Homeland

Spoiler alerts...

Carrie Mathison is a very creditable addition to the recently burgeoning ranks of socially inept, borderline bonkers female investigators. Claire Danes fully deserved her Golden Globe for this role and overall the show deserved its own gong for Best TV Drama.

That said, it was at its best when it was feeding our interest with the is he or isn't he dynamic through roughly the first seven episodes. Deep down we had to know that he was, but there was enough genuine paranoia knocking around in the head of his principal doubter that we were highly susceptible to this play on our hopes and fears.

After this point the narrative took a stumble, though one suspects it was at least in part a feigned piece of clumsiness. Still, I never felt Homeland quite recovered its composure after that, in spite of the undoubtedly exciting near climax.

I'd already been wondering whether the CIA was really an organisation of rank amateurs led by a kind of David Brent figure when in walked the FBI in order to demonstrate where the show's political leanings really lay. Amateurs they might be, but the folk at Langley were bleeding heart liberals compared to their Quantico-trained counterparts, and this rather arch distinction struck me as pure silliness. And in general the latter stages of the season seemed to be at pains to show off more rounded edges than you will find at your local Apple store.

This story originated on Israeli TV and one suspects that therein lies the origin of some of the detectable stretch marks. In the Middle East the issues are that much more up-close-and-personal, such that I would have fewer problems believing in the figure of the ideologically-flipped front-line soldier. Bring this plot to the US and a more expansive cultural (and geopoltical) reality becomes the backdrop, and somehow in this format, it can't quite jump the credibility hurdle.

The scriptwriters seemed to want to have their cake and eat it here. For Brody to be both a fanatic and yet still a sympathetic figure, a somewhat spurious back story involving a government cover-up has had to be concocted. It's as if we are being asked to consider that the real American equivalent of the UK's native suicide bomber is a Democrat not a Teahadi Republican.

Meanwhile Brody's former partner is permitted to go full-on terrorist without so much as a hint of explanation (or sensitive depictions of the Muslim way of life). So one has to conclude that Marine 1 and Marine 2 represent two unlikely extremes, and thus two cop-outs in terms of addressing why a man out on the sharp edge of the war on terror might 'turn'. I could also not help but notice that the two least sympathetic most blunt-headed characters in the series are the two most prominent African Americans.

There were also a few of the kind of arbitrary plot points that got on my nerves a bit during Forbrydelsen (The Killing)*. Brody is worried that Carrie might goss about their affair and scupper his political career, but surely the fact that he has returned from Iraq a practicing Muslim would be an equally, if not more dangerous piece of personal information to protect?

Anyway, all these caveats aside, I can't wait for the next batch of episodes. I somehow suspect that the Israeli version ended with more of a bang at the end of its first season.

* Like, why would Meyer's last words be a cryptic reference to the design of the killer's sweat shirt and not his surname!

2012, here we come.... (#31)

...But probably too late.

Anyone who saw The Walking Dead this week will know what V was on about when she compared the situation of the zombie in the well to the crisis embedded in the Eurozone.

She reckons that any attempt to extricate said zombie now will have results similar to the one we witnessed on Sunday's show...

(It does look a bit like Silvio Berlusconi as well...)

Torchwood: Miracle Day

How does Torchwood manage to be so consistently entertaining and so annoying at the same time?

John Barrowman observed that the short five episode season in which we last came across Captain Jack and his mortality issues was too short for his taste. Well, now Starz and the Beeb have finally combined to give us some more Torchwood and this time we get ten whole episodes, though once again with an over-arching theme: one day people just stop dying.

The doubling of time available has however allowed a team of writers and directors to use this as a platform for exploring a range of different themes and parallels including concentration camps, gayness and Catholicism and the evil that is corporate PR.

On top of this one has the inevitably rather awkward transatlanticking of the original rather Welsh format, which seems to have been achieved by snapping on some CIA-types who seem to have been imagined using the remarkably similar FBI-types we came across in the doomed ABC series FlashForward. Viewers will recall that this too had a seemingly straightforward premise which became a bit of a mess across the season, but that was really nothing compared to the dog's dinner we have here.

Behind all the campness Torchwood was always a more intelligent series than FlashForward and there were moments in the first four or so episodes when I was genuinely impressed with the way that the consequences of global non-mortality were being thought through. But then it gradually became clear that, even with just ten episodes, the end product would feature unevenly-developed plotlines and characters, of the sort that we became familiar with in longer running US serials like Heroes and Lost, and where one often had the impression that the production team were making things up as they went along. I do hope there's a point to all this overacting by Bill Pullman for example.

Even the central premise of this new Torchwood has started to drift. A few episodes ago a rogue agent had her neck snapped and yet was still on her feet swiping at a moving vehicle. They have such lust for life, someone then observed, suggesting a zombie strand to the narrative, which never really got going. Yet with two espiodes to go we're now apparently back at a situation where one bullet can remove consciousness permanently, which is basically death, and would surely be recognized as such by any sensible society without the need for ovens.

There's another serious problem. Jorge Luis Borges once said that the key to any crime-mystery is that all the suspects have to be there from the start. The person or persons responsible can't just wander in from stage left at the beginning of Act III, but that is essentially what appears to be happening here.

And yet I am enjoying it so....

Toughest Place To Be A....

