MOVE over, faith, revelation, reason. Our blessed generation has
a new - and unassailable - source of knowledge. No one can argue
with evidence adduced by that technological marvel the mobile-phone
video.
Remarkably, this staple of modern life was the hinge of the plot
in two high-end thrillers launched at the weekend: The
Code (BBC4, Saturday) and Homeland
(Channel 4, Sunday). The latter suffers, in my opinion, from being
too topical: a drama, set in the United States, about the hunt for
terrorist leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and about the
security threat that they present to the folks back home, with its
anguished debates about the morality of drone strikes, feels too
close for comfort.
The shaping of events which is necessary to transform them into
performance needs a certain distance from the actual situation in
order to work. Otherwise, the artifice involved begins to feel like
indulgent grandstanding when we know that the news bulletin, a few
minutes later, will present the same events but with real
corpses.
Here, the mobile-phone footage was the evidence that the bombs
that had "taken out" a terrorist leader had in fact destroyed a
wedding party, with extensive loss of lives. Of course drama should
not be comfortable - it should confront us with the horrors of our
times - but this is too self-conscious in its anguished liberal-
ism.
The Code is Australian, and extremely stylish. The
opening episode presented us with a series of disconnected events
which, by its conclusion, began to crystallise into shape.
Something rotten at the heart of government is linked to the murder
of a girl in the outback; it is only her boyfriend's mobile phone
that proves that this was not just an accident.
A mole inside government is feeding leads to a journalist. His
brother is an IT whizz who is able to decode the scrambled
messages. The baddies are a ruthless corporation - or are they the
state itself? Antagonisms and unlikely partnerships are lightly
sketched in, for once making it feel worth while to make sense of
it all.
The first episode in Brian Cox's new series Human
Universe(BBC2, Tuesday of last week) was sheer delight. His
sense of amazement and wonder at what he shows us sweeps us up with
him on the ride. Other documentaries have covered similar ground -
the rise of Homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to spaceman
- but none with such boyish enthusiasm. Only 250,000 years - too
short a period to register in cosmological time - separate the
first making of stone tools from the international space
station.
Of course, we have much in common with our evolutionary cousins;
but what distinguishes us is infinitely more significant. Complex
speech, agriculture, writing, civilisation - these developments
have followed each other with astonishing rapidity.
Cox thinks that it was extreme fluctuations in climate and
environment which made our brains leap in size ahead of those of
previous hominids, setting the scene for our extraordinary culture.
Let us hope that he finds space to acknowledge how central awe and
wonder are to religious faith.