James reviews 'Defiance: Fighting the Far Right (2/3)', 'Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies' and 'Columbo'

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the eleventh episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

There is a short intro podcast, which you can listen to if you like. But really it’s straightforward: you suggest upcoming Freeview programs and I review them. If no-one suggests anything, then I have a look and choose something myself. 

Remember: send suggestions and comments to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or go to IReviewFreeview dot com.

In this episode, I will review: 

Defiance: Fighting the Far Right, on Channel 4

Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies (S 1 Ep 1: ‘Going Small’ ) on BBC4 and

Columbo (S4, Ep5: ‘Playback’) on 5Select

A couple of interesting looking documentaries plus a detective in a crumpled raincoat driving a dusty old car, asking just one more thing.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

a crumpled shortie raincoat in front of a broken shop window and an atomic diagram.

So, here we go.

Defiance: Fighting the Far Right, on Channel 4, Tuesday April 9th, 10:00pm

Politics. (Sigh) Politics. I don’t mind admitting Margarett Thatcher - with her tub thumping, honking certainty - made me a socialist. And since then I’ve never seen cause to change.

She became Prime Minister in 1979, the same year as the Southall riots, which is the subject of this powerful and upsetting documentary.

The National Front, a Neo-Nazi group of the far right, decided to hold an election meeting in Southall town hall.

Southall had an ethnic mix of 70% Punjabi/Asian. Tensions were already high from previous National Front marches and the death from a racist attack of a young Asian student.

Protest were planned, and the police came en masse to protect the 30 or so National Front members, seen giving the Nazi salute as they entered the town hall.

The police sealed off the area and tried to keep the protesters moving. The Special Patrol Group, known as the SPG, a unit of the police known for brutality, was also present.

(Sigh)

I really really don’t know if I can write this review as an unbiased viewer coldly assessing if the documentary got it right or wrong or if the balance of the talking heads was fair. Sometimes disgust and outrage can overwhelm the critical faculties. 

After all, there’s nothing remotely funny about elderly grandmothers being dragged by policemen through broken glass, or a guy trying to run a multi-cultural community project being hit so forcefully on the head he ended up in a coma for days, or indeed the death of Blair Peach, knocked on the head by the SPG with - most probably - an illegal lead-filled cosh.

Rightly, the last quarter or so of this program was dominated by Peach’s death. They were just trying to get back to their car to go home when they were set upon. Peach was knocked down and beaten. He died within hours. People saw it happen. They gave testimony. And the later inquiry blamed no-one.

In a later statement, the pasty-faced leader of the National Front said Peach’s death was:

‘A good thing one less imported alien Marxist agitator causing trouble in the country … if you look at ‘photos of him you’ll see he was racist chaos.’

And police commissioner Cass, who produced the report exonerating the SPG, chilling said:

‘… if you don’t fight or be violent and behave yourself, you won’t have the SPG to worry about. I leave that message with you.’

Which is as clear as a gangster extorting protection money can be.

And Thatcher said the best response would have been to ignore it. 

Really? Ignore it? Keep your head down, behave yourself?

That would have been like ignoring a thug busting into your front room and peeing on your carpet. It makes me so angry! 

As a shout of outrage against unfair treatment, biased press and brutal police tactics, this documentary is totally convincing.

To me, it is significant no one now will go on record and say the policing was correct, and the treatment of those legitimate protesters was as it should be.

So I admit: I am biased. Which is why, after several false starts over 2 or 3 days, I’ve not been able to write a ‘proper’ or full review of this program in my usual jaunty, irreverent manner: sometimes it is better to simply say: ‘turn your TV on and watch this.’

Which I urge you to do. Not as easy watch, but worth it.

By the way, I have put it on series record and - in an unusual step - I might even go back and watch episode 1 on a streaming service.

Now … let’s hope I have better luck with:

Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies (S 1 Ep 1: ‘Going Small’ ) on BBC4, Tuesday April 9th 9:00pm 

This is the latest offering from the good old Beeb. In their never-ending quest to meld inform, educate and entertain into one irresistible stew of delight they have grunted and given birth to this two parter on BBC4.