Last night we watched the first episode of a new BBC three-parter in which various UK professionals are sent out to foreign locations designated as the toughest places to pursue their chosen careers.

Angie Dymott, the Welsh paramedic from Cardiff, handled herself very well during her posting at the Estación de Bomberos Voluntarios in Zona 11, especially as she had never seen a bullet wound before.

Aside from the usual cheap shots about corrupt cops and politicians and the now standard rather throw-away exposition of the relationship between Guatemala's recent past and present, this was a well-made programme. We particularly liked the way Angie got to stay with both the affluent volunteer in his walled 'compound' and the more humilde salaried bombero who resided in a small house with his large family in the pubelo of San Cristóbal.

Overlooking this location, which Dymott thought more typical of a quiet Guatemalan 'village' (in spite of the fact that it was patrolled at night by armed vigilantes) is Ciudad Peronia, where two rival maras, Los Metales and Los Caballos have supposedly reconciled. Even the bomberos seemed reluctant to accompany the Welsh paramedic on her fact-finding mission up the hill where she briefly spoke to an ex-gang leader who has now found God and drives a bus: perhaps not the best career choice for someone looking to get out of 'the life'. The interview was cut short when the gang's current intake passed in several vehicles revving their engines.

Archie, her first mentor, took his charge to the extraordinary Fraternidad Cristiana auditorium, which she clearly found moving. He's a full-time marketing executive who gives up some of his weekend to work with the Bomberos Voluntarios, and although his first dead body apparently gave him a sleepless night, his present attitude is clearly more desensitised. I quote my cousin Philip on this, as he was the one who flagged up to us the imminent broadcast of this documentary:

"She was totally shocked on the first shout when her mentor told her to forget it. He was handling it, breaking into smiles and grins, almost reveling in the power of life and death. No, there is nothing here to save, he's been shot five times, he's dead. She had to accept it and give up her conditioned response; we have to try something."

Next week it's the turn of bus driver Josh, who must be thanking his lucky stars that they sent the paramedic to Guatemala, while he got to go to tough it out on the streets of Manila.

Sherlock

In his time off between Doctor Who seasons Russel T. Davies gave us Torchwood. His successor Stephen Moffat will be keeping us entertained during the break with Sherlock, in which Conan Doyle's much loved characters have been chrono-shunted into early twenty-first century London.

Methinks this is a format that will go down a little better across the pond than 'oversexed alien-chasers in Cardiff.' Indeed, Sherlock may in a sense be what we get instead of Captain Jack and his (now mostly dead) merry crew.

As the eponymous freelance detective, Benedict Cumberbatch charges around in a long overcoat much like that habitually worn by John Barrowman in Torchwood, and it's hard not to characterise this version of Holmes as what you'd get if you merged Jack Harkness with the last of the Timelords, with a side-effect of the process being that this new TV persona comes out as a 'high functioning sociopath'. (whilst retaining a propensity for casual sexual encounters even less pronounced than the Doctor's.)

Anyway, this is a great new series and confirms my opinion of Señor Moffat as possibly the best writer-producer working in British television at the moment. I can't understand why he hasn't already buggered off to LA. He's using up an awful lot of really brilliant ideas on the small screen.

This is a Sherlock Holmes who has few friends and barely functions in the modern urban world, and yet maintains a website called The Science of Deduction and has a comprehensive understanding of neoteric gadgets (including the particular marks that drunks leave on the side of their mobiles when plugging in the charger.) The series may have a zippy modernity that bares comparison with the various CSI productions, yet Moffat has cleverly brought forward enough of a Victorian aesthetic into contemporary London crime-fighting that Holmes and Watson don't appear as two fictional characters adrift in this new temporal setting.

All in all, superb, and a great pity that there will only be four episodes in the first season. They might actually have cut these up a bit more, because the first two have seemed just a little overlong. (90 mins.)

Rick Stein and the Japanese Ambassador

This mouthwatering show began with an invitation. His Excellency Yoshiji Nogami — the Japanese Ambassador in London — suggested to Rick that he take himself off to Tokyo in order to absorb some of the deep cultural underpinnings of the Japanese relationship with fish. He should then return and design a suitable banquet at the Ambassador's residence for a handful of special guests.

Stein had already been informed that he'd got his Cornish mackerel sushi all wrong. You don't — as he once did on air — just cut up the freshly caught fish and serve it on a little chunk of rice. 'Raw' it may be, but first it has to coated in salt in order to firm up over a couple of hours before being seasoned in a marinade of water, sugar, mirin and kombu (edible kelp). The same technique is applied to sashimi and helps remove any fishy odours.

Sushi wasn't going to feature at Rick's London banquet anyway as when he visited Tsukiji the chef on the right — below — duly informed him that it takes about ten years to learn how to prepare it. (After joking that he'd been a taxi driver until four days earlier.)



I'm glad Stein went to this particular little sushi joint inside Tsukiji because it was one of the highlights of my trip yet by the time I'd queued up and been shown to my place at the bar my camera's battery was dead and I was unable to take any snaps inside. (Many of the pics I was able to take can be seen here.)


The maguro one finds in Antigua these days tends to come from Florida. Rumour has it that the gringo owner of Nokiate used to import his in an ice box inside his suitcase until he got rumbled at the airport.

