personal political

idolatry

Olle thinks I should enter Australian Idol next year because I'm "such a good singer". This assessment is based on me singing to him most bedtimes. His often-requested favourite is 'She'll be Coming Round the Mountain". I wonder what Kyle would make of that. (Though Mark seems to be competing for the role of 'nasty judge' this year.)

fat world

Last night I watched a French-made documentary on SBS called It's a Fat Fat World. I thought I might have seen it all before, but this was a very new perspective - obesity in the developing world. The culprit? For the main part, globalisation, the spread of hypermarkets and fast food (McDonalds and KFC know no national boundaries) and reliance on motorised transport.

In Egypt, apparently 60 percent of adult women are obese! Essentially because of inactivity, because they are confined to the domestic sphere. These women are like walking manifestations of boredom and oppression.

In Mexico, what had been a healthy traditional diet has been adulterated so that now people eat multiple tortillas deep fried in lard, without beans or vegetables. I think they said that one out of every two adults is overweight if not obese in that country.

The dimensions of the problem are quite overwhelming. It was horrible to watch people eating themselves sick, served up a diet of what amounts to poison masquerading as modern luxury. Of course, that's all around us here too. In fact, we went to a child's birthday party today and, feeling sensitised to the issue after watching this program, I couldn't help but see the sheer amounts of food as totally over the top.

[And now I'm off to cook dinner!]

beautiful

The beautiful Line of Beauty is about to hit British tv screens as a dramatic serial (I hope it makes it to Australia soon.) The Observer has cleverly asked a former Conservative MP from Thatcher's era to review it.

bert

Berts: I was taught in high school by a nun called Sister Bertrand, who we used to refer to as Bertie. Around the same time, Dr Bertram Wainer was playing a major role in Australian current affairs. And I had an Aunty Bert, whose name was short for Bertha - I never heard her called that, she was always Bert.

I watched the tv documentary about Bertram Wainer the other night with great interest. He was a Melbourne doctor (with a lovely Scottish accent) who was at the centre of the push to legalise abortion. I hadn't realised, even though I later worked in that field myself, exactly what he'd done. I hadn't realised that it wasn't a simple [okay, difficult] matter of getting the law changed.

In Victoria - and, I wouldn't be surprised, NSW and other states too - backyard and some 'frontyard' abortion was allowed to go on because police at high levels were being paid bribes.  The homicide squad was on the take - ironic isn't it, that abortion was seen as the province of the homicide squad. When I think of watching Homicide as a child (we were allowed to stay up late for it), to think now what those kinds of men were really up to...

So legalising abortion was a matter of confronting police and political corruption. Wainer and his family and others who worked in the abortion field received death threats and at least three attempts were made on his life. But he carried on pushing for change in what looked like a remarkably sanguine way.

As a Catholic schoolgirl, the received view was that Bertram Wainer was a horrible, evil man. When I hear his name now, it still has that connotation. Having seen this documentary, I marvel at how far removed from confronting the real evil (isn't that what the church is meant to be doing?) that view was. The Catholic view of abortion is so very rarefied...

idol thoughts

Confession: we've been watching the third series of Australian Idol. Actually, only part of the series - we came in just a few weeks ago, when they were down to six contestants from the original twelve.

Our excuse was that co-parent's sister in Melbourne's daughter's friend is a cousin of Lee. In fact we have met this cousin, who is a younger but equally smiley and good-looking boy. When this info was passed on to us, we had to tune in and see for ourselves.

The first series completely bypassed me except for the news that the winner was an evangelical Christian. I managed to avoid all of the second series except for the final - we were at friends' place for dinner that night and they insisted on watching it. I was appalled. To my ears, no one on the show could sing in tune, especially the eventual winner. I'd received chain emails urging me to vote for Casey because she was a large young woman from an Aboriginal background (god, that looks awful written down but that is in effect why some women were campaigning on her behalf), but I felt completely unmoved by her. All of the performances were embarrassingly derivative.

The same could probably be said for most of this year's contestants but these contests have a way of hooking you in. Which is another way of saying that we're hooked.

Though I may yet wriggle free. When Dan was voted off last night, some of the spark went out of the competition for me. I thought Dan had the best voice, in a vaguely Tom Jones-ish way. And I think that Lee has the most charm/charisma, albeit in a bubblegum kind of way. He looks genuinely relaxed  and ... nice. I was really surprised that Kate made it into the final three. And Emily does nothing for me.

I would have liked to see a final between Dan and Lee or between Dan and Emily, with Dan winning. That's in the idealised arena of the television program. In real life, someone I know who's in the music biz points out that it's much better to come second or third - then you aren't tied in to the Australian Idol contract. You don't have to do their album and their concerts, you can do your own. Both the previous second-place getters have done well in the music business, but last year's winner seems to have sunk like a stone.

I'm slightly perturbed by the fact that I prefer the final two men over the final two women. I wonder if that's an indication of how constricted women still are in the way they must present themselves on stage. Kate turns up in an assortment of ridiculous feminine outfits, while Emily supposedly represents the tough diva, which to me is just another flimsy stereotype. The men have a much broader array of types to choose from and can even go out on a limb with pink hair or dreadlocks. Watching the show with my young son, I've been pleased that Dan and Lee are there for him. I can't imagine wanting a daughter to emulate the women.

jamie and the super nanny

I've only seen one episode of Super Nanny, but I was hooked. In Australia we're seeing the American series (the English nanny visits families in the US). I hope they show the original English series here eventually. My friend Su in London tells me she is a devotee too - what she loves about it is that nanny Jo is empathetic to both the children and the parents. Unlike most other reality TV shows, emotional cruelty is not encouraged.

