Tuesday, July 31, 2007
‘India with Sanjeev Bhaskar’Not being a snob or cultural elitist, but a amidst the docu-soaps, reality TV, cookery channels and soaps, there is the odd BBC 2 programme with a mission to inform – ‘Restoration’ and ‘Coast’ to name but two.
How to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Indian independence? We were served by way of ‘India with Sanjeev Bhaskar’. The programme reeked to high heaven of lazy TV. I can just imagine the commissioning meeting, ‘India? Let’s get that guy from the Kumars. OK, what’s next Ancient Greece? Get Peter Andre, he’ll draw the punters in.’
I don’t object to celebrities or the famous for being famous presenting travel programmes, the problem was that at the start of ‘India with Sanjeev Bhaskar’ there was no attempt to explain his personal relationship with the country. At what age did he leave? How often has he returned? Does he have any relatives there? As a result we didn’t have any personal connection to the presenter.
We started with Sanjeev Bhaskar on the set of a popular Indian TV soap. If he’d made a programme on that aspect of popular culture it would have been illuminating. Could other ex-pats have presented programmes on cricket, religion or business?
He was keen to show the ‘New India’, no problem there, although it began to grate. It all went downhill when he was asked to judge the ‘Mrs India’ contest. The organiser was an ambitious, driven woman who made Margaret Thatcher look like a domestic drudge. There were moments of toe-curling embarrassment, one contestant an innocent air stewardess was quizzed about the ‘Mile High Club’. Then came that beamer ‘what do you think about marital rape?’ Where the hell were we going? ‘How many times a week do you do it? What positions?’
Sanjeev Bhaskar might be a comic actor but his default is to laugh, smirk or make light of everything. It was a bit like having a supercilious, immature teenager with no moral compass as your guide. Marital rape? At that moment he should have walked.
Just to give some ‘balance’ a lawyer gave him a guided tour of the recycling district. Every conceivable object – paper, cardboard, electric wires, cars, was scavenged. People eking out a living sorting other peoples’ rubbish. It’s interesting how seriously posh people regard penury as some kind of life-style choice. His lawyer friend assured him that they had two mobile phones, ‘One more than me’ smirked Bhaskar. He then started burbling about how recycling was so much better here than in London. No Sanjeev, they do it because they are dirt poor; it is the only way they can survive.
After half an hour we moved on to Bangalore the centre of the Indian computer industry. There’s no dispute that there is an expanding middle class and that the economy is growing exponentially. However, the fault line was that the programme was neither documentary, travelogue nor personal reminiscence.
There was no explanation or attempt to engage in debate or pose questions to the audience. The fact that 70% of Indians live in villages, without access to computers didn’t warrant a mention. A whole hour on India and nothing about the caste system or the large Muslim minority, you wouldn’t imagine that was possible.
Bhaskar was so concerned that the stereotype that India was all about snake charmers that all he succeeded in doing was presenting another stereotype – Bollywood, billionaires, Mrs India and IT geeks. In one hour he didn’t interview anyone that wasn’t comfortably off.
‘India with Sanjeev Bhaskar’ was stricken by the curse of ‘Celebrity TV’. The premise here is that the viewers are such drongoes with the attention span of a gnat that you can’t have a serious presenter (Boring!!) you have to throw in a celeb. As a result you get the inane, the vacuous and content-lite that this programme represented, devoid of any depth or analysis. It was more a vehicle for Sanjeev Bhaskar – ‘Look At Me’ – Sanjeev at the docu-soap, Sanjeev on the billionaire’s yacht, Sanjeev as a judge at ‘Mrs India’; the camera was never away from him.
Indian independence was one of the most momentous events in history, yet here reduced to celebrity-TV, a posturing, pretentious, jokey take on it. BBC 2 you have really ‘lost the plot’.
BBC 4 ‘Bombay Rail’ – an excellent programme, you’ll learn more in ten minutes than an hour of ‘India with Sanjeev Bhaskar’
Labels: TV
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Power To The PeopleLosing the shop, pub and school is normally a sentence of death for a village as it spins into inexorable decline. BBC reporter Tim Samuels was embedded in the picture-postcard pretty Cornish village of Lanreath. The twist to the programme was that he was both reporter and agent provocateur, he had a plan…
Samuels had the innocence of an ingénue and the sort of self-deprecating charm that could win over the local Women’s Institute. With them on board anything was possible.
It wasn’t all cream teas and buttered scones, he got up at four in the morning to witness the last milking of the cows at a local farm, the farmer standing disconsolate as they were loaded onto a transporter. He was making a loss of 2p on every litre of milk, prices falling due to relentless pressure from the super markets.