My neighbour is a Florida fisherman and has filled me in on some of the deeper anxieties of his trade. In the case of tuna you need to get the fish in the boat within about 30 seconds after it catches on the line because the adrenalin released when it starts to fight will eventually increase the acidity within the flesh.



I tested out this little board of tuna sashimi above (one piece already eaten BTW) when lunching with Rudy at Ubi's this week. It was certainly delicious, but not quite a match for the melt in the mouth stuff they serve at the world's largest wholesale fish market.

Sushi has become a form of globalised, aspirational fast food. A couple of decades ago there were hardly any sushi restaurants in London, but they're all over the place now. Antigua Guatemala has at least three now too. In Britain the miniature conveyor-belt model predominates, but I only once saw one of these in Japan (at the Sony showroom) and this had little plates of cake going around it. (Very artistic they were too.)



Nothing compares really with the Japanese way of preparing and presenting this food, as evidenced by the selection of screen shots I took last night from Rick Stein's programme.

By the end of it we both wanted to get on the next flight to Tokyo and V's long neglected project to acquire a live-in Japanese cook is back on the table, so to speak. The Ambassador surely won't want to part with the pair who did most of the work on the night in the embassy kitchen:


It seems that the colours white, green, yellow, black, green and red predominate in Japanese cuisine. (White and red, the colours of the flag are especially favoured.) Freshness and seasonality is all important. The sashimi in the pic below was made with red bream, sea snail, tuna and prawns amongst other things.


Stein and his researcher Takako were also given a very special banquet in their honour by Japan's former (unpopular) PM Yoshirō Mori.



The sashimi course (one of eight) arrived at the table covered by little igloos...



...a technique Rick Stein borrowed for the London banquet:

Britain rises to the TV challenge

In a gloomy, wet weekend that had its disappointments, a beacon of light was provided by the finale of series five of the new Doctor Who.

Complex ideas literally fizz out of Matt Smith's Doctor, indicating a pleasing determination on the part of new producer Steven Moffat not to pander to the Saturday evening lumpen-publikum like his predecessor. Ratings have dropped, but a certain carry on in South Africa may have contributed to this.

As someone who started watching Doctor Who as far back as 1971, I can honestly say that Matt Smith is by far the most inherently fascinating incarnation of the Time Lord yet. His comic timing is spot on. And Karen Gillan is also the strongest of the companions since Russell T. Davies rebooted the concept in 2005.

Even V is now hooked, and she used to regard catching up with the series as a bit of a chore. (Me too at times, I have to admit.) Now she can't wait for the Christmas special.

For so long British TV drama has lagged behind the output from across the pond. But now there are several multi-season shows from the BBC which are worthy of comparison, such as Survivors, which started off so terribly, but has pulled itself up to become one of the most gripping and well-written TV narratives in the UK.

The opposite appeared to happen with the now defunct US show Heroes which showed so much initial promise before declining into incoherence.

FlashForward (now also cancelled) had an interesting premise and also seemed keen to suck in audiences beyond the geek heartland, but its self conscious soapiness created a terminal inbalance in both plot and character. Viewers of Survivors can find more and more reasons to care about its characters (even the flawed Tom), but FlashForward's former stalwarts were surely struggling to give a hoot about its central FBI team and the various conspirators who rather conveniently tagged along with them.

The show that was supposed to herald a new era in sophisticated American TV drama was of course David Simon's The Wire, a series retrospectively praised recently in the LRB by Michael Wood:

"Part of the lure of The Wire, of course, is its drawn-out storylines. Not only are there multiple narratives in any given episode, but a single complex story threads its way through a whole season. This is a method that creates both a sort of viewing leisure, and an unusual, slow-burning suspense. Richard Price, the author of Clockers and Lush Life, who worked on several episodes, calls The Wire a ‘Russian novel of an HBO series’, and Simon himself is fond of this metaphor too, speaking of ‘a novel for television’ "

Multi-strandedness for the masses duly arrived in the form of Lost, which concluded with a bit of a splutter last month after six seasons. WTF? its loyal fanbase asked. What happened to time travel, the Dharma initiative etc. After so many possibilities had been opened and so few of them closed, the final set-down was the very one we could all have guessed back in 2004 without having to tear our hair out over what exactly was the matter was with Desmond.

This may in part explain why the writers had given the illusion (unlike those of Heroes say) of knowing exactly where the longer narrative was going at any one time. In the end I would rather they had focused less on creating new characters and themes in the final season and more on tying up the loose ends from the previous ones.

What was so impressive about Moffat's creative contribution to the new incarnation of Doctor Who was the way he weaved a series of threads through all the stories, his own and those of other contributing writers, and then properly tied them back in the concluding double-episode.

David Simon's new show Treme, set in New Orleans, is currently running on HBO. I watched the start of the first espiode and thought hmmm, this is a bit heavy.

I'm still following Dexter and True Blood because these are not only well-written but also a bit less up themselves than some of the aforementioned offerings. The writers of Dexter have certainly surprised me with their ability to keep up (and even extend) interest in this character and I'm looking forward to season five in September...though V's not a fan, largely because she hates voiceovers.

The updated version of V is also quite fun. It's a bit soapy like FlashForward, but the cast is much stronger and it seems to have a better (and simpler) idea about how it's going to generate the necessary dramatic tension going forward. It has yet to be scrapped by the network too.

