More telly!

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Coming up in the next few weeks on BBC2 here in sunny Britain, 'The Supersizers Eat...the French Revolution' (or 'Versailles', as some listing previews seem to have it), a one hour prog on the eating habits of the 1780's/90's, as far as I can gather...I'm guessing 'cake' (yeah, I know, it was either brioche or a pre-existing anecdote reapplied to da queen), oranges, and the dawn of canned food, but I may be totally wrong. And better - or possibly worse - well, at any rate, more pertinent to this site - 'Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution' http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/04_april/22/bbctwo_tz.shtml ...well, you go for years, decades, with nothing on the telly and suddenly - oh BBC, you are really spoiling us! Or not, as the case may be - 90 mins on Robespierre (neat!) only with Simon bastard bloody scrotum-faced Schama (nooooooo). God, I was gutted as I scrolled down the page. I know the BBC have him on a 3 million quid contract (our money!), but that's just cruel. Like putting celery in my food.
Be interesting to see how the prog plays out - the synopsis sounds like the usual fare - Schama doing his standard 'it was the proto-Holocaust' thing - but Zizek is this decade's student darling, and the British public quite like the idea of guillotining non-virtuous politicians at the moment! No date as yet, but it's the 220th anniversary (tenuous link beloved of schedulers) of that Bastille business, so I reckon it'll be on around then. I don't know how to put stuff on youtube, but if anyone else here in Britain can copy and post the broadcasts (because BBC online isn't available from overseas), that'd be fab!

Comments

[la-muse-venale6.livejournal.com]

"Debating Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Zizek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp."

I fear this will turn on an anti robespierriste portrait as... always, ugh x_x

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

There is no way this is going to turn out well: your epithet describes Schama well, and, as for Zizek, he's not doing Robespierre any favors by defending him. It's odd that neither the defense nor the prosecution seem to understand anything about their subject...

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

...Or rather, let me rephrase that. It's not really odd, per se. Zizek is unthreatening to the establishment because he and Schama are fundamentally in agreement about their considerably warped vision of Robespierre. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether they're defending this vision or attacking it, because it's nothing but a mirage: the same superimposition of 20th century ideas onto an 18th century personage.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't like Zizek's preface to the "Virtue and Terror' book: he doesn't seem to consider context, either. Still, I'm surprised (pleasantly surprised) they're going to do a 'debate' - usually, it's just a straight Burke/Carlyle 'revolution is bad and the leaders are mad' line (and having seen some recent French popular history magazines, they're no better: it's 'tyran' all the way there, too). I'd like to see a repeat of the debate Channel 4 did in 1989: it had Michael Foot (bookish former Labour Party leader) defending the Jacobins.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

And as I type this - on BBC4: 'Simon Schama's John Donne'.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Actually, looking up some stuff on his book on 'Lost Causes', Zizek comes across well (suppose I should read more of him - I just have a knee-jerk hatred of cultural theorists, specially if they're fashionable, but it seems he's an anti-po-mo-cultural theorist, therefore one of the good guys)...he's a lot smarter than Schama, so I'm hoping he'll wipe the floor with him.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I don't like cultural theorists either, so perhaps I'm biased, but I wasn't particularly impressed by that book. Admittedly, I only read sections of it in a bookstore a couple of times, but all the same... It has, as I recall, some of the same problems as his preface to Virtue and Terror.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I've just reread the intro to the 'Virtue and Terror' book..... Zizek quotes with apparent approval Foucault's infatuated witterings on the Iranian Revolution, and ends up by comparing Robespierre with the purity of drive of Muslim Fundamentalists - which is A) madness (and it's hard to think of anything more opposed in both ends and means to the values of the Enlightenment), and B)the BBC will LOVE as 'soooo controversial and relevant to, like, the issues of NOW. As Zizek also seems to think it's Fascist/Far Right when European countries like France do stuff like ban religion / headscarves in schools (rather than seeing it as Enlightenment values in action, allowing a child at least some hours in the day when it is not being indoctrinated into superstition or forced to conform to the dress codes of dark-age patriarchy!) I'm thinking this could be car crash TV. As the old line has it, with friends like that, who needs enemeies?

Ok, I may be misjudging him on the basis of a short and extraordinarily foggy essay, but if it's true that he hates post-modernists for their lack of beliefs/values, I found it difficult to discern any of Zizek's own.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

As the old line has it, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
That about sums up my whole objection to this "debate."

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I can't say I agree; a debate implying that "both" "sides" of the argument are being covered when really only one side is representative (Schama being more or less representative of revisionists/reactionaries, Zizek not being at all representative of defenders of the Revolution in general or of Robespierre in particular) is rather worse than no debate at all. People who might well be sympathetic to a plausible historical interpretation of Robespierre will almost certainly be turned off by Zizek's representation (which is very similar to Schama's), even if it is a defense. After all, those who listen to Schama do not dislike the Revolution because he does not like it directly, but indirectly, through the skewed "fact" he presents that they believe to be the truth.