In a nearby sea side village he was introduced to the ‘Revolutionary Action Committee’ who were monitoring the insidious spread of second homes and holiday lets.
There was some inspired door stepping of politicians, Post Office minister Jim Fitzpatrick forced to justify closure of rural post offices, Tory spokesman Alan Duncan, ‘I’ve got a wonderful chap who delivers our mail’, ‘What’s his name?’, ‘Er… postie?’ Then on a reconnaissance mission to Islington he tricks the Mayor into inviting him to bring some sheep onto the green.
Samuels took the whole village – WI, Morris Dancers, school children, sheep and all - to occupy a stretch of Islington. The media coverage does get a bit incestuous as BBC News report on the BBC organising a protest.
The battle to keep the school open is lost, but on his return a few months later the community has rallied, the pub and post office have reopened.
The programme concentrated on one village, as it was the BBC they weren’t going to involve all the other schools faced with closure and it would have been interesting if they’d mentioned which political party voted to close Lanreath School.
Maybe this programme will spark some French style direct action as farmers invade the cities blocking off roads and dumping manure outside the politicians’ offices. Is Tim Samuels the new Jose Bove? Not quite it is the BBC you know.
Labels: TV
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Nanny of the MaroonsI rarely watch television, if there’s anything that’s guaranteed to addle the brain it’s the constant diet of soaps, docu-soaps and reality TV, every so often there’s an exception, Ms Dynamite’s programme on the Jamaican slave revolt leader Nanny of the Maroons was excellent.
A debate is opening up surrounding the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery, not to doubt William Wilberforce’s moral integrity, he had to battle against derision and abuse but the main determining factors were economic and the revolt by the slaves.
There are few actual details about Nanny’s life, we don’t even know for sure when she died. A mythology was attached to her – she could catch bullets in her buttocks, the British put it down to witchcraft.
From Britain’s invasion of Spanish held Jamaica in 1655 slaves fled to the hills. In the revolt 1730 – 1740 they established autonomous areas and inflicted military defeats on the British. They singled out the sugar plantations for attack and in 1734 twenty of them were abandoned.
A harrowing moment was when Ms Dynamite was shown some of the artefacts from a slavery museum - shackles for children and a gibbet that still contained human remains when it was found in the nineteenth century. There was an embarrassing interview with the Farquarsons whose descendants had been plantation owners, amidst the evasions and qualifications a ‘slavery was inhuman and cruel’ wasn’t really forthcoming.
In 1738 the British signed a treaty with the Maroons, but they agreed to return any runaways or slaves who had fled within the last two years. They were divided and significantly Nanny of the Maroons didn’t sign. That is another reason why her reputation has thrived and she is now an official ‘Jamaican Hero’.
A fantastic antidote to ‘Amazing Grace’.
Labels: TV
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Bring back the Orphanages!It doesn’t exactly sound like a rallying cry, not in the wake of the abuse scandals, the way that some children were institutionalised and talk to any social worker and they’ll tell you that ‘residential’ is usually full of badly paid, unqualified staff, working unsocial hours.
Phil Frampton’s ‘Insider’ documentary for Channel 4 on Thursday night painted a different picture, his foster placements broke down and he was brought up in a Barnardo’s home in Southport. It wasn’t always clean, he was on occasions beaten and humiliated but he did get to university, along with other children from the home. Siblings stayed together and ‘everyone looked after each other’.
In the last thirty years the numbers in children’s homes has gone down from 25,000 to only 5,000, most placements are now with foster parents - in a ‘family environment’. However, although payments have increased there is a shortage of foster parents, which means that children can be shunted around a succession of short-term placements. One child had had 58 different foster placements, another had to travel one and a half hours to get to school.
There are many excellent, caring, foster parents but there are cases where they are given minimal training and support. A high percentage of placements break down. And as for the ‘family environment’ siblings are often split up with terrible consequences for the children’s mental health. Also it’s not unheard of for foster parents to go on holiday and not take the children they are fostering.
The German ‘Kinderhaus’ system places children in large houses with well-qualified staff, but due to the economies of scale it costs £20,000 per child as opposed to £30,000 in Britain. In Denmark a very high percentage of children in care go on to higher education.
We spend over £1 billion on the care system yet something like a third of homeless people and a high proportion of prison inmates have been through the care system. A higher proportion are in prison than university. It costs about £40,000 a year to incarcerate someone, surely it would be better to spend it on a world class care system – including some well equipped ‘orphanages’ staffed by well qualified professionals?
Phil Frampton's book - The Golly in the Cupboard
