Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

The box match

All my other lists were easy and non-controversial. You all agreed with me on best movies , best books, important non-fiction, and popular songs.

But now here is the big one - television series. I've come up with 21 drama series, a mixture of American, British and Australian gems. I haven't generally included series based on classic novels (eg Dickens, Jane Austin) although in the case of "Brideshead" and "Forsyte Saga" and "Jewel in the Crown" I think the television series became classics in their own right, so they are included. Hey, no rule says I have to be consistent.
Angels over America
Boys from the blackstuff
Brideshead Revisited
Carnivale
Edge of Darkness
Forsyte Saga (original)
Grass Roots
Hamish McBeth
Have gun will travel
Hill Street Blues
Jewel in the crown
Northern Exposure
Pennies from heaven
Sea Change
Singing detective
Six Feet Under
Sopranos
Talking to a Stranger
This Life
Twin peaks
West Wing
Not easy of course. You tend to put more weight on series seen more recently. And in any case it is very difficult to assess the older ones. The only really old one I've included is "Have gun will travel" but I haven't seen that in 40 years and have no idea how well it would hold up. Still, at the time, I was aware that it was quality as distinct from the fluff of say "Bonanza" or "Gunsmoke". "Talking to a stranger" is not much younger, and again I haven't seen it in 40 years, but I am certain it would have aged well. Looking back I think there is no doubt that the quality of the best series has improved enormously in recent years, while there is simultaneously much more rubbish.

Something that surprised me about the list, and the mental ranking I was doing, was this. I had always assumed that British television drama was by far the best, but in recent years I have changed my view. The reason is this. If you match up the relatively short drama series then there is no doubt that the British are best. It is only in recent years that American series like "Carnivale" and "Twin Peaks" and "Angels over America" have matched the quality of the short British drama series. But on the other hand the British have done nothing that can remotely match the sustained quality, season after season, of "The West Wing", "Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under". And of those three, "West Wing" while brilliant in dialogue, is a set piece with characters who don't really develop: and "The Sopranos", while having dialogue and character development among the best ever created, is relatively limited by its setting. Which leaves "Six Feet Under" as, in my opinion, the greatest sustained TV drama ever created. Not British, American.

Comedy was even harder of course. It ages and dates very badly. Series that I would once have included as classics - "Steptoe and Son", "The Goodies", "The Young Ones", "Last of the Summer Wine", "MASH", even the recent "Friends", don't hold up well to viewing again now. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, embarrassingly bad. Humour changes over time, and it has geographic limits that make it very difficult to translate (note the ruin of British comedy shows translated into American and lost in translation). So this list is very tentative -
Black Books
Brittas Empire
Coupling
Dads Army
Drop the dead donkey
Father Ted
Fawlty Towers
Malcolm in the middle
Marion and Geoff
Monty Python
Mother and Son
People Like Us
Red Dwarf
Seinfeld
The Office
Yes Minister

Now in contrast to the drama list there is no doubt at all that British comedy is "better" than American comedy. This is clearly partly a result of my cultural background, but Australians have been exposed to as much American comedy as British in the last 50 years, and the best American material is as uproariously funny here as it is seen to be in America, while the worst sitcoms are hard to crack a smile about. The British have their sitcoms too, which are as embarrassingly bad as any American sitcom, but they also have highly original unique pieces that only Seinfeld matches on the other side of the Atlantic. Of the American sitcoms I think only "Malcolm in the Middle" has a spark of originality and I don't know how well that would stand up to viewing again in say 5 years. I can't think of a British sitcom that wasn't embarrassing at the time. But all the British comedies listed above (including the Australian "Mother and Son", whose pedigree, through say "Steptoe and Son", is undoubtedly British) are unique, one off, dazzling pieces of invention. And as a result they are impossible to compare. No way I can settle on a "top three" here - there is simply no way of comparing, let alone ranking, pieces as different as say "Dad's Army" and "Marion and Geoff", or "Monty Python" and "Coupling".