It's possible that a whole generation of the best writers in America have moved from the silver screen to the LCD/Plasma screen, but the jury is still out on whether they have fully realised the potential which we all anticipated in the mid part of the last decade. But the Brits are now catching up for sure. And we don't have that annoying tendency to cancel shows before any kind of satisfactory wrap-up can be achieved.

Wonders of the Solar System

Watching this series on the Beeb recently we learned that there are essentially only two worlds in our solar system with 'Earth-like' characteristics and that there are essentially only two outfits in Brian Cox's suitcase. (He's wearing the warm weather version here in Arizona/ 'Mars'.)

Jamie's American Roadtrip (2)

This is Jamie Oliver's viejahijue face.

His trademark cockney chirpiness was noticeably absent in the kitchen of Leah Chase, proprietor of New Orleans's famous Dooky Chase restaurant. When the 86-year-old veteran suggested that he might not know how to chop an onion, he went about demonstrating his skills with such unbuttoned release that he was lucky to escape from her kitchen with all ten digits intact.

Blighty's most famous Essex boy was in there to learn how to prepare a gumbo, but when Ms Chase finally served up her preeminant version, he repaid her for the patronising jabs he'd been repeatedly subjected to by damning it with faint praise ("a thick broth...quite meaty.")...and later added that she'd given him the 'cheat's' gumbo, and that he'd have to read up elsewhere to really get a handle on this dish.

Leah Chase had to shut down for two years after Katrina until she'd raised the $500k required to repair her diner. Jamie made a poor job of looking interested as she related the painful recovery process, but did make hurricanes the theme of this fourth episode, declaring that he was on a quest to discover how food could make people want to carry on living in a place subjected to regular natural disasters. "I'd be well out of there..."

Having moved on into the Cajun countryside — where he was invited to deliver the coup-de-grace to an alligator destined for his pan — Jamie reflected that this part of the Union is "intimate, small, special and quaint", not "the machine" with which many people (in Essex?) associate America.

He got to grips with a 'Cajun microwave' and prepared a lomito of pork coated in ground bay leaves and stuffed with spicy Louisiana sausage. (This one doesn't seem to have made it into the recipe book, but the Cajun alligator with sweet potato and salsa did. Well useful.)

The programme was dedicated to the late, great Keith Floyd, inventor of the alcohol-fuelled gastro-odyssey on British screens. The essential difference between Keith and Jamie would seem to be that the latter gets mullered AFTER cooking and is thus more likely to be seen cooking with a hangover, than sploshing wine all over his glass and wok at the same time.

Jamie's American Roadtrip (1)

Last night we caught up with the first three episodes of this recent channel four series, recommended to me by the accompanying recipe book which I picked up from Amazon in January.

The cheeky mockney's first stop was LA, where he promised us his culinary education would be more gangland than glam. He visited the kitchens of Homeboy Industries, an enterprise for lapsed gangbangers and chilled out with former 'blood' Rigo who now cooks the breakfast at the Four Seasons. Together they went to Redondo Beach where Jamie borrowed the mackerel some Chinese men were using as bait to prepare what looked like first class fish tacos.

Oliver had earlier remarked that while Mexican food in the UK is all stodge, starch and cheese, but added that he was expecting to find something more interesting and authentic in the parts of LA he'd never before dared to venture into. Sure enough, he was soon initiated into mole and was reworking these flavours into an indulgent chocolate mole tart with cloves, chillies, cinammon, toffee fudge and dulce de leche. Jamie's Spanish is actually a form of pidgin Italian which he no doubt picked up off his old mentor Gennaro.

Then in the next episode, he was off to Wisconsin to hang out with colourful characters such as 'Hip' and Tucker Zing who introduced him to rodeo, Dutch ovens, calf castration and eating slabs of cow cooked by sticking them onto pitchforks before dunking them (unseasoned) into huge cauldrons of boiling fat. The scenery was majestic and the cowboys as enigmatic as characters in a Mccarthy novel.

We were intrigued by the way folk up there use coffee to keep meat moist and add an extra note of flavour to their roasts.

In part three Oliver rented a flat in Queens where he could sit on the bed with his Macbook Pro looking, for a change, like someone we might have to take seriously, because of all the intellectual books on the shelves around him. In the neighbourhood of Astoria he helped a wonderful Egyptian chef prepare flatbreads and secured an invitation to an unregistered Peruvian eatery down in Jackson Heights.

For his own Peruvian ceviche he combines the juice of three lemons with a pair of chopped chiles and a teaspoon of salt and allows his cubes of fresh fish to cook in this mixture for around two and a half minutes. He then adds chopped spring onions and capiscums, mint, coriander and maybe also mustard cress and fennel tops. It wouldn't be a Jamie Oliver recipe if he didn't also drizzle some extra virgin olive oil over it as well. (Here's a slightly less oily and salty recipe with camote and corn.)

Jamie's Big Apple adventure concluded with a supper party where he prepared the "shavishe" (rhymes with Italian mobsters' "capishe?") described above, and donated the funds thus obtained to a Colombian called Jorge who every night feeds 80+ illegals on New York's streets for free.

The Seven Ages of Britain

Watch out Simon Schama and Andrew Mars, another BBC stalwart is after a piece of your vanity history programme action!

We're four ages into David Dimbleby's (public) schoolboy history of the British Isles, and so far I can't remember him having mentioned Scotland once.

