Saturday, November 1 - Pay Tv

The Age

Thursday October 30, 2008

brad newsome

Dan Cruickshank's Raiders of the Lost Art

BBC Knowledge, 6.30pm

Christmas has come early - a new channel dedicated entirely to BBC documentaries and sundry factual programming. What more could a professional couch potato want? This doco is an enthralling one, following the efforts of British architectural historian Dan Cruickshank (Around the World in 80 Treasures) to investigate the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in April 2003. Displaying remarkable courage and/or foolhardiness, Cruickshank arrived in Baghdad just days after the looting and set about asking a lot of unwelcome questions. American soldiers were a big help, but the museum people themselves were a surprisingly big hindrance. Cruickshank quickly came to suspect that some museum officials had been involved in some of the looting, or were at least complicit. Incredibly, he even headed to the thieves' market of Saddam City (now Sadr City) to try to buy back some of the stolen treasures. The most poignant part of the documentary, however, is the juxtaposition of footage of war-torn Baghdad with footage Cruickshank took in November 2002, when noisy groups of schoolgirls were happily filing in and out of the museum. While the documentary remains an eye-opener today, some of the information is out of date. Cruickshank, for instance, talks about the possibility of 170,000 artefacts having been looted or destroyed, but that number was to drop sharply within a few weeks and again over the months and years that followed.

Homes from Hell

Lifestyle, 10.30pm

Another reasonably interesting compilation of British home-owner horror stories. Home video and new photographs and footage help build a compelling argument for keeping one's house and contents insurance up to date. Among the more memorable disasters here are a flood that made off with half a house, a crumbling cliff that did the same, and a woman who was stunk out of her own terrace house because her next-door neighbour had more than 60 cats - alive and dead - in his. The kitchen sink, an investigator recalls, was "a soup of faecal matter". Gross.

Blue Dragon

Cartoon Network, 9am

Kids on missions. Bizarre pets. Mysterious baddies. Monsters to vanquish. It might sound exciting, but if anime series came in ice-cream flavours, Blue Dragon would be vanilla. It's not as witless as Pokemon, but it's nowhere near as much fun as Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, or even Naruto. Still, it's watchable enough and should do less to rot young minds than Video Hits.

Worth a look

Top Gear Polar Special

BBC Knowledge, 7.30pm

© 2008 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home