HOW wonderful of BBC2 to devote an hour each Saturday evening to an exposition of faith. Unfortunately, the focus of belief, although it is held with all the fervency anyone could desire, is not that expressed in our creeds. The American Dream explores the system of secular values that has animated our transatlantic cousins since the end of the Second World War.
After the first episode last Saturday, it is unclear whether it will be a demolition job, placing the excesses of naïve optimism under the microscope of cynical European liberalism, or take at face value the average United States’ citizen’s boundless self-confidence.
We have seen both approaches, as the programme builds up its picture by telling individual stories: some are delighted by the freedom they have enjoyed, and by the chance to make whatever they wanted of their lives; others point out how rigid were the norms that governed people’s expectations.
In particular, women who did not subscribe to that absolute fulfil-ment of suburban home-building and caring for family and husband found themselves frozen out: it is startling to be regaled by a paean to the self-expression offered by Tupperware parties.
The immediate post-war period seemed to be a time of supreme confidence in the US’s right to world supremacy, epitomised by its nuclear bombs. This was, in reality, undercut by deep paranoia, and the fear of the Communist threat, beyond and within the homeland, which was supposedly preparing to destroy the American way of life.
As we reach the ’60s, the stage is set for the canker in the bud to show itself, as liberation, sex, and drugs enter the stage — and, more significantly, the Negroes and urban poor excluded from the dream begin to find their voice.
The destruction of a way of life was a constant theme of Ancient Worlds (BBC2, Wednesday of last week). Richard Miles led us on an admirably clear journey from kingdom to kingdom, demonstrating how the high Bronze Age civilisations were destroyed, one by one, by mysterious “raiders from the West”. Their advances of agriculture, writing, and city dwelling were, by about 1150 BC, all devastated. Only the seagoing Phoenicians thrived. Their status as roving merchants offered more flexibility, and they developed the first phonetic alphabet — writing that could be shared beyond a professional caste of scribes.
There were some splendid parallels drawn with our contemporary world situation. Biblical studies got a look-in, too: Hezekiah’s ultimately futile defence against Assyria is encouragingly historical, but archaeology requires us to treat the great united kingdom of David and Solomon as unsupported myth.
The United States, the ancient Near East — but what of us, today? Getting On (BBC4, Tuesday of last week) holds up, for my money, the most uncompromising mirror to Britain. This rich comedy mines the most unpromising seam: a female geriatric ward, where dissolution, despair, and death reign. The medical staff are not the ministering angels of TV convention; rather, in their self-centredness and keenness to hide behind regulations instead of actually helping the patients, they are demons patrolling a particularly contemporary hell.