I'm even more hooked on Jamie Oliver's new series about school dinners. In Australia we don't have school dinners - thank goodness! (We have friends in London who are scrupulous about feeding their eight year old only organic food, but who let her have school dinners so that she is not excluded from the social group - hardly anyone brings a packed lunch at her school. So for lunch every day she has baked beans and chips...)

Most schools here do have a canteen. My son's school does not, so I'm not au fait with the usual canteen fare, though I wouldn't be surprised if it rivals the awfulness of contemporary British school dinners. But I have accompanied his class on excursions and been shocked by how much packed junk kids bring along to eat. I've wondered if this was junk for a special occasion (a trip to the zoo) or if a lot of kids eat like this every day - chocolate bars, cartons of juice, chewy sweets, packed crackers and cheese dips...

I was quite neutral about the early Jamie Oliver food series, but began warming up to him with the unemployed series. With school dinners, I've become a big fan. He is not afraid to name such monstrosities as 'turkey twisters' the sh*t that they are. He is wonderful - direct, honest and warm - with the kids and with the dinner ladies. He has had a big impact on the education debate in Britain with his healthy eating campaign. I'm just a little disappointed that he probably won't ("let's face it") be sending his own two kids to a state school.

PS: Jamie trained at the River Cafe in London, which I would nominate as my all-time favourite restaurant and source of cookbooks .

a funeral and a wedding

[Postings will be erratic for the next couple of weeks due to school holidays.]

I saw a bit of the Pope's funeral live on television - the bit between arriving home from work and going out to the movies (Being Julia - good fun, much much better than a pope's funeral.)

In fact it was co-parent who turned on the tv and wanted to watch it - out of historical interest, I suppose. I couldn't take the sight of all those old men. All those old men. Barely a woman to be seen. I look at that and think - 'This is nothing to do with me. I don't want to have anything to do with those old men.' Off out.

The next night I had already gone up to bed and was drifting off, but co-parent's narration of the guest list at the Camilla-Charles blessing made me wake up and go downstairs to watch. Why on earth was Richard E Grant there? And Rowan Atkinson? Phil Collins, not so surprising, he seems more the type to hobnob with Charles.

It looked very very cold outside Windsor Castle.

Like most other people over 30, I could not help but think back to watching Charle's first wedding live on television, in 1981. I watched it with my mother. I was one of the few people I knew who liked Diana's dress at first sight. This was despite the fact that the moment I'd read, months earlier, that Charles was engaged to a teenager, I'd snorted with derision - it screamed 'set-up'. As it was, of course.

It was so very very strange to see Charles and Camilla get out of the car and walk down that side-aisle together. I've followed this particular royal melodrama quite closely over the years - the documentaries, the biographies (authorised and unauthorised), the interviews, the magazine articles and of course, Diana's death and funeral. Yet even though I 'know' so much about these people and what they've said about each other, it still came as a shock to see that they are actually real - that it wasn't all made up by the tabloid media. He really has been having a relationship of some sort with Camilla for decades. There really were "three of us in this marriage".

Now there are just the two of them.

I liked Camilla's dress too. And if I were religious I'd have converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism on the spot - women were prominent in the procession and in the ceremony; it all seemed more lighthearted (I know, it wasn't a funeral), less ancient, less rigid, more modern. Maybe anything would have, in comparison to the scenes from Rome.

news spectacle

Madeleine Bunting, a columnist for The Guardian, writes about the impossibility of dealing with all the images of horror and human sufferings brought to us by the television news.

If you see the murdered, the raped, the bereaved on your screen, what is the moral responsibility engendered by this form of witness? Michael Ignatieff elegantly articulated a widely held view, that "television has become the principal mediation between the sufferings of strangers and the consciences of those in the world's few remaining zones of safety ... it has become the means ... by which we shoulder each other's fate."

But by knowing about terrible suffering all over the world, in what sense can you "shoulder" all those fates? Isn't it a sort of self-aggrandisement to claim that the viewer sitting on the sofa at home in the UK "shouldered the fate" of the tragic mothers of Beslan or Sri Lanka? "My brother's keeper" is a crucial ideal, but how do we translate it for an age of global information flows?

There's no simple answer, of course.

We used to have cable tv, which I found very useful at times of international political drama - I could switch on BBC World. However, during the 2003 war in Iraq, I switched off. I didn't want to see it. I'd done what I could to prevent it, now I could do nothing to change what was happening; there was little purpose served in viewing those images. We moved house and did not take cable with us.

Reading is different, although reading can be voyeuristic too, of course. These days I get most of my news from the Web, online newspapers and news services, though I continue to watch the ABC's 7pm television news bulletin most nights, partly out of curiosity about how they will present the main issues of the day.

In the past few years, I've become more and more unwilling to be manipulated by and made subject to the pathological media. Yesterday I caught some of the Comedy Channel (on the tv in our lunchroom at work) - an American program in which two real people had to act out a script (presumably for some reward) - this one involved a young handsome black man having to seduce an old (70-ish) white woman. He did this with aplomb. The studio audience was hysterical with laughter. Why was this funny? It was such nasty humour. I hated overhearing it.

That's the other side of the coin - flick the remote and find images of tsunami desolation or of the kidnapped and tortured in Iraq, flick again and get a glimpse into the sick heart of our culture.