Monday Night on Channel 4

[Charlie]

Apologies to forumistas based outside the UK, who contribute an ever-increasing proportion of current posts

This is just to acknowledge the remarkably high standard of a couple of programmes on Channel 4 last night.

Channel 4 has by fat the best news bulletin on British TV, so much better than the BBC's, there' no comparison. Partly this is down to the quality of presenter Jon Snow, who seems able to deal with just about every subject and any politician with verve, humour and intelligent expertise.

Unfortunately, his studio colleagues are not nearly as good - Krishnan Gurumurthy is smug, insolent and irritating. But Alex Thompson is a pretty good deputy when Jon's away and the foreign correspondents are excellent, especially Lindsay Hilsum and the drole arts commentator Nicholas Glass.

Forgive that preamble, it's just to explain why I was still watching the channel from 8 till 10 last night, having being lured by the many trailers for The Ascent of Money and Catastrophe.

Niall Ferguson is the presenter of a four part series based on his own book, The Ascent of Money, a brave attempt to make the obscure topic of finance accessible to the layman. I hesitate to say I understand it now, but I'm starting to get the point and am grateful to have had the door finally opened to a subject I studied at University with blank incomprehension over forty years ago.

An explanation of how life on earth began, Catastrophe is presented by Tony Robinson, whose script was irritatingly repetitive at first, but finally settled down as we met a few experts who offered plausible theories about the big bang that created the circumstances in which life forms evolved. Considering there were no cameras pointing out into space at the time it all happened, the reconstructions were helpful for once.

Top class TV (not a phrase which comes to mind very often).

[Leon Parker]

The Ascent of Money I saw, Catastrophe I missed. Good to know about these things as it supports my view that there is more to the world than meets the eye. Increased my understanding of how the world ticks.

[Quintin]

I agree with you about Niall Ferguson's progamme. I was always rather wary of him before because he was 'sold' as a right-wing hisorian and one with a political axe to grind. However, I recently read his book Empire which I can much recommend. He has an open, accessible style, particularly in his writing, and whilst he certainly comes at a subject with a point of view, his points are well argued.
I also saw the Catastrophe programme. The subject was fascinating and the contents informative (did you know that when the moon was formed it was only 15,000 miles from Earth and is still moving away at 3.5cm a year? No neither did I.) but I thought the format was dreadful. I really couldn't see the point of having TR doing pieces to camera (all in London?) about a subject he's not an expert in. He added nothing and irritated the hell out of me I'm afraid as did the endless repeats of the same image of Thea hitting Earth. Clever CGI but after the 5th time.... It would have been far better to do it as do Horizon with a non-seen narrator and the experts doing their thing to camera.

[Charlie]

I also saw the Catastrophe programme. The subject was fascinating and the contents informative I really couldn't see the point of having TR doing pieces to camera (all in London?) about a subject he's not an expert in. He added nothing and irritated the hell out of me I'm afraid

my general feeeling about TR too,although I could stand him here as genuine experts were allowed a few words in edgeways

[Charlie]

I also saw the Catastrophe programme. The subject was fascinating and the contents informative (did you know that when the moon was formed it was only 15,000 miles from Earth and is still moving away at 3.5cm a year? No neither did I.) but I thought the format was dreadful. I really couldn't see the point of having TR doing pieces to camera (all in London?) about a subject he's not an expert in. He added nothing and irritated the hell out of me I'm afraid as did the endless repeats of the same image of Thea hitting Earth. Clever CGI but after the 5th time.... It would have been far better to do it as do Horizon with a non-seen narrator and the experts doing their thing to camera.

It has got worse. The repetition is excruciating. I sometimes wonder about how my brain reacts to being told the same thing several times within a matter of minutes. Like those local radio DJs who repeat the phone number incessantly. I blank the information. The only good bits are the experts, who speak from knowledge, whereas the script is banal and can never be from the heart, especially if the presenter is standing in a crowded London street, to tell us about a volcano in Siberia 250,000 years ago. Where did that convention come from and why is it used so often?

[CantSleepClownsWillGetMe]

I think the idea is to show humans busily going about our everyday lives, as though we are somehow immune to the devastating potential for destruction that lies within our planet and also out in space. A bit like showing clips of a little girl skipping on the pavement, then cutting to shots of a speeding motorist hurtling towards her street. It can be quite effective if done properly.

June

[Neil Foxlee]

I still relish Simon Schama's well-deserved and priceless put-down of Niall Ferguson on the morning after Obama's election. Ferguson said how he'd started off as a McCain supporter, but that the better candidate won, to which Schama retorted in his best camp voice: "Oooooh, Niall, you're such a trimmer..!"

[Note: 'trimmer' = person who changes their opinion for reasons of expediency.]

PS Rumour has it that Ferguson helped to inspire the character of the young history teacher in Alan Bennett's The History Boys - the one who taught the Oxbridge contenders that to make a mark, you needed to come up with unorthodox opinions regardless of historical 'truth'.

[NormanD]

This week's episode of "The Ascent of Money" had two of us shouting at the television simultaneously. A sure sign of grumpy old age, but also one of having lived through a historical experience which we see being distorted. Ferguson's summary of the reasons for the military butchery in Chile in 1973 was appalling. The description of the overthrown social reformer (and reformist) President Allende as a communist and Marxist was historically inaccurate and just plain lazy writing. For the tens of thousands of Chileans who were murdered, tortured, imprisoned or exiled - a barely mentioned side-effect of Friedman's economic experiment - Ferguson's 'revisionist' writing was just an insult.