The concept is simple: Tell the story of English (er British) history by visiting the key national treasures which can be plotted against a narrative familiar to readers of 1066 And All That.

This way people who had big jewels (such as Alfred the Great and Francis Drake) or big gaffs (Romans, Henry VIII) can come to the forefront and all those toiling plebs can be discounted. Indeed, the revolting peasants didn't even merit a mention during Dimbleby's extended paean to the magnificent lifestyle of Richard II. (That's his Queen's crown being contemplated in the pic above.)



In this week's episode we were astounded to see Dimbleby finally donning a pair of protective gloves before handling a volume in the Pepys Library. Up until then he's apparently had no qualms about whipping through the pages of priceless manuscripts with uncovered mitts, poking his ballpoint at delicate Sutton Hoo trinkets, or stomping all over Roman mosaic flooring.

All in all, the best thing currently on the EBC...er, the BBC.

TV Viewing Diary: Christmas

While the best programmes on American TV seem to take a break for the 'holidays', Christmas is celebrated in the UK with a host of big ticket productions.

Foremost amongst these perhaps was the Beeb's showing of a digitally-animated adaptation of The Gruffalo on Christmas Day. Featuring the voice talents of John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Helena Bonham-Carter, this 30-minute film was utterly charming and helped dispel the notion I once had that the story was a kind of poor man's Where The Wild Things Are. (It also helps to know that Julia Donaldson penned the text some time before Axel Scheffler came up with his design for the eponymous beastie.)

David Tennant appeared in the RSC's production of Hamlet as the titular Danish procrastinator, and in his more familiar role as maverick Time Lord in Russell T. Davies's final production of Doctor Who. This special was split in two and broadcast on Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and encapsulated many of the reasons we've been sad to see Tennant go, but perhaps a little less tristes to see the back of the series's erstwhile re-inventor. Having twice the time to deliver one of his at once over-sentimental and histrionic finales, Davies appeared unable to consistently maintain plot momentum and coherence, and part one of The End of Time was filled with plenty of the pointless running around waste-land environments which so characterised the original series.

He then had viewers craving for an definitive end in a stuttering epilogue sequence reminiscent of The Return of the King. Still, it was enjoyable in places, especially for the way John Simms's The Master morphed himself onto the entire human race with a twsited juvenile grin and for Timothy Dalton's turn as the very un-Obama-like President of Gallifrey.

Jumping back on the twin zeitgeist bandwagons of poular sci-fi and global apocalypse the BBC also gave a festive showing to a stinky new adaptation of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Back in the 60s the plot had holes big enough to drive a Mini through. You might have thought an updated re-telling would involve a form of modernisation geared to bolstering believability, but no, writer Patrick Harbinson has gone the other way, expanding the plot holes to the point that you could drive a whole herd of cattle through them...let alone an (?) of triffids. (He seems especially keen to dodge the question of how these killer plants move around concrete urban spaces.)

To wit, Eddie Izzard's character Torrance enters the story as the only passenger on a jumbo to have kept his sight by sleeping through the cosmic light show and then survives the plane's coming down in the middle of W1 by locking himself in the loo protected only by a few inflated life-vests. (Is the first action of blind airline crew to turn off the autopilot?)

Do Vanessa Redgrave and daughter Joely Richardson now always come as a two-for-one deal? Anyway, not since her strops in Nip/Tuck has the latter given such excrutiatingly dire renditions of sharp emotion. And, as if to emphasise the problem of her acting ability Harbinson has given her some of the drama's most idiotic lines.

Considerably more bearable was the Sandy Welch adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw starring Michelle Dockery aired last Wednesday. Re-located to good effect in 1921 as Britain recovered from the 'death' of the Edwardian era in the trenches of the Great War, it showed considerable promise until the rather too lifelike figure of Peter Quint started popping out from behind trees. James's ambiguity is for me almost impossible to render accurately on screen, but that's never stopped people from trying over and over again. This version clearly wanted to have its postmodern cake and eat it: yes the ghosts are there and yes the governess is sex-starved and bonkers.

TV Viewing Diary: The World's Strictest Parents

This is the only episode of this series that I've tuned into and but I can't imagine there can many pairs of British teens more suited to exportation to the developing world...in this case Belmopan, Belize and the home of the Perez family.

Calvin and Rosie are soon pulling all kinds of strops as the discipline and worth ethic of their hosts is applied. A tipping point of sorts is reached when Mrs Perez threatens to tip them both outdoors, mattresses and all, unless they hand over their fags.

The BBC of course can't afford to be sued by the parents of reality TV participants with avoidable malaria infections, so the 'larning experience' proper seems to kick in from then on, with both teens appearing to have their perspectives rearranged by a stint at the Liberty foster home.

The programme suggests that its that much harder for children who have been abandoned by their natural fathers to learn respect for authority. It also reminded me of many of the reasons why I have come to admire the core values of the sociological midrift of our neighbouring nation.

TV Viewing Diary: Ugly Beauty

Waldemar Januszczak is unquestionably a more captivating presenter than Matthew Collings and clearly knows it; his contribution to BBC2's Beauty series was superficially more stimulating, but upon reflection...all over the shop.

