Television
Money talks
Martyn Harris
ver the first hour of Your Cheatin' Heart (BBC 1, 10 p.m., Thursday) I found my chair inching closer and closer to the screen in an effort first to listen to, and finally to lip-read the dialogue. `Ah canna Jolene,' said the female taxi driver to her radio controller. ‘Ah'm stuck oot here inokie funokie wi'ah boyskoo nabelltin, lewkinfra loreyes bultin wi'a poky hat inna roof.'
My finger hit the rewind button four times before I worked out she was stuck in the middle of nowhere (okie funokie) with a Boy Scout in a bell tent (John Gordon Sinclair in a voluminous mac), looking for a low-rise building. Jolene was a friend with a scarlet quiff like a coiled frankfur- ter. The poky hat in the roof was a mystery to the end but it hardly mattered. This is a drama series to be understood through osmosis rather than linear narrative.
In Centrepoint (Channel 4, 10 p.m., Monday) wicked Uncle Claud is becoming steadily more baroque: 'A society's atti- tude to toast is a test of its flexibility in times of social change', while Roland's girlfriend Saskia becomes steadily more tiresome: 'I'm bad news, Ro. I'm not faithful, not consistent. Don't have any- thing to do with me' — but you know that he will. I said last week that I couldn't decide if Centrepoint was brilliant or ludic- rous, but I'm beginning to lean towards ludicrous. Against a backdrop of Paris burning, Bob Peck as the deliciously sinis- ter Armstrong whispers to rich girl Maria: You and I know that behind all the waving and shouting, money talks. In a low, serious monotone — a language everyone can appreciate.' They have spend a fortune on Centrepoint, but I doubt if even Bob Peck can save it now.
Terror, the first of a 'three-part inves- tigation of political violence' (Channel 4, 9 P.m., Monday), took the opportunity of re-running a lot of old hijack and bombing footage, but never really engaged with the subject. Focusing this week on Arab- Israeli terrorism Julian Pettifer told us Portentously, `The origin of the terror of recent years lies in a conflict that goes back to Biblical times', and then jumped smartly to 1939. The Holocaust begat Israel, which begat the Stern Gang, which begat the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians, Which begat the PLO hijacks, which begat Sabra and Chatila and on and on.
It was gruesomely fascinating to watch the counterpointing of terrorists with their surviving victims, but it was a form of `explanation' that explained nothing. I am all for historical perspectives, but this seemed to me to be playing the terrorists' own game of citing an infinitely regressive series of ancient grievances, of grudge and counter-grudge, that Solomon in all his wisdom could never unpick.
There was no mention of more penetrat- ing and more optimistic perspectives, such as Francis Fukuyama's argument that the roots of terrorism in the Middle East are not primarily to do with prejudice or revenge or religion, but economics. It is only possible for a modern state to main- tain unrealistic attitudes to the world around it when somebody or something is subsidising you. In the Middle East the Arabs are insulated from rationality by oil, and the Israelis by US dollars. Neither will listen to reason or to each other, but each might be persuaded by that low, serious monotone' of money.
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