So there you are. As usual I've enjoyed compiling the lists and I hope they stimulate you to thinking about your own lists, and reminding me of series that I have, embarrassingly, forgotten.

And does it all matter? I hear you ask. Why isn't this another blog about global warming, or Iraq, or the appalling things that neoconservatives are doing to western societies? Why a frivolous blog on television? Well, I think it does matter. Just as the dumbing down and down and down of news and current affairs on television has left the public poorly informed about the issues that matter, unable to think about and decide on important questions because their critical faculties have atrophied, so television programs themselves have an important influence on the public. A regular diet of reality tv and rubbish drama like "CSI" and mindless sitcoms like "Two and a half men" leaves brains unstimulated, thoughts unthought.

Quality television drama and comedy is as important to the public conversation as quality news, and the public is getting too little of either.

television

12 August 2007
Category The Arts
4 comments

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ageing

{ 11:27 AM, 12 August 2007 } { Posted by humanfemale }
Comedy does indeed age badly. One exception though is Mother and Son. I didn't like it at all when I was younger but these days I find it most amusing.

[David says - that's an interesting comment. I "liked" it more when I was younger. These days I find it is so close to the bone, as I have more experience with ageing, that it seems more like a very sad documentary than a comedy. But then all great comedy carries within it the seeds of sadness].

Edited by mrpickwick on 11 August 2007 at 8:36 PM

Comedy Series

{ 9:25 PM, 1 September 2007 } { Posted by Rikki }
I loved "To the Manor Born" and "The Good Life" and "Are You being Served". When they were revived, I watched them again and still found them amusing. Some things are good regardless of age!

excellent list, David

{ 10:40 AM, 12 February 2009 } { Posted by paikea@VOX }
i remember when they showed The Jewel and the Crown on Masterpiece Theatre in the US - i was pretty young - but my parents wanted us to watch it - i'm of Indian descent, so the whole thing was pretty intense - i don't think i HATED anyone as much as i hated Merrick - it was only later that i realized how fantastic the series was politically and culturally - i grew up on a diet such wonderful Britishy things - have you seen the remake of Forsyte Saga? - i thought Damian Lewis was quite good as Soames (i didn't totally hate him in the end) - and, actually, i do think that nobody does quite do comedy like the British - Black Books - lol! - i can't even imagine something like that in the states - Red Dwarf, Brittas Empire, Yes, Minister - i'd add Vicar of Dibley, The Good Life and To The Manor Born - i love comedies that make me laugh out loud! - there were some fine US comedies, though - NewsRadio was among of my favorites (i never did get into Seinfeld - i always thought they were so annoying - why would i spend a half an hour watching these people on tv when i woudn't go near them in real life) - way above dreck like Two and a Half Men *shudder* - i tried to watch that show (on a plane) and switched to my acrostic puzzle instead

oh! - one more add on the dramas bit - Agatha Christie's Poirot - with David Suchet - just wonderful!

[David says - Hi Paikea, glad you dropped by and liked it. I did see the Forsyte remake with Damian Lewis who I greatly admire as an actor. Probably my age, but I still liked the original marginally better. It may just have come down to Irene, the first of which was better (dreamier, more beautiful, more ... ethereal) than the second. And I think Eric Porter was just a little more Soamesian than Lewis. One of the rare remakes though where I didn't cringe and immediately hate it, but rather saw it as just a different, and equally valid, director's vision, of a book I have loved since I first read it as a very young teenager.]

Edited by mrpickwick on 12 February 2009 at 12:38 PM

best tv series

{ 4:14 PM, 15 April 2009 } { Posted by global ernie }
"I Claudius" with derek jacobi, brian blessed, sian phillips et al... by a country mile. i think auntie has shown this twice over the last 20 years

[David says - Yes Ernie, I was also a great fan, though only saw it the first time. I was generally excluding series based on classic novels, but that could well be another exception].

Edited by mrpickwick on 15 April 2009 at 2:27 AM

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"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)