You might think that all of modern art is ugly, corrupt and out to shock, he posits at the start, but watching my self-indulgent tour of Venice and whatever's showing there at the time will soon cure you of this misapprehension, he adds, sort of.

From then on we're not really sure if the documentary is about the beauty of ugliness, the ugliness of beauty...or even whether it is anything but an idiosyncratic sub-section of modern art that is the focus of all this enthusiasm.

So, as with Collings the topic is diced up into several categories of beauty of undefined size and importance, with an assortment of examples supplied:

— THE BEAUTY OF EMPTINESS
He takes a rowing boat out into the lagoon in order to talk about the 'cosmic haziness' of Turner. Anish Kapoor's reverie-inducing sculptures and the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto also feature.

— THE BEAUTY OF DEATH
Art, he offers, is about finding beauty in our short, meaningless existence. So Damian Hirst's dead flesh in a perspex box belongs to an age-old traditon.

— THE BEAUTY OF MOTHERHOOD
An odd choice, that one. He turns back to Tiepolo to show us how artists have given us visions of motherhood based on our hopes rather than facts. And then he's waxing lyrical about the poetic art of Yoko Ono. (Motherhood??)

— THE BEAUTY OF TEXTURE
Seemingly ugly 'found' textures can be ravishing, Januszczak asserts. Spanish artist Jorge Otero-Pailos has preserved the last dirty wall in the Doge's palace by taking an impression using a latex skin. While the marks of pollution — and a certain amount of history — have now been erased from the real thing, Otero-Pailos's recreation of the pre-restoration surface with all of its skanky textures has been put on show at the Biennale.

There's truth in this, for I have certainly found the little chapels along the Calle de los Pasos and the facade of the cathedral itself a bit less 'ravishing' since they were treated to a paint job.

This section also included an aside on Karl André the 'balladier of the banal' and Jeff Koons, purveyor of the ugly beauty of kitsch — which 'looks dumb but isn't' and addresses our 'deep appetite for shallow things'.

— THE BEAUTY OF THE NIGHT
Suddenly we've left Venice and gone to Tokyo, where the neon-lit skyline has inspired artists like Tatsuo Miyajima. I was rather taken with his Sea of Time, where little red electric numbers flicker in a still pool.

— THE BEAUTY OF MYSTERY
Essentially the kind of aesthetic experience you have when you see something that makes you think 'How friggin' random is that!'. Example: Maurizio Cattelan's horse.

TV Viewing Diary: Horizon

This season's Horizon has been top draw — indeed, a full recovery has been made after the tie-up with Discovery had led initially to a downmarket drift.

Perhaps the best programme so far was the one presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has replaced Richard Dawkins as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. (And are far more down-to-earth incumbent of that chair he certainly makes.)

— Who, where, what am 'I'? the intrepid Oxford mathmo asked.

And so he takes himself off to Berlin in order to submit himself to an experiment which demonstrates the disconcerting fact that our brain activity indicates which way we are going to go on specific decisions some time before we are consciously aware of 'making a choice'. In the case of Du Sautoy the experimenter knew what he was going to do a full SIX SECONDS before he did. (He'd earlier sat beside the conveyor-belt at a sushi bar just so we knew what he meant by choice.)

As one would expect, he had some sensible things to say about the implications of this finding for our moral being. Although science has discovered that consciousness is in some senses a retroactive story that our minds tell themselves in order to justify a more 'parallel' process of interaction with the world, this kind of 'determination' should not in any way excuse the individual from any blame for the consequences of his or her actions — our consciousness is encoded in the deeper mind and in a sense our ethical biases become encoded in there too.

Therefore, in some ways our "I" is our brain's report on itself. Earlier however, Du Sautoy met up with Professor Henrik Ehrsson who has a trick for demonstrating that one's "I" might be said to be little more than an interpretative illusion.

Du Sautoy was made to put on a VR headset which treated his eyes to the images transmitted from a pair of cameras fixed on a chair directly behind him. "I am three feet behind myself," he observed, feeling somewhat transplanted.

Things got really fun when Ehrsson brought a hammer into the lab and started attacking Du Sautoy's displaced consciousness...and the out of body experience was complete when he wore the cameras himself, tricking Du Sautoy into thinking he'd become the Swede.

Professor Christof Koch also related the bizarre story of 'concept neurons'. One of his patients possesses a single neuron which will only fire whenever he sees either a pic of Jennifer Anniston or her name in print. (It remains obstinately unmoved by Brad Pitt however.)

Syntax Era

I took this pic at the Science Museum in London back in 2002.

Many (...many) years before I had had my first encounter with a computer in there. I typed in my name at the prompt and the black & white screen then diplayed "Hello Guy!". I was totally thrilled; as far as I was concerned it might just as well have been Hal 9000.

The BBC's one-off TV drama Micro Men (working title 'Syntax Era') tracks the rivalry from 1978-1985 between (Sir) Clive Sinclair and his former employee Chris Curry who went on to form Acorn Computers.

These were the bubble years of the micro-computer. It seems that Curry had the idea first but couldn't distract Sinclair from his fantasies about personal transportation. Sinclair was still, as was his wont, first to market with the ZX80 (see above, the little white door wedge beside the Apple II), but then Curry and his colleagues won the contract to make the BBC Micro under license.

