Watchification

“We’ve noticed it doesn’t rhyme.”

After spending 3 years trying to write a thesis on Paradise Lost, Iannucci is a great foil for Milton, dissecting the poet’s works with interesting interviews with people faced with similar issues. Iannucci is basically the best English teacher in the world, enthusing about topics unknown, travelling around London and England, and ranting around what looks like an abandoned BBC office floor.

A masterful Arena, exploring cool jazz – but rather than taking the normal route of talking heads, here the music tells the story, with occasional narration, on-screen quotes from the musicians, clips from all sorts of places, even a brief Allen Ginsberg reading. There’s also wonderful original incidental music by George Taylor. Worth watching, even if you think you don’t like jazz.

In Hyperland, Douglas Adams’ ‘fantasy documentary’ from 1990, Tom Baker plays a software agent who shows Douglas the future of television: Interactive Multimedia.

Are you tired of linear, non-interactive television, Mr Adams?

Bearing in mind that although much of the ‘browsing’ mechanism feels familiar and obvious, this documentary was created in 1990. That’s two years before the first web browser. The internet was a very different place then.

This was not only cutting-edge for its time, it was remarkably prescient.

“It is the eye and the heart that are the surest guides”

It seems Heathcotes have a thing for travel guides. I’ve been known to eulogise, and namesake-but-no-relation David Heathcote presents this series taking old travel guides as a starting point for a journey, in this programme the Shell travel guides from the 30s to the 70s.

The idea of Shell touring guides was dreamt up by John Betjeman, as he needed the money from such a project to get married. He hired enthusiastic amateurs, often friends, to write, design, photograph and edit the decidedly anachronistic guides. They were told to give “your view, of a place now” – now being a time when touring moved from train to car, and hidden gems of natural beauty were widely accessible for the first time. This is the dilemma prevalent in the guides – a fear of the car, knowing that the unspoilt experiences could be destroyed just by mentioning them. Heathcote revisits places from two of the guides, and finds some spoilt, notably Padstow, but resigns himself that that’s all part of progress, for better or worse.

The Explore series has been a bit random, sometimes feeling a bit too much like the original Rough Guide TV series from the 80s. But I’ve found the programmes about Manila fascinating: I spent a few days in one part of Metro Manila a few years ago, and the amazing contrasts between the tiny rich percentage and the slums and poverty stick in my mind, along with the warmth and friendliness of the Pinoy people.

This programme explores one of the major issues in Filipino life: the strength of the Catholic church, versus the need for sex education and control the exploding population. However, just the portrayal of daily life so different from that in the UK makes this worth watching.

I’ve complained before about the ever-increasing repeats on the BBC – normally with ruses similar to this spin-off programme. However, taking a story from the main programme on the Philippines and exploring it to the depth needed represents a clever use of multi-channel and digital TV delivery.