Caligula. The newcomer Patrick Stewart, who would go on to fame and fortune as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation (syndicated, 1987-1994), played Sejanus. Veteran actors Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed (here on his best behaviour), and George Baker took on the parts of Livia, Augustus, and Tiberius. The ensemble cast was, to say the least, brilliant, and produced acting of a very high quality, and though it is absurd to single out any one performance as any more brilliant than the others, Sian Phillip's performance as Livia, the woman behind the throne who is killing off anyone who gets in the way of her son Tiberius becoming emperor, including her other son, Claudius's father, the "noble" pro-Republic Drusus, all in the name of saving Rome, is fantastic.

Mixing and matching gallows humour with, for the time, groundbreaking depictions of depravity, nudity, and violence on British television, I Claudius depicts Rome's imperial household from 24 to 54, from the Emperor Augustus through the Emperors Tiberius and Caligula to Emperor Claudius, who managed to survive the sometimes deadly schemings of some in his extended family by playing the fool. The show was not an immediate critical hit but it was a hit with viewers (all that sex and violence?). Soon the critics would come around too. In 1977 PBS and Masterpiece Theatre brought I Claudius to American shores where it pushed the limits of violence and nudity on American television just as it did in British television earlier.

I watched I Claudius on PBS when it was rerun on Dallas's PBS affiliate KERA around 1984 and was immediately hooked. I have watched it several times since including twice on DVD, the first time after I purchased the region two box set and recently just after I bought the region one box set released this year by Acorn in honour of I Claudius's 35th anniversary. Like the Acorn Upstairs Downstairs box set the Acorn I Claudius box set is superb, with video and audio quality probably about as good as we are going to get it. The Acorn 35th Anniversary I Claudius also includes a host of wonderful extras beyond The Epic That Never Was that I mentioned earlier, a 70 minute plus documentary about the making of the series "I Claudius: A Television Epic" (2002), a 12 minute interview with Sir Derek Jacobi, and a 36 minute featurette in which the cast talks about the show and tell us their favourite scenes from the series. If you have wanted to buy I Claudius for awhile but haven't yet, have never seen I Claudius but want to, or want to upgrade from the earlier and inferior US transfer of the show, now is the time.

I Claudius, by the way, would have an immense influence on television in its wake from the obvious, Rome (HBO/BBC, 2005-2007) to the less obvious, Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991) The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) and Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-), all of which, like I Claudius, explored the dark and decadent side of family, extended family, and imperial, in its broadest sense, "politics". Perhaps that is one of the reasons that I Claudius is, or so rumour has it, about to be remade by the BBC and HBO for a new generation of viewers who have fallen in love with "imperial" decadence and depravity.

Bibliography:
Graham Nelson, I Claudius, The Digital Fix, http://film.thedigitalfix.com/content/id/58338/i-claudius.html

Postscript Note:
I Claudius, like Upstairs Downstairs (ITV, 1971-1975), is filmed theatre or as Up Down creator Alfred Shaughnessy once put it, "electronic theatre". I have to say that it has been a pleasure to rewatch, as I did recently, both shows. It was a joy to watch television shows which, as theatre television does, allows actors to act and be more than simply cattle to be moved around amidst special effects, and scenes they act in to breath, something rare in an American and British film and television landscape increasingly devoted to the cult of jump cutting and limited attention spans.

PBS Does Woody: Musings on Woody Allen: A Documentary

I spent part of Sunday and Monday watching the four hour two part Woody Allen: A Documentary on PBS. I enjoyed it a lot. It certainly didn't, as more and more PBS documentaries are doing these days, whitewash its subject. And I liked that.

When I first went to college way back in the 1970s I usually made it a point to see all of Woody's films. I saw the wonderful mockumentary Take the Money and Run, the satirically hilarious Bananas, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Sleeper, and Love and Death. Like so many others I recall being disappointed when Woody seemed to make the transition from comedy films to serious films in Interiors and Stardust Memories. It is been a long time since I have seen either so my memory of both is rather hazy but I think I was among those who saw both films as retreads of Bergman and Fellini in American guise. I recall loving Annie Hall and Manhattan (a film that takes on new meaning, perhaps, in the wake of later events in Woody's life), both of which I thought nicely mixed Woody's comedic and serious sides.