Sinclair responded by trying to outflank Acorn with a move upmarket (The hideous QL or Quantum Leap) while Curry did the opposite, trying to steal some of the ZX Spectrum's gaming thunder with his Electron. Neither machine sold well and the champagne days came to an end.

For years Britain (and Cambridge geeks in particular) had led the way with 'personal' computing but surrendered the advantage to large-scale American and Asian enterprises. "We could have been the British IBM!" Curry snarls at Sinclair at one point, and the narrative here does suggest strongly that both men became distracted by their feud and might have done better to collaborate from the start.

One of the great Cambridge pubs, the Baron of Beef on Bridge Street, is the scene for some of the central encounters between the warring entrepreneurs. The last time I was in there it was just after collecting my 'free upgrade' MA in 1993, so I wasn't entirely sure if they'd shot in the real interior. In my day the floor was still covered in sawdust.

Sinclair had made the first slimline calculator and the first digital watch, but it seems he never really believed in the tranformational powers of computing and even today recoils from the Internet. He appears to have simply spotted an opportunity to significantly undercut the Apple II (the largest machine above) and the Commodore Pet on price, calculating that he could make hundreds of thousands of people desire a home computer even if they had no idea what they were going to do with it.

The drama concludes with bittersweet footage of Sir Clive (whose company Sinclair Research recently comprised himself and er...nobody else) in his C5 being passed by big lorries emblazoned with the logos of Microsoft and Compaq. Anyone for an A-Bike?

Tony Saint's script is gently funny and full of nostalgic touches, playing with the counterintuitive notion of Sir Clive's sexual magnetism. The Office's Martin Freeman is an always likeable presence and comedian Alexander Armstrong has a good turn as the irascible inventor. (Though his slaphead/ginger scalp prosthetic looks like it could be more firmly attached with Blu Tack like the RAM unit on the ZX80.)

{Full disclosure: I have a ZX81 and a BBC 'B' in a box in my storeroom here in Guatemala!}

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (1)

Presented by Oxford University's muy simpatico Professor of the History of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch, this new BBC series has set about tracking each of the key moments which have given the Christian faith the structures we see today.

This is not a history of theology, he informed us at the start, but a history of the church — a rather convenient excuse for not addressing controversies with contemporary resonance such as the historical origins of the Gospels — and yet he was quickly tackling the doctrinal scrap surrounding the teachings of Arius which led to the Council of Nicea in 325 and the imperially-imposed compromise we now know as the Holy Trinity.

Further dissention within the early church was largely condensed by MacCulloch. In a Constantinople restaurant he mixed water with oil and water with wine in order to explain the respective positions of Archbishop Nestorius and Pope Cyril of Alexandria on the manner in which the human and divine were combined in Jesus. Nestorius was exiled and then partially rehabilitated at the Council of Chalcedon. (He was also condemned for insisting that the Virgin should be described as the Mother of Christ not the Mother of God.)

Yet the first really significant bifurcation occurred when some early missionaries took the eastern road out of Jersualem, whilst others headed west into the empire which in 70AD had sacked the Temple and generally trashed the city, thereby uprooting Christianity from its origins as a Jewish sect.

Eastern Christianity was never to have a Constantine moment, was never to acquire the friends in high places enjoyed by its western equivalent. Still, MacCulloch makes his way to China, finding there an east-facing Buddhist pagoda (pictured), once a seventh century Christian mission, and learns that under the Tang Dynasty Christianity was known as 'the religion of light'. Its adherents were predominantly merchants, and so lacked the characteristic arms-bearing attitude of the Latin church.

Many eastern Christians remained pre-Chalcedon in outlook, rejecting the fudge imposed by the Byzantine emperor. The Church of the East, based for 1500 years (up to 2003!) in Baghdad, was one of these, and its members played a significant role in the translation of ancient Greek texts by the Abbasids.

The Syriac Orthodox church based in Damascus has a liturgy which is rich in symbolic gesture. A priest explained to the intrepid historian that unlike western theology, which has always been 'rational' and philosophical, the Syriac faith (encapsulated and transmitted in a near-relative of Aramaic) could have been knocked up by a poet.

Today Christianity is perceived as an integral part of the 'western' cultural offering, but these ancient eastern offshoots suggest that things could easily have been different, MacCulloch concluded. He even located a friendly Islamic scholar in Damascus willing to admit that the Muslim practice of praying from a prostrated five-times a day was borrowed from the ways of early christians in the east.

Casa del Rio

A while ago we watched amiable design historian David Heathcote making the most of a night at this highly unusual property in Devon. It was the fantasy home of a baker-entrepreneur — the man who brought sliced bread to Britain no less — and he'd chosen as his model the 'Hollywood Hispanic' mansion of actor Douglas Fairbanks.

It's the kind of house that periodically crops up on the listings of my mate Maddie in Miami, but which is altogether less likely to appear amongst the real estate ads at the back of Country Life.

When first constructed, it sat alone atop a hillside overlooking a cove-like valley. Today, the river below is chocker with modest west country pleasure cruisers and the Casa del Rio has acquired some less glamourous neighbours.

In the garden one can glimpse the ghost of a turfed-over swimming pool surrounded by stately isotales (con todo y su flor). The not-quite central feature of the main house is a magnificent marble spiral staircase balustraded with meandering ironwork.

The glossy floor at the base quotes the alternating black and white Art Deco motif seen also within the lobby at Claridges. (V hated it there and she hates it here too!)



