Here are people who should know more than we do, but they don’t. In a lot of ways, you’re already ahead of them if you’ve bought a few packets of Panini stickers for the kids’ album because you know who the players are. It shouldn’t be that way. These people are being paid to be experts, yet they’re sitting back and approaching every game like a pleb. They talk only about the players they’ve heard of — Argentina is Messi and Tevez, for example; South Korea is Ji-Sung Park — from the Premiership or the Champions League, and that’s that. No bothering to look any further. There is no world of football outside of England, or the top teams in Europe — everyone else is just ballast. Just spin out some old flannel about shocking defending and put some whizzy circles around players in the replays at half-time, and that’s job done. It’s crass, ineffective, tedious, lacking in insight, and downright contemptuous of the vast majority of footballers and teams at the World Cup.

I was struck most by “ineffective, tedious, lacking in insight, and downright contemptuous [of the audience]” and it got me thinking about a documentary the BBC had put out about Atlantis (yes, really). When I watched a bit of the documentary, it intrigued me, and I was quite entertained by it (good production values, engaging host, etc.), but I discovered, after a series of short Google searches, that dozens of little details that were stated as “fact” (or not qualified in any way) were either largely discredited theories or incredibly tenuous extrapolations. And yes, of course: it’s television, it’s not a history book; but why shouldn’t it at least try to be a bit more rigorous? Telling us something is a theory (albeit a largely discredited one) doesn’t diminish its value as an interesting anecdote (I’m thinking of the small segment about “evidence” of human sacrifice at a Minoan site); but it does, perhaps, make everything less black and white, and the “plebs” who watch television need things to be simple. Or so the argument goes. But it’s not really an argument, just an excuse for lazy programmme-making.

It didn’t used to be like this: Kenneth’s Clarke’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are two examples of engaging, entertaining programme-making that doesn’t skimp on its research or dumb-down its subject-matter. And there are still good programme’s being made, so mainly I’m just ranting.

Television has always been getting dumber, though, so none of this is especially revelatory. The frustrating thing when it comes to information and research, whether about footballers or Atlantis, is that here and now in 2010 information is incredibly easy to access, anywhere, and at any time. People, well-paid BBC pundits and documentary producers in particular, have iPads and netbooks, 3G and wireless, Google and Twitter. With the power of all that at our disposal, it shouldn’t be difficult to find out some anecdotes about the Serbian football squad, or to see what current thinking is on human sacrifice in Minoan civilisation. And if we really can’t utilise all this technology at our disposal, for simple tasks or for complex problems like fixing a broken oil well, then we’re probably doomed.

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radioactive. Well, I don’t put this forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3,000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece — philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years — but also in India: a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled. And aother was around about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world — India, China, Byzantium; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life — action, philosophy, organisation, technology — there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence.

The whole series can be found on YouTube, which is excellent. And here is the video that corresponds with the passage I quited above.:

Creative, poetic writing teams and strong, cohesive ensemble casts: this is what makes them work, for me. And so, I was very pleased to see familiar faces from both Deadwood and Homicide: Life on the Streets in a newly-released trailer for Treme, a forthcoming HBO show that has David Simon (see above) and Eric Overmyer (he, like Simon, was involved with The Wire, and also something intriguing called St. Elsewhere, about a hospital) at the helm. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Here is the trailer:

When I was in secondary school I felt it was the greatest thing ever produced for American television; and later, when I was in Olympia, home of Matt Groenig’s alma mater, Evergreen College, I still felt that way; and watching it now, in 2010, a day off my 29th (damn) birthday, the feeling persists, potently. And I do hope The Simpsons continues to be funny and wise long into the future, as I have come to rely on it.

(Amusingly, as I was writing this, ‘Way Down in the Hole’ started playing, a track that connects to another truly great television series produced in the last twenty years; all of which reminds me I need to download some episodes of Homicide. On an unconnected note, the new season of 24 is very bad, in many ways, but some of the cast seem to be trying very hard, so I am perservering: foolish, I know.)

(I just read on Wikipedia that Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One In, is planning on making a film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: very interesting indeed. I need to watch Let the Right One In again, but this time with the English subtitles turned on — last time Liu Bing was concentrating on it the most, so we were using the Chinese subs, and so I didn’t have much of a clue as to what was happening.)

One things that seems interesting is this post from the 16th of February, 2009:

I’ve recently become semi-addicted to a computer strategy\shoot-em-up game called ‘Hostile Waters’, and I must say, it’s great fun, if slightly long-winded sometimes (the missions seem to go on, and on, and on…

My cold feels slightly less bad, but I’m still sniffing and coughing a bit.

Irritatingly, I missed the first bit of West Wing on C4 tonight, after missing all of the first episode of season 3 last week… I couldn’t quite get into it, which is annoying, because I really love it at times…

Addictions to computer games, colds, and The West Wing.  The past is not always a foreign country.  Oddly enough, a day or two ago I found myself looking at the Wikipedia article for Hostile Waters after taking a wrong turn while searching for information about the film of the same name.  And watching The West Wing again might not be such a bad idea.

I’m going to fall asleep listening to the audiobook of Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders.  It is a novelisation of a Doctor Who television story.  The original show features Tibetan monks and a race of alien spiders.  You can read more about it over on Wikipedia, here, or by doing a little light Googling (there is a vast amount of information about Doctor Who available online).  I don’t remember it being a scary story, but alien spiders (or were they giant alien spiders?) sound a bit scary.  Hopefully I won’t get nightmares.