I haven't seen many of Woody's films since Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy, a film I loved. I saw Sweet Lowdown and thought it was good though it didn't move me. I saw Manhattan Murder Mystery but again it didn't move me. I did like the Welles Lady of Shanghai redo at the end of the film, however. I have many of his later films thanks to the $3 dollar bin at Big Lots, but haven't seen them yet. Perhaps this documentary will push me to watch them. I would like to see Hannah and Her Sisters, Zelig, and Midnight in Manhattan.
Like so many bio-documentaries these days Woody Allen: A Documentary was limitedly critical. There is no engagement in the documentary, for instance, with the claim of some critics, most notably Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Allen has become an auteur who is acceptable to Americans who simply refuse to watch foreign films for a variety of reasons, parochialism, a bizarre fear of subtitles, their slow pace, their intellectualism.

By the way, one of the things I, at least in part a New Yorker, found really interesting in Woody Allen: A Documentary was Martin Scorsese's quip that he didn't really understand Woody's Manhattan. It was not, he said, his New York City. I found Scorsese's statement interesting because Woody's cinema is more like my life, the life of the nerd, and Woody's Manhattan is more like my Manhattan. To turn the tables a bit I just don't quite understand Scorsese's violent mob New York City and am not sure I really want to. I have never really been into the mafia and gangster film and television genre beyond Once Upon a Time in America. But hey, that's me.

Prime Time America Comes to Prime Time PBS: America in Primetime

PBS recently began running a four part series called America in Primetime. America in Primetime explores the changes that have occurred in American television since the 1950s and 1960s.

The first two episodes of America in Primetime, "Independent Women (30 October 2011) and "Man about the House" 6 November 2011), are an exploration of how women and men have been represented on American television and how female and male representations have changed since the 1950s and 1960s. The documentary series will conclude with "The Misfit" and "The Crusader", explorations of American TV's loosers, oddballs, and the plain weird and American TV's increasingly complexity in terms of characterisation respectively next Sunday and the following Sunday at 8 pm.

I have watched the first two episodes of the series and I have to say that America in Primetime is, in my opinion, much better than the uncritical and largely cheer leading Pioneers of Television that ran on PBS in 2008 and 2010, a series which explored various genres associated with US TV including crime dramas, situation comedies, and late night television.

My comment about the superiority of America in Primetime to the Pioneers of Television, however,is a bit of a back handed comment. I enjoyed hearing talking heads like Edie Falco, Mary-Louise Parker, Sandra Oh, Roseanne Barr, Felicity Huffman, Dick van Dyke, Ray Romano, Brian Cranston, Shonda Rhimes, Carl Reiner, Marc Cherry, David Chase, Matthew Weiner, Ron Howard (who talked about the obvious: that TV is, at its best, more like a novel), and other stars and creators of American television who talked about their shows and others that preceded and influenced them. However, and this is a big however, I can't fully take seriously a show which focuses on the transformation of women and men on American television since the 1960s that ignores Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No American television show, in my opinion, particularly in recent memory, transformed the image of both women and men on American television screens more than Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its women who sometimes exhibited traditionally masculine traits and its men who often revealed traditionally feminine traits. Do I spy that typical elite Hollywood disdain for certain genre shows in America in Primetime here? Additionally, the show ignores the representation of gender on American not in prime time soap operas like All my Children which have long played leading roles in undermining traditional depictions of women and men on American television. Do I spy yet another elite Hollywood disdain for certain genres here? Anyway, for these reasons alone America in Primetime deserves a thumb somewhat down from me at least thus far.

Additionally I have to give America in Primetime a thumb somewhat down because the show, up to this point, has ignored the fact that in many ways HBO and its fellow cable television travelers, are all, to some extent, versions of the BBC with their short and sometimes higher quality seasons and their sometimes more artistic approach to television. And I object to the caricaturing and stereotyping of two early American television shows, Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954-1960) and Leave it to Beaver (CBS, 1957-1958 and ABC, 1958-1963), in order to create straw men the art heroes of Prime Time in America could play off of and knock down. While both shows indeed presented, to some extent, 1950s images, real or imagined, of American men, women, and children, they also presented a mother who often knew more of what was best than father and a Tom Sayweresque kid in the form of "the Beaver".

