Television
Tip of the iceberg
Clive Gammon
An abiding memory I have of Greenland concerns a beach close by the coastal settlement of Sukkertoppen: grey pebbles, grey rocks, small icebergs drifting close inshore, and the bleached jawbone of a whale, which imperfectly concealed several hundred empty Tuborg lager bottles. They had been left there by Eskimos whom you are not allowed to call 'Eskimos' but only Greenlanders.
That was four years ago, and since then' it has clearly become even more of a sociologist's paradise, to judge from last week's Europa (BBC 2), which dealt with the problems of this vast freezing island where the native inhabitants, vis-à-vis Denmark, enjoy the same kind of privileges as do Angolan blacks in relation to Portugal. But the Danes are goodies, of course, not baddies.
The euphemistic 'Greenlander' is a good covering up expression for a start, implying as it does that all are equal — Eskimos, halfcastes and the 'Summer Danes' who work tax-free in the country for limited spells. In reality, Greenland is a .Danish colony. Even that description is a little misleading for the country is virtually run by the Royal Greenland Trading Company, a point that was somewhat glaringly missed in an otherwise thoughtful look at. the problems which Danish suzerainty has brought to the previously 'primitive' Eskimos.
Certainly, in the new flat blocks that the Danes have built for them in a deliberate policy of urbanisation, the Eskimos don't put on an attractive front. They go on the booze a lot, as any Danish administrator will tell you. They fight. They are idle. Their womenfolk show no restraint in producing illegitimate children. They have all the vices that nineteenth-century Americans deplored in their reservation Indians and the twentiethcentury South Africans find in the Bantu. You'd think that being taken away from all that nomadic hunting and fishing, and given regular jobs in a nice modern freezing plant in Godthaab, shelling prawns in hygienic conditions, would make them into neat, if slanty-eyed, Scandinavians, but somehow it hasn't.
What the programme also didn't discover was why the Danes invest so much money in their colony with so little return. I didn't discover the reason myself when I was there, unless it might be the rumours one heard of vast mineral deposits, mainly iron, under the glacier.
STaleftator December 15, 1973
I may have said this before but the expression. 'Play for Today' could reasonably be taken to indicate that recognisably contemporary types are to be displayed in a contemporary setting; alternatively, and perhaps additionally, themes of contemporary motnent would be dealt with. This, in the never-ending BBC 1 series of plays, is rarely the case.
Talce last week's Baby Blues; by Nemone Lethbridge. The theme was puerperal depression, a real enough thing, it seems, especially in women who have a child by Caesarian section, and sometimes so terrible that it can lead to a mother killing her child. 'Real and contemprary' enough, even to showing a real Caesarean on film.
But unhappily almost every single character was unbelievably overdrawn: the guiltily pleasant mother; the extraordinarily nasty, drunken, shouting, rich father; the black nurse who intoned her lines slowly as if a lesson imperfectly learnt by a four-year-old; the Jewish joke-cracking doctor, acceptable in Jonsonian comedy of humours maybe (but you need the language as well). All flatly incredible and hence hardly to be taken seriously, which I am sure was not what Miss Lethbridge intended at all.
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