ONE OF MY biggest gripes with documentaries these days is the sense I’m being preached at by some clever dick who has a rolled-up copy of the Guardian for a spine.
Too many of today’s documentaries are flashy nonsense. I can’t think of a nicer way of describing them. Too many shots of the presenter strolling or striding about ancient pavements or entering mysterious tombs and caves, pretending to hack their way through jungles, standing romantically on promontories, staring up in rapt concentration at bits of architecture, and so on, accompanied by mood music.
What makes this worse is the diminishing presence of facts. You end up learning almost nothing.
A couple of years ago I enjoyed a series on ancient Rome, presented by Cambridge classics professor, Mary Beard. In her case only a couple of things annoyed me. One was the way she talked about the Roman Empire as being “multicultural”. Rome wasn’t multicultural, as she must know. It was multi-ethnic but profoundly monocultural: it didn’t matter whether you came from palest Britannia or darkest Egypt, if you were a citizen what mattered most was that you were Roman and espoused Roman values and Roman identity. But Mary Beard couldn’t resist the temptation to slip in a message on behalf of the PC community that multicultural was good and therefore we shouldn’t complain about mass immigration (a belief confirmed by her comments on BBC’s Question Time a year or two later).
The media can’t help but assume the public are a bit thick and need condescending to with some theatrical eccentricity.
I WAS ALSO annoyed by the constant shots of her cycling around Rome in her red coat, her long white locks flapping behind her. There was absolutely no point in it. The eccentric prof image is an old one but the media still can’t resist it. I remember Dr Magnus Pyke waving his arms about on TV back in the 1970s. In real life, of course, he was nothing like that. The media can’t help but assume the public are a bit thick and need condescending to with some theatrical eccentricity.
I’ve also watched programmes on the Egyptians (you can’t go wrong with the ancient ones), including one on the women pharaohs. I have no problem at all with that except that their being women seemed to be the only thing worthy of note about them. The presenter herself kept appearing in her baggy black pants suit and wildly wacky, frizzy red hair, strolling about the desert, entering dark tombs, gazing up raptly, etc, etc. All I can remember her telling us was that one pharaoh was a successful warrior and built lots of stuff. Hardly a great boost for the sisterhood or my appreciation of the ancient world.
I was left with the same knowledge deficit after a documentary on the Taino people of the Caribbean. The knapsack-wearing young chap who was our guide was keen to impress us with the vibrancy, creativity and diversity of these folk but it became evident very soon that all the theories he and others were propounding about the tribe’s religious beliefs and ceremonies, social habits and practices, etc, were founded more on conjecture than archaeological or historical knowledge. At one point he announced the astounding fact that since the Taino lived on islands they got around on boats and traded with other people! I really did think then we had reached the nadir of documentary making.
Anyway, I can sum up what I learned in one sentence: the Taino practised skull modification, ate mainly cassava and fish, made rubbish pots and cave drawings, blew conches, paddled about in boats and got off their heads on a drug called cohoba. During the programme, though, we were given some ridiculous TV. We saw a group of blokes dressed up as original natives, pretending to take cohoba and trip out. I could witness a similar scene any Saturday night in any town in Britain, where the natives get dressed up and wreck their brains with booze — for real. At the end of the programme we watched a group of islanders painted and garbed in “traditional” gear connecting themselves to their ancestors by dancing together and blowing a bloody conch. I endured a whole hour of this and learned less than I could have gleaned from five minutes on Wikipedia.
Since this particular programme was part of a series about pre-Columbian America the subtext was more important than the lack of substance: gold-mad Europeans bad, indigenous druggies good. The Europeans in this case were definitely bad (they were Spanish, after all) but the idea that the Taino were peace-loving, environmentally-aware, proto-hippies is tosh. They fought with other tribes, as all tribes everywhere do, and left little evidence of whatever culture they had to be rediscovered, ie, reinvented, by the current inhabitants of the islands. Ironically, the presenter decried the idea of the Taino as an example of the noble savage while presenting them as just that.
What too many of these programmes are really doing is scratching around in the detritus of the oppressed for some symbols of indigenous superiority over their colonialist overlords (ie, us) because we in the west can never be told often enough how awful our ancestors were and how racist and sexist we are. Hence the rolled-up Guardian for a spine.