Up front is the affable Jim Al-Khalili, striding around showing blow up pictures of all sorts of small stuff. 

Effectively, it’s a quick tour of the history of seeing ever smaller things. After holding two lenses up: one to make big, the other to make bigger, he shows drawings - from life - made by Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. A house mite must have resembled a nightmarish monster. Not the sort of thing you want wandering around eating your dead skin cells.

It was the opening up of another world.

As an aside, Hooke’s best microscope only magnified by 50. On eBay right now you can pick up a kids Beginner microscope for £10:59 which magnifies up to 1,200 times: that’s 24 times more powerful than Hookes, and its got free postage!

But I bet a modern kid now, looking through it, doesn’t have the same sense of wonder and awe that must have overwhelmed those early scientists. I would like to think so, but somehow I doubt it.

We were shown a tiny wasp: so titchy it has wings like perforated paddles and swims - rather than flies -through the air. And of course, cells animal and vegetable..

The prof expounds mightily on cells. Well, why wouldn’t he? We’ve all got them after all. Cells are very efficient, but that’s somewhat limited because they’re more like ping-pong balls rather than a golf balls. To make sure we understand this, rubber gloves are blown up and attached to a board. ‘Welcome to my digestive tract!’ he cries.

Ah, it’s fun to make fun of things, but at the time, I actually understood what he was telling me. But I pity some poor sod who went for a wee when cells were first shown and came back to rubber gloves.

But, because of increasing distortion, there is a limit to optical microscopes: they’ll get you down to cellular level, but not much further.

Hence the development of the electron microscope! In one bound we jump from the very small to the very very very small.

And to celebrate, we are shown pictures of viruses. Hurrah! Look: Covid-19!

It appears axiomatic: the more you look at images of ever smaller things, the more scarey or the more beautiful they become. Sometimes - often - both.

And weird things happen. Take the blackest thing known to man: a paint which, under the microscope, resembles a carpet, with a shag pile of long skinny filaments. Light goes in and gets lost, never to return. 

But even electron microscopes have limitations, so we have a look at an atomic force microscope. I must admit, the science and engineering behind this rather defeated me. The prof attempted to demonstrate using an old-fashioned record player complete with wind-up handle, stylus and great big horn before showing a gecko sticking to a pane of glass. Apparently, a very tiny needle can sense forces at the atomic level and use this to show images of the surface of very very small things.

He gets together with another prof and they look at the surface of an E-Coli bacteria and talk about why it’s so good at resisting antibiotics. 

But atomic force microscopes are only good at looking at surfaces, the flatter the better. Which is a shame because atoms have this annoying habit of sticking together in 3 dimensions.

So some bright spark developed X-ray crystallography. We see a familiar picture of the bones of a hand, and soon we’ve moved on to the structure of penicillin and then the double helix of a DNA.

We’re now about 2 thirds of the way through. Time for a recap and a winding down? Nope: the good prof goes galloping on. “Can we see even smaller?!” he toots, getting out a couple of lenses to focus the sun on a sheet of paper. I was hoping it would catch alight, but sadly, it didn’t. But anyway, electron microscopes work differently.

Three professors are shown: elderly gents now who cracked the problem! They sit round a table and tell each other what they already know all for the enlightenment of us viewers who - if they were like me - hardly understood a word.

The end result, however, was impressive: a picture of long coil of what looked like your granny’s tatting on an off day, but in fact is a tangle of carbon nanotubes.

After waxing lyrical about graphene, and predicting some delights to come we have the inspiring wrap up: ‘as we learn more, from insects to cells to the atoms that make us, I know there will be many more wonders to discover.’

An excellent documentary: it didn’t talk down to you and assumed you were a person with brains and interest. I dunno about the brains, but I was interested and watched all the way through.

Good stuff. 

And now - as they say - for something else again.