And has anyone commented on the programme's sponsor - the Cayman Islands (tourist board or banks, I'm not sure which)? It was like watching a programme on the history of alchoholism sponsored by Bacardi Breezers....

Neil added

to make a mark, you need(ed) to come up with unorthodox opinions regardless of historical 'truth'.

Hmm, this sounds very familiar in these times of internet debate.

[Neil Foxlee]

For the lowdown on Ferguson, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/200 ... reducation

Here's some choice examples:

'It was obvious to me that the most intelligent people were drawn towards Thatcherism and the stupidest people were public-school lefties,' he argues.

"Ferguson doesn't care about being unpopular. He has said that America should face up to its imperial responsibilities and occupy Iraq for 40 years. Britain should not have gone to war in 1914 but allowed Germany a mainland empire. The problem with the Treaty of Versailles was not the amount of reparations imposed on Germany, but that they were not collected in full. The British Empire was not all bad, but, in fact, had some rather good points [...]"

At the risk of courting controversy, I wouldn't wholly disagree on the last point, but the way he glossed over the bad (very bad) in his Empire series was disgraceful. For a counter to Ferguson's rose-tinted view, I recommend John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried: a People's History of the British Empire, an old-left perspective. Here's an Amazon customer's review:

"Useful outline history of the British Empire, 15 Dec 2006
By William Podmore

The author of this useful outline of the British Empire is a history lecturer at Bath Spa University College.

In the early 19th century, the Empire gained vast profits from slavery. 13 million people were kidnapped from Africa; two million died or were killed en route. The 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica played a key role in overthrowing slavery in the British Caribbean.

During the 19th century, the British state waged three `Opium wars' to force the drug on China. As American historian John K. Fairbanks wrote, Britain's opium trade was `the most long-continued and systematic crime of modern times'.

India's 1857 rising for national liberation was `a national revolt' (Disraeli), `a national war' (Governor-General Lord Canning). The British government as usual accused the rebels of rape and torture (later British investigations proved these accusations to be lies), to incite its forces to commit appalling atrocities against the Indian people.

Gladstone's Liberal government ordered British forces to invade Egypt and Sudan in 1882-84. They massacred tens of thousands of people at Alexandria, Tel-el-Kebir and Omdurman.

After World War One, fought supposedly for the rights of small nations, some of the colonies, like Ireland, Egypt, India, Iraq and Palestine, decided to fight for their freedom. The Empire resisted, with its usual methods of barbarism. In Ireland, Churchill and Lloyd George enthusiastically backed the `Black and Tans' death squads.

Of the Iraq war, T. E. Lawrence wrote in 1920, "Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We today are not far from a disaster."

General Rawlinson, the commander in chief in India, said in 1920, "You may say what you like about not holding India by the sword, but you have held it by the sword for 100 years and when you give up the sword you will be turned out. You must keep the sword ready to hand and in case of trouble or rebellion use it relentlessly. Montagu calls it terrorism, so it is and in dealing with natives of all classes you have to use terrorism whether you like it or not."

After 1945, in the Far East, the Empire conducted brutal wars in Malaya, Indonesia (620 British and Indian troops were killed and 20,000 Indonesians), and Vietnam, where the army instructed officers, "Always use the maximum force available to ensure wiping out any hostiles we may meet. If one uses too much no harm is done." The British position in the Middle East collapsed, after defeats in Palestine, Iran, Egypt and Iraq.
In Kenya in the 1950s, the Empire portrayed its pogrom against the Kikuyu people as a Kikuyu pogrom against the white settlers. The comparative death tolls reveal the truth: even official figures showed 11,500 Kikuyu killed, and 32 settlers.

Newsinger argues that the British ruling class sees the American empire as the best guarantor of its global interests. He concludes that only `mass protest and mass resistance' can end `British capitalism's allegiance to the American Empire'. We will need to do a lot more than that! " [end quote]

[joel]

Note: 'trimmer' = person who changes their opinion for reasons of expediency.

Expediency is quite the best reason IMO, and is the mark of a supple mind.

[Neil Foxlee]

It's true that one sense of "expediency" is "appropriateness; suitability", which means it can be associated with pragmatism rather than dogmatism, but another sense is "the use of or inclination towards methods that are advantageous rather than fair or just", which relates it to opportunism and realpolitik. Needless to say, I approve of the first and disapprove of the second.

[joel]

So to be fair and just one must be inflexible and dogmatic. Interesting. I wonder what Solomon would have made of that!

[Neil Foxlee]

So to be fair and just one must be inflexible and dogmatic.

Don't think it follows, somehow. A trimmer is someone who adjusts their (expressed) opinions out of self-interest (eg wishing to appear fashionable, in line with dominant opinion or simply right after the event) rather than principles. In this case, the inference is that Schama thought that Ferguson decided to belatedly endorse Obama because Obama won.

[joel]

Without doubt the great Simon S. has never himself stooped so low.
FWIW, I'm currently of the opinion that the grandest "historian" by far of the Victorian era is George MacDonald Fraser. Flashy would undoubtedly regard himself as perfectly trim. Toe-curling stuff.