Big tureen on the table - you just helped yourself

Saturday. Dinner at Marie-Astrid’s house, Julie also there. It was a vegetarian meal, consisting of a huge vegetable stew (in a big tureen on the table - you just helped yourself) with home-made bread. Afterwards a fresh fruit salad that contained nuts and ginger. Playing from Marie-Astrid’s PC was music she had downloaded earlier (Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney, Honesty by Alex Parks, Crown Imperial by Sir William Walton etc). Marie-Astrid announced that her divorce had come through that day, and then talked about the break-up of her marriage (“He went on a course for men about to leave their wives - how self-indulgent is that!”). I asked Julie (who is Scottish and has a very pronounced Scottish accent) about what she thought of devolution but she was totally uninterested in Edinburgh politics (“I am not a die-hard Scot” she said scornfully, “all that haggis and bagpipes nationalism gives me the creeps”).

Afterwards we disagreed about what to watch on television, and reached a compromise - I would put up with Celebrity Big Brother if I could see an hour of Shoah afterwards.

Celebrity Big Brother has all the attributes of pornography - voyeuristic, abusive, humiliating. It is compelling to watch, but left me feeling depressed. Applying the principles of transactional analysis (that we relate to other people in one of three ways: child, parent, adult) everyone in the arena seemed to be either a parent or a child, with brief adult exchanges occurring on the sidelines. A parade of bullies strutted around the various rooms, intimidating, shouting, making people cry. A supposedly right-on “ordinary” singer whined at having liquid soap poured over his cashmere jumper. A supposedly right-on politician (George Galloway) seemed to float around the room sets whispering, manipulating, egging people on (degrading himself to the level of the Neil and Christine Hamilton political freak show).

Shoah (shown on the More4 channel) is a very great film. I have seen parts of it before, but not all of it (it’s nine and a half hours long). Despite its great length it is never boring. It is an historical documentary of the very finest quality. Directed by Claude Lanzmann, it combines scholarship with the absorption of a detective murder mystery. Although a new channel, More4 is continually setting high standards in broadcasting.