Columbo (S4, Ep5: ‘Playback’) on 5Select, Wednesday April 10th, 4:00pm 

Columbo is a bit like getting into a nice warm soapy bath after - oh, I dunno - starting to think your life wasn’t worth a can of peas. Pour in more bath salts, get your significant other to scrub your back, close your eyes, lean back and drift off to into a world where everything is nice and predictable, where all you have to do is wonder not who did it or even why did they did it, but instead how will a squinting man in a crumpled mac work out who did it and why.

Oh, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Columbo was first pitched.

Excuse the voices: I’m not much good at them.

“Hey boss, we’ve got an idea for a new detective series!”

“Oh yeah? Two a penny. Go away.”

“It’s different.”

“They all say that. Go away.” 

“Each episode starts with the murder and you see who did it.”

At this point there would be a ten-minute pause.

“Oh?”

“The fun comes not from finding out who did and why, but in how does the detective work out who did it and why.’

“Ummm.”

“We can give him a crumpled mac and an old car and quirks. Squinting. Eyebrows that don’t behave. Cigars. A Dog.”

“What sort of dog?”

“We were thinking a little terrier thing called Robert. After my wife’s rich Pa. Just in case, y’know what I mean?”

“Nah, make it a Basset hound. I like basset hounds. And call him …. Dog.”

“You got it.”

And so - I imagine - Columbo was born.

In this one - ‘playback’ It was the son-in-law what did it, then fiddled the security tapes to give himself an alibi.

And, step by step, Columbo nibbles away, but he can’t quite make the final link to prove the alibi false until he sees a football game on TV, and an incident on the pitch is shown again. You could almost see the lightbulb come on inside his tousled head. The security guard saw the incident on TV. The TV is showing the feed from the security cameras, which are being taped. The son-in-law is a technical whizz, who designed the whole system. All he had to do was swap the tapes round so the guard sees the killing 20 minutes after it actually happened, when the son-in-law is definitely somewhere else. As the guard thinks he’s seeing a live feed, he’ll confirm the son-in-law left before the murder. Bingo.

Columbo hastens back and looks closely at the tapes for proof. And of course finds it.

Once confronted, the murderer stops posturing and is tamely led away for justice to take its course.

I have never seen violence in an episode of Columbo: even the initial murders are anodyne and squeaky clean. Nor is there much emotion expressed by families or friends. Quite simply, it’s not that sort of show. Nothing to offend your ancient toothless Granny sitting down to watch with her 10 year old grandson.

In ‘Playback’ the son-in-law hardly bothers to shed even a crocodile tear, while his wife - the daughter of the murder victim, don’t forget - looks a bit sad for a while but soon forgets all that nastiness and carries on as before.

This robotic unreality is undoubtedly quite deliberate. Strong emotions, even second hand on TV, can be upsetting, so best avoided. Nothing to detract from seeing Columbo assembling his clues and making deductions.

And it’s an enjoyable journey, greatly enhanced by Peter Falk as the lead, shambling around with his signature catchphrases, old car and never seen wife.

Having Columbo as virtually the only recurring character and then never showing him with any kind of home life is a genius move. It stops the series descending - like so many others - into boring, tedious soap opera.

For once you get a few characters who turn up every week, the relationships require maintenance. Backgrounds need to be supplied. A history is inevitably built up. And unless the series is ruthlessly edited, the essential focus - solve the murder, catch the murderer - is lost in a swirl of boring and unnecessary personal verbiage.

You only have to look at the recent ‘Annika’ series to see how quickly this soap opera virus can take over a promising idea and strangle it to death. Once Annika’s daughter’s problems and her own relationship with an unlikely shrink came galloping into view, the series was inevitably doomed. Solving the murders became a spare time occupation while walking around looking tragic.

Very sad and a great pity. It had the makings but they chucked it all away.

There is no chance of that with Columbo, for in many regards, he’s the only actual human on display. The rest are just disposable cut-out figures, there purely as chess pieces, to be moved and re-arranged as the plot dictates.

Which is - to me - pretty much as it should be.

Have I put it on series record? Of course I have. Sometimes you really need a nice warm bath. 

And that sigh of slightly bogus contentment concludes the reviews in this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me through the website Ireviewfreeview.com or email contact@ireviewfreeview.com.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.