Television

Service or profit in the Post

Dispatches - Third Class Post, Channel 4 "Third Class Post" promised to be an exposé of everything that is wrong with today's Post Office. We were going to be told just why up to a million letters a month go missing. Much of the real scandal remained unreported. The programme portrayed postal workers as work shy, light-fingered malcontents, too spliff-addled to put the letters in the right holes. The film will come as a gift to all those who wish to accelerate the "liberalisation" of postal services, leading ultimately to the wholesale privatisation of the Post Office. The reporter continually...

Thinking about abortion

'My Foetus', by Julia Black, Channel Four They show dying people on telly. They show starving people on telly. They show people killed by war and communal conflict on telly. No one objects. But when someone wants to show a three to four minute uncomplicated medical procedure there is great controversy. Of course the procedure was an abortion and it was shown, very late at night, in Julia Black's film, My Foetus, on 20 April on Channel Four. Predictably the pro-lifers were up in arms. Abortion is a taboo subject. One in three women will have an abortion, but very few will talk about it...

The Men Who Would Be Napoleon

Caligula, Nero, Commodus, the mad, bad Roman emperors, arouse in us pity for the people who could not find a better system of government - and, at a certain level, incredulity and incomprehension. The same, when we read about, say, 19th century slavery in America, in which black people were bred on special farms and often worked to death over a short span of murderous exploitation in six or seven years. Or that until not so long ago women lacked most civil rights; that women got the vote in most of Europe only after the Second World War; or that, forty years and less ago, the US democracy...

Dunkirk

BBC2 If there is a national myth about the Second World War which still holds sway in the public imagination, it is that of the "miracle of Dunkirk", the "little ships" which rescued retreating British troops from the Normandy coast in June 1940, when France fell to the Nazis. BBC2's dramatic recreation of these events gained more than five million viewers, almost matching the viewing figures for Footballers' Wives on ITV! The three Dunkirk programmes were compelling television, recounting a wretched and crushing British military defeat. Using digital technology, the film-makers took you to...

The Miners Strike

BBC2 "Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain" - Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England Compared with Channel 4's programme, reviewed here , the BBC 2 account attempted more worthily to measure up to the historical and personal importance of the strike. It followed a similar set of stepping-stones across the turbulent months as had the C4 version: the call to strike, the buzz, high spirits and sense of license of the flying...

Strike: When Britain Went to War

Channel 4 "Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain ..." - Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England In 1984 Channel 4 was in its infancy and looking to bring a new seriousness to British television. Already it had screened a series analysing the Spanish Civil War. Its prime-time news programme had depth, thoughtfulness, integrity. Twenty years on its two-hour chronicle of the great miners' strike of 1984 and 85 demonstrated how...

Big Read: BBC

My mother recently confessed she looked forward to getting old so she could have more time to read. After bringing up nine children and a lifetime of underpaid care work (she still volunteers, looking after "old people" often younger than herself), that may seem scant reward. But it brought home to me just how imaginative literature can immeasurably increase the pleasure and quality of even materially impoverished life. Socialists are unquestionably in favour of literacy. Like clean water, it forms the basic hygiene of intellectual freedom. But we rarely celebrate its pleasures. It's as if...

The Deal

Channel 4 film, shown on 28 September With Hollywood director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons) in charge we might have expected a portrayal of the interplay between sex and power and the "dark side" of the relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. What we got was more like a Mills and Boon story of rivalry between brothers for the hand of a good woman, (or in this case the Labour Party and, goddam it, the country), who had been let down badly by previous lovers (the Tories, the unions, militancy). The Deal's starting point is the defeat of the Labour Party in 1983 and leads up to...

All things to men

Pornography: The Musical, Channel 4 Stealing and gratifying other people's sexual desires in return for money have only ever appealed to me, and then not much, when I've been really broke. Both strike me as being dangerous, uncomfortable and one of them - stealing - possibly immoral. To judge from Pornography: The Musical the "money factor" is the biggest reason people work in porn. But it's not the only one. "Everyone's got a vocation in life... this is what I was meant to do. I love the career, I love the industry," says one woman. Of course, that could be bravado. A handful of women - and...

Globalisation is Good

Channel 4's documentary Globalisation is Good (20 September 2003) certainly lived up to its billing as "controversial" . In fact it could easily have been called "Sweatshops are Good". For instance, the film showed a Nike factory in Vietnam where the boss and some carefully chosen workers said that they thought Nike was a brilliant employer (loans, sports facilities, clean factory, high wages, etc.). The film cut to "anti-globalisation" protests in which No Sweat banners featured heavily, with a commentary which claimed that "this boycott movement" would stop production going to Vietnam. We...

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