Despite my thumb being slightly down on Prime Time America thus far I do look forward to watching the final two episodes of the series. After all, America in Primetime is much better than most of the stuff on American over the air television in primetime. And that is wh I suspect so few Americans watch PBS.

Haunted by the Past: The BBC's Case Histories

PopMatters Critic Lesley Smith recently criticised the BBC adaptation of Kate Atkinson's mystery novels, Case Histories, for turning Edinburgh detective Jackson Brodie (played by Jason Issaacs) from an existential figure adrift in the world and who briefly impacts the lives of others into a standard TV detective who doesn't have much of a head for business. I have not read the Atkinson novels so I can't compare the two. All I will say here is that adaptations for different media are adaptations for different media and as such have to be judged as such even though there obviously is a connection between the "adaptation" and the "original" and the former is indebted to the latter in some way, shape, or form.

But back to critic Smith's assessment of the BBC adaptation of Case Histories, I have to disagree with Smith's assessment of the show. I very much liked Case Histories. At the time that Smith wrote her review--just after PBS broadcast the first of the three episode series (PBS stitched together two of the original six episodes transmitted by the BBC to get three episodes), I wrote this: I have only seen two episodes of Case Histories so I obviously have to reserve full critical judgement, as any self respecting critic should, until I have seen the third. It is not clear, however, contrary to Smith's claim, exactly where the relationship between Brodie and D.I. Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington) is going at the end of episode two in this arc driven show which is why judgement should and must be withheld at least for the moment.

Now that I have seen all three episodes I can expand on these brief remarks. I particularly enjoyed the sense of melancholy that haunted almost every character in and almost every aspect of Case Histories. Brodie is haunted by the death (accidental?) of his sister Niamh and the subsequent suicide of his older brother who apparently feels responsible for Niamh's death. Brodie's melancholy associated with his sister, the death of whom along with the suicide of his brother replays themselves in Brodie's mind almost every day, is paralleled in the present by his relationship with his daughter Marley. Marley and Brodie have a close relationship that has put into jeopardy in the present when Brodie's ex-wife moves Marley from Brodie's Edinburgh to New Zealand where she has taken a job at the end of the second episode.

Other prominent and minor characters in Case Histories are equally haunted by mental scars from their pasts and their presents and these past and present ghosts impact the random chance encounters that almost all of them have with Brody and sometimes with each other in the Case Histories universe. D.I. Munroe is haunted by her feelings for Brodie, wondering, until the end of episode three, whether he has the same feelings for her that she has for him. He does. She is haunted by her difficult relationship with her teenage son, a relationship that is the antithesis of the one Brodie has with Marley. Lily Rose, who Brodie happens upon in an Edinburgh park by chance when he asks her to call for an ambulance while the person who hired him in episode one is writhing on the ground in pain, turns out to be the niece of someone who later hires Brodie to find her, Lily Rose, Shirley. Shirley turns out to be the sister of someone who supposedly killed her husband, Cheryl. Cheryl is the mother of Lily Rose who, after she was convicted of murdering her wife beating husband, a murder she did not commit, asks her sister Shirley, who did commit the murder, to care for Lily while she is in prison. Shirley, who seduces Brodie, abandoned Lily Rose and may carry this scar with her every day of her life. Reggie, the young girl who chances upon Brodie in episode three after he has accidentally been hit by a train while trying to save the life of Reggie's teacher along the railroad tracks, saves Brodie's life after the train accident. Reggie, it turns out, has a difficult relationship with her drug running brother and has had to drop out of school to work in order to take care of herself and her brother while trying to do some studying on the side. She has mental scars, in other words. Reggie's boss, Joanna Hunter, who has disappeared and who Reggie has asked Brodie to help her find, turns out to be famous because, when she was a teenager, she saw her mother brutally murdered by Gary Moore. She, of course, has lived with the scars of this murder ever since. Fearing that Moore, who has just been released from prison, is intent on murdering Joanna, Reggie and Brodie desperately seek Joanna eventually discovering that she has been kidnapped and held for ransom by mob "business" partners of Joanna's husband and has never been in danger from Moore. If the relationships in this paragraph seem labyrinthian that is because relations in Case Histories are labyrinthian.

