AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

I have struggled to the end of the Van Meegeren prog and I have to disagree with Hatty -- I found it irritating and tedious. I grant that as a documentary it possessed all the right things, it is just I couldn't stand old Andrew Graham-Dixon's pompous complacency. Like all experts before him, when he knows something's a fake he can pour on the righteous vituperation. It's just that after decades of reviewing art exhibitions for the most prestigious of heavyweight publications, he hasn't managed to spot a single one though even he must know he has stood in front of hundreds, thousands of them.

Then he has the temerity to stand in front of a genuine Vermeer and tell us Van Meegeren could never steal the heart and soul of Vermeer. Bollocks, Andrew, that Vermeer is quite possibly a fake. Any decent modern artist could duplicate the heart and soul of any Golden Age artist -- it's just an example of "100 metre sprint syndrome" ie any club runner of today would win the gold medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

And let us never forget that Vermeer was considered near-worthless until the late nineteenth century when all of a sudden the whole world thought his heart and soul was worth millions. Bring me my sick-bucket of burning gold.

[Hatty]

All or nearly all TV presenters are full of themselves, one just has to put up with their smugness. The point of the programme was that Van Meegeren's hoax is well known but treated as a 'one-off'; no-one seems to have accused him of being a professional forger even though, as any investigator could have found, his card had been marked. Meegeren was part of a forgery ring though whether the other members, including the picture 'restorer' who'd employed him, were prosecuted wasn't revealed, so presumably not.

Another pertinent factor in Meegeren's success was that the idea of a missing Vermeer period had been mooted by his biographer... such interstices are great opportunities for forgers. The question why no works from this missing period turned up until the biography's publication seems to have never been asked.

[Mick Harper]

Spiral (Canal Plus to BBC4)

Jeez, be thankful you live in the land of Midsomer Murders. Paris is feral. Our own disaffected minority youths may be into knife crime but at least they play cricket. Maghrebi youth play for keeps. One other thing: avoid being a French woman. And avoid going out with French women, they'll eat you alive. Unless they're having nervous breakdowns. So would I. Good luck, Northern Ireland.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

By the way, the statement "in 1878 Vermeers could be bought for two guilders" should not be taken on trust. It was stated that there were only seventeen known Vermeers (or something, I am quoting both these statistics from memory) so I find it difficult to believe, even at a time when the art market was fairly undeveloped, that any moderate-to-rare painting from the Golden Age could be bought for two guilders.

The point being that the impression is given, Vermeers being so cheap, you can expect a steady stream of them to emerge from burghers' walls when they become not so cheap.

[Mick Harper]

Hindus: Do We Have A Caste Problem? (BBC-1)

I wouldn't have thought this required an interrogatory but I suppose the BBC has to worry about these things. A better question would be "Starting with a blank slate who in their right minds would have a caste system?"

[Mick Harper]

The worst thing about holidays is having to catch up with your digibox. Even though I'd spent hours before I went deleting stuff to make room, it was at 100% when I returned. Sure, I had wiggle room deleting all the stuff I had recorded but actually watched on holiday (Newsnight, Fare Dodgers -- At War with the Law etc) but I still had to get up early and stay up late ploughing through the stuff self-catering apartment tellies don't provide (Al Jazeera News, the World Series etc). I'm stable now but I don't mind telling you, it's been a struggle. Simple rule: no more holidays.

[Mick Harper]

Giri/Haji (BBC-2)

As this is the first Japanese cop show on a major channel, I feel obliged to give the official verdict. Nubbins. That's Japanese for 'Probably not'. For a start the cop's brother is involved. This is a lazy and desperate plot device not usually resorted to until Series 2, so not a good sign. Then the (British) woman cop lead is highly promiscuous and with ugly and gormless men. Now this is either how the Japanese see British women or they are following the Bridge trope.

What Japanese TV producers might not know is that Japanese women are highly promiscuous when they are in London but very nervous about their fellow-Japanese finding out. I know this from teaching English to Japanese students for many years. Japanese women are very unflattering about Japanese men.

The programme itself was confusing and formulaic but otherwise well done.

[Mick Harper]

But I finally lost faith in the series as a whole when I heard this piece of dialogue in the second episode

Cockney dudess: But he was more than ten metres away.
Cockney dude: More like eight and a half metres.

What is taught in school stays in school. Even drama school.

[Mick Harper]

Spiral (Canal+ to BBC4)

Can we please have no sex, no no-sex, no babies, no no-babies, no spells in prison, no sudden releases from prison, no fatal and then non-fatal illnesses, no grief from forlorn wives/husbands. Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. If you're French, you're at it. They're worse than the Belgians.

[Mick Harper]

Criminal (Netflix)

This is important for two reasons:
a new genre -- entirely set in an interrogation suite
a new production method -- identical sets, similar characters, different story lines, each series made in Britain, France, Spain and Germany with dubbing.

Very good but one slight mystery. It's fair enough having Werther's Originals available from a German vending machine, but in English? As Tony Hancock would have put it, "Did Goethe live in vain?"

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Wiley raises some typically good points. Operating civil society requires the principle "what works" and this is in conflict with the liberal belief "whatever next?" Criminal activity has to be controlled in order to have an operating civil society but resources are always tight in civil societies because nobody wants to a) pay taxes or b) live in an uncivil society. So you cut whatever corners are appropriate and keep this hidden from liberals as long as possible.

Gradually everything improves in civil societies, including how to control criminal activity, so fewer corners need to be cut. However, from time to time, you get a disaffected feral population that needs some of the old methods being wheeled out. Our last examples were the miners' strike of the 1980's and the rave culture of the 1990's. I don't know what the real situation is in Paris but Spiral seems to suggest that the ex-Maghrebi immigrant population has reached this condition.

Our own equivalent, West Indians, are pussy cats in comparison and just need some quiet (or as we call it, 'institutional') racism to keep in check. Of course the liberals need to be kept in check too but always remember that liberals are just as necessary to the operating of civil society. If the police had their way....

[Mick Harper]

Secrets of Amazon Dispatches (Channel 4)

The largest retailer in the galaxy was given the full Dispatches treatment (undercover researcher does two weeks training etc) and it seems that they are selling a little plastic duck that has 30% of something implicated in loss of male fertility as opposed to the EU limit of 21%. Otherwise a clean bill of health. It's your choice whether you want to continue shopping with them.

[Hatty]

The trade in Chinese babies to the U.S. (last night's Storyville about China's One-Child Policy on BBC4) is official, but criminal. The surplus babies are sold to American families qua orphans which entails forging provenances, as with artefacts. It was evident the same locations where the babies had been 'found' were re-used multiple times, again reminiscent of objects being dug up in 'favourite' findspots.

The 'traffickers' weren't selling the babies to Americans, that was the job of orphanages whose sales are massively profitable for the state. The traffickers, recently released from long prison sentences, explained they simply brought babies abandoned in the street to the orphanages, for which they were well paid. Television plays a big part in propagating state policy but before that of course troupes of actors using 'folk arts' were the main medium. Not so different from our own itinerant troupes getting church doctrine across via pre-Reformation mystery plays.