After all, if Robespierre is a fanatical mass-murderer (and all the rest), what does it matter if one side of the debate is defending him? Does it make people like fanatical mass-murderers more? For my part, if I believed Zizek's interpretation of Robespierre to be correct--which I most emphatically do not--I probably would not like him much more than Schama does. (Though I would probably still be less of a reactionary bastard.)

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

They really had to make a debate featuring two caricatured extremists, didn't they? Damn.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Naturally. >.>

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Clash of egos - it's what viewers go for. Radio history progs are generally pretty good, quite nuanced: I've just listened to "In Our Time' on the trial of Charles 1 this morning, and they had three professors discussing it for 45 minutes and the end result covered most of the main points (and wound up with 'and paved the way for things like the French Revolution and the Nuremberg trials' - well, it's a rare thing here to hear Louis XVI's trial called a war crimes trial!). TV viewers are dumber, need stuff to be 'sexed up'with a 'celebrity academic' fight (though not many regard Schama as a serious 'academic'!).

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

There I have to disagree as well; I think the viewers are more intelligent than television producers give them credit for. I highly doubt they'd lose viewers by reducing their idiocy quotient. Of course, it's not as if it's an experiment they've ever tried...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I'm genuinely surprised they're having Zizek on BBC2: he's more a late night Channel 4 figure. Despite he presence of Schama and the very negative synopsis, the fact that they're doing an hour and a half (50 mins would be more usual for this type of prog) on a non-Briton who isn't Napoleon or something-in-WW2-that-can-involve-loving-shots-of-military-hardware makes me hope BBC2 is improving. There was a small item on Tom Paine on TV last week, and The Enlightenment does seem to be more prominent in political discourse at the mo, c/o Christopher Hitchens etc., so maybe history progs on subjects other than war might be in the offing. (I like 'The Supersizers go...', but it's not exactly history - more a dressing up show involving some old recipes, and the presenters have their poo tested at the end!)

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Forgive me if the present indications leave me less than optimistic. They may well start offering more programs in this vein, but from what we've seen so far I'm not inclined to view that as a good thing.

[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

"Simon bastard bloody scrotum-faced Schama" aww, I never thought that name would bring such a gigantic smile to my face.

I'd really like to see these though, and am rather annoyed they'll be on when I'm not in Britain. :(

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't have any hard disc recording type technology (I don't even know what it's called!). Some of the 'Supersizers' programmes are posted on Youtube, so hopefully whoever does that will post this series up, too (the series starts next week, but I presume the "Versailles/ French Revolution' one will be timed to go out in July. The 'Terror!'one may be a US co-production, if it has 'acting' bits - some of the glossier BBC progs often are, so may be broadcast in the US, too. It's so rare to get anything on the French Revolution on TV (not counting The Chuckle Brothers vs Robespierre!), that even if it's bad, I'm still glad it's something.

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

*pukes*

And for the matter:

It was a year which gave birth to key features of the modern age: the thought crime; the belief that calculated acts of violence can perfect humanity; the notion that the interests of "mankind" can be placed above those of "man"; the use of policemen to enforce morals; and the use of denunciation as a political tool.

That already existed long before with the Ancien Régime, wtf. And it's all bullshit.

[trf-chan.livejournal.com]

Fuck, the French Revolution didn't really "give birth" to any of those.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

That's a novelty - they normaly 'blame' all that on the puritan/republican regime of the 1640's/50's...How about Pitt's use of spies, false money to fuck the economy, nazi-style Atlantic food blockades, agents provocateurs disguised as revolutionaries...? Will they get a mention?

God, I hope they don't wheel John Gray out to compare the Jacobins to Al Quaida and George Bush!

[(Anonymous)]

Is he talking about the Inquisition? Is he talking about the lettres de cachet? No one with any knowledge of history could subscribe the above-mentionned sentence.

[lucieandco.livejournal.com]

Haha, if the notion that the interests of "mankind" can be placed above those of "man" for one is a key feature of the modern age I suppose the modern age started roughly with the death of the dinosaurs. I assume that what they're going for (unless they do mean to mention it as an example something good that came of the Revolution ... which wouldn't make the overall claim any more true, and anyway the context is all negative) is "evil collectivism takes away my human right to not give a fuck about anything but myself" but the way they're phrasing it it sounds like a concept that's Older Than Jesus (and quite popular at that). So ... they are either trying to put everything in the broadest possible terms to make the programme attractive to absolutely anybody or they're seriously clueless? Excellent.

(On a sidenote, the top of the page says they made a comedy drama about the colourful scope of threats to the life of war journalists? A comedy drama! Why not a call-in show? If you would prefer to see a bomb death next week, call ABC-01. If you're more in the mood for amoebic diarrhoea, -02's your number.)

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Thinks: surely the most obvious legacy of the French Revolution to the modern age is TROUSERS!