From this brief summary of the complexities of Case Histories I hope one can see that the television adaptation of Atkinson's novels has indeed been faithful, assuming critic Smith has characterised the books accurately, to the existentialist and random chance encounters aspects of the original books. Many of the people Brodie encounters and tries to help he comes upon by chance. And most of those he comes upon through chance encounters and who he tries to help are deeply scared by their difficult and disturbing existential pasts, just like Brodie himself.

Thank you BBC for giving this viewer in the US, the land haunted by TV and film juvenalia, a thoughtful and adult television show.
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Bibliography
Lesley Smith, Case Histories is Left With a Faint Echo of a Delightful Original, 19 October 2011, PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/150136-case-histories/

Talking about Vine Talk

Recently I watched a marathon of WNET's and WLIW's Vine Talk on Create, one of the new national networks of PBS that came on the air with the transition to digital television in the United States. Vine Talk, which was created by Olive Productions, a production company owned by actors Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi, attempts, as one of the hosts says at the beginning of each episode, to demystify wine for the general public or at least the general public that might or does watch PBS.

Each episode of Vine Talk is hosted by Ray Isle of Food&Wine magazine and one of two sommeliers and wine experts, Stephanie Carraway and Emilie Perrier, and centres around six wines chosen by a panel of experts from a larger number of wines from particular wine regions of the world including Burgundy in France, the Napa Valley of California, the Barossa Valley of Australia, and the Mendoza region of Argentina. During each episode each of the chosen six wines are sampled by an audience present at each show taping downstairs and three to four "celebrity" tasters with varying degrees of wine expertise (none, some, quite a bit) upstairs (some might find this symbolism meaningful). The celebrity panel is guided in its wine tasting by Stanley Tucci, one of the executive producers of the show. At the end of each episode the audience and the celebrity panel chose their favorite wine from among the six.

I found the show interesting and, as someone who knows incredibly little about wine, occasionally informative. I learned much about wine, wine regions, wine microclimates, the impact of microclimates on wine, and more from the comments by the sommeliers, who remain upstairs with the celebrities in order to fill in their blanks about all things wine, from Mr. Isle, and from the "celebrity" chefs that are almost always in the celebrity panels of each show. The comments from some celebrity guests like John Litgow and Nathan Lane, both of whom seemed to think that their function on the show was to act as court jester during the evening (the late night talk show effect?), didn't do much for me. On the other hand Gay Talese's intelligent questions about wine were questions I would have wanted to ask of the sommeliers present at the Vine Talk table, Tucci's and Talese's memories of Italian-American childhoods filled with wine making and wine drinking were fascinating, and guest glassmaker Maximillian Riedel's discussions of wine drinking and the science of wine glasses--he argues that different wines demand different shapes glasses--was utterly fascinating and highly educational.

What is as much if not more interesting to me about Vine Talk has been the reaction to the show by TV journalists and web commentators. Troy Patterson's review of the show on Slate with the revealing title Coastal Elites Sipping Wine: Vine Talk confirms every Republican suspicion about PBS (http://www.slate.com/id/2290602/) tells you all you need to know about his take on Vine Talk. And then there was this not unexpected cliched and stereotypical gem from Michael in the comments area under Mr. Patterson's "review":
"whether the show is about wine-tasting or stock-car racing, why should we spend TAX money to support it? There should be a strategic drive behind the use of OUR money; if we're talking about spending on TV, then it seems that it should educate, inform, or entertain. I'm guessing we have plenty of options for entertainment on TV, so that's probably not a good use of TAX funds. Educate or inform then? Well, we have many options for that in the media, too, so the compelling reason to use OUR money for this would be because it was something no one else was informing us about - like the old whitepaper/documentaries - and it was something that was worth all of us knowing about. So, I'm guessing wine tasting - not really a compelling reason there. It's a hobby. Now, if we were gonna' educate people on growing, or the business, or perhaps alcohol abuse - seems we might have a compelling reason - maybe. But this isn't an example Republicans should point to, it's an example ALL of us should point to and say - private funding is fine, but not with OUR TAX money."