I'd say that Casa del Rio is eye-catching rather than beautiful and its exterior and tejado roof must look like even more of a folly during the dark winter months. It's available to hire for parties at a cost of just under £2000 for three nights.

The BBC4 series covering the inter-war years has been fascinating, if occasionally repetitive. There's only so many times one can learn that cocktails were invented to disguise the taste of bootleg booze, for example. But what with re-reading Tender is the Night, I suppose I am going through a bit of a 'Deco' phase myself now.

GEM in LAG

Robert aka GEM (Gringo en México) appears to have run out of Mexican locations to which he can take his peculiar brand of geniality, and so has passed down the isthmus and into Central America for his latest series. Last night he was here in La Antigua Guatemala, providing viewers with a slightly unrepresentative tour.

Up early to visit the parque central, he was soon enough declaiming his mantra — "tengo hambre" — and so set off to the Santo Domingo for desayuno.

The chef in that fine establishment might have made more of an effort with the typical breakfast that Robert was duly served up; not even the cameraman seemed especially interested in this bodoquito of frijoles, accompanied by two slices of plantain and a couple of fried eggs, with a tea-spoon of chirmol tipped over them. Attention quickly switched to the bowl of chiltepe sauce. "Peeka!"

He'd have been better off going to the 'Panzón Verde' for an albeit less typical — but very nicely turned out — plate of Eggs Benedict. (Pictured below.)

But afterwards Robert still repeated "comi rico" whilst rubbing his panza. Thus fuelled up, he next visited the Colonial and Vigua museums within the ruins of the friary, along the way flirting with Olga and Xiomara — the two indíenas stationed strategically on a pathway near the pool, beside substantial piles of huipiles and other piezas típicas.

"Te vemos en la tele siempre Robert," they told him.

Lorenzo Gottscha of Valhalla was his host for a tour of the various contraptions they've knocked up there for husking and sorting their harvest of macadamia nuts. Robert seemed pleased to have found a fellow speaker of colourful gringo Spanish, but Lorenzo clearly didn't want to address him directly at all during his visit, speaking instead at the invisible producer somewhere behind camera. (The crew's PNC escort was caught giggling in the background.)

GEM's appetite was then better served (he'd already eaten pancakes at Valhalla) at the Posada Don Rodrigo where he tucked into a set of well presented typical Guatemalan dishes, such as Caldo de Gallina, Pepián and Pollo con Crema y Loroco...though after the caldo he didn't exactly throw himself at the rest of the meal with his accustomed gusto. We've all been there...

Someone really ought to have told Robert that it's not the done thing here to say "óoorale!" every time a new dish is brought to your table.

No presidential-style gira of Antigua would be complete without a trip to Jades SA, where Robert got some quite shocking responses to his signature "cuantow cooesta aystee?

Next week, he will be heading off to Pana.

Nick Griffin's 'PR coup'

A record 8m people tuned into this week's edition of Question Tme which featured the debut appearance of recently-elected MEP Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.



Radio 4's Sue MacGregor has since accused the Beeb of setting the 'attack dogs' against Griffin, a tactic which could only have led, she suggests, to many viewers feeling increased sympthy for the BNP.

On the night senior politicians from the 'mainstream' parties did appear to be congratulating themselves on how they had run circles around this rather obviously stupid, yet nonetheless cunning and shifty derechista.

Bonny Greer even told us that we should regard the BNP's take on the 'indigenous' history of the British Isles as a work of comedy. (Though her characterisation of the Roman Empire as multicultural and tolerant and the Celts as recent African emigrés seemed almost equally potted....and she wasn't laughing when he desribed the Ku Klux Klan as 'non-violent'.)

Griffin's taunters on the panel collectively concluded that the British people had far too much nouse to take this nasty man and his nasty politics seriously. In fact, after the show a poll indicated that 22% of viewers would 'seriously' consider voting for the BNP. (Griffin currently represents roughly 1/60th of the UK electorate.)

This is the age-old problem of voters being unduly impressed by politicians who say in public the sort of things these voters only think in private....thereby disregarding the obvious truth that such politicians must also think things in private that they are reluctant to come out with in public.

Only the Conservatives appeared to have come with the intention of scoring some points against the government, and embarrassing the suddenly comparably shify Jack Straw on the issue of border controls. Indeed, the Tories' all too transparent ploy here was to place 'ethnic' party members on the panel and in the audience so as to snipe at Labour's record on immigration, without seeming to side with that odious creep sitting next to Ms Greer.

Earlier Straw had his own comedy moment when he said that, as Justice Minister, he could of course personally guarantee that Griffin would be able to speak in confidence on the BBC about his Holcaust doubts without fear of any long-range EU lawsuits.

It was a bizarre spectacle overall: the normally nerdy and clubbish arena of British politics suddenly beset by a name-calling, American-style culture war, where bug-eyed ideology overwhelms the traditional anglo-saxon virtues of common sense and a more sober, empirical 'fervour' for the facts.

Talking of Anglo-Saxons, nobody took the opportunity to point out to Griffin that they had perpetrated their own uncontrolled immigration a very long time after the end of the last Ice Age.

The most positive spin one could put on the whole thing is that by drawing Griffin and his party out of the shadows and into the discredited mainstream of British politics, they too will end up discredited by association!