I have to admit that I just love reviews like this. Not because they are factual but because posts like "Michael's" reflect a tendency in so much right wing rhetoric and demagoguery. They are full of ideologically correct fiction masquerading as fact. A couple of examples: "Michael" claims that Vine Talk is being funded by public tax monies but provides absolutely no evidence that the show is or was funded with tax payer money. In fact, Vine Talk was actually funded by Metrokane maker of the rabbit wine opener, wine preserver, and rabbit aerating pourer and by public television stations WNET and WLIW. "Michael" conveniently forgets or is simply ignorant about the fact that a significant percentage of the funds for public television comes from VOLUNTARY contributions by viewers and sponsors. So "Michael's" pronouncements to the contrary I am not sure we know fully how Vine Talk was funded. Was it funded with tax payers money? Was it funded solely by Metrokane? Was it funded, in part, by voluntary contributions from viewers? Gee wouldn't it be nice to get even a sliver of empirical evidence from ideologues and demagogues like "Michael"?

Beyond the facts related to the funding of Vine Talk so what if Vine Talk is funded by federal, state, or local governments? Tax payers money goes to help fund megacorporations like Boeing and Mobil so why not public television and Vine Talk, both of which serve important and critical education functions in American society and we have often, in the past, used taxpayer money for educational purposes. Vine Talk certainly teaches anyone a little something about wine and thus does educational work. I have a sneaking suspicion that this hellfire and damnation rhetoric about taxpayer funding of PBS is a lot more about greed and the unwillingness of many to pay taxes for almost anything if it means separating people from their beloved mammon. It is also, I think, about what it means to be an American. Many American conservatives of many different stripes have never, it seems to me, been able to come to grips with American diversity in all its forms. Americans, in general, have long had problems with increasing diversity in the US brought about by religious diversity, political diversity, and Southern European, Eastern European, and increasingly "non-European" immigration into the United States (ironically, of course, a lot of the Latin immigrants they appear to fear are actually, at least in part, significantly European). In the end I suspect that many on the "all-American" right would only be happy, irony of ironies, if all America and all of those represented on American television looked (unfortunately) like most of the folks on Vine Talk, minus the gays, of course, White.

Speaking or ironies, for many self-proclaimed conservatives PBS appears, if their rhetoric is to be believed, to be their ultimate liberal and left wing great satan. How a network that shows programmes like "This Old House", "The French Chef" (Julia Child once worked for the OSS), "The Donna Dewberry Show" (Dewberry is a Mormon and Mormons aren't particularly known for their political radicalism these days), "Barbeque University" and "Primal Grill" with chef Steven Raichlen, Lidia's Italy with chef Lidia Matticchio Bastianich along with its more political fare of documentaries and investigative journalism is sapping the conservative all-American red, white, and blue bodily fluids of US citizens has never been clear to me. In fact, I would think that many conservatives would cheer PBS for its highly decentralised and highly local structure and remember that local commercial television used to programme local cooking and children's shows that looked a lot like those on PBS once upon a time when the FCC was as interested in educational content as in sex, breasts, dirty words, and extending corporate dominance. PBS, after all, was meant to be and is still largely decentralised and local even if certain PBS stations dominate its airwaves because of size and hence revenue. But no, apparently many conservatives prefer mega centralised bureaucracies like, no not Stalinist Russia, but Clear Channel Radio to PBS.

But back to Vine Talk. Yes the show has some problems. Not all of the guests are particularly interesting and some, like Nathan Lane, were, at least to me, incredibly annoying. This may be just me but I prefer to learn more about wine than to experience an overload of the humour of Nathan Lane which I frankly don't find that humourous. But come on give the show a break. Vine Talk is still a relatively new show and is still finding its feet. Give it time. I know that being patient is difficult in an era where watching or reading something for more than a few minutes without an action/adventure cgi spectacular breaking out can seem like an eternity, but hey humour me.

Check out the Vine Talk website here http://www.vinetalk.com/