Australia: not just good for exporting actors who can play a bit of rough

For someone who 'doesn't watch television', I am fucking excited about television. The Australian TV season has started again and those people do documentaries like nobody's business. And their national television streams internationally. I love you, ABC. Whilst sewing and cooking this weekend we sort-of watched The Howard Years in the background, about the prime ministry of a man his predecessor Paul Keating famously described as a 'little dessicated coconut', featuring all the sorts of lies and iniquities and quiet political perversions you'd expect in the post-mortem of any right wing government - but something I've never seen done on British, Canadian, or American television, or at least not so soon after the fall (end of 2007).

And then last night, when I needed something sort of short to fix my mind on - my throat is doing something very, very strange to me and is excruciatingly painful - we watched a series of shorts by a team called Clarke and Dawe, who make fun of politicians through mock interviews on the ABC's 7:30 report, the Clarke half of the team being the politician but not making any sort of effort to actually ape the politician - just talking. Again, compared to any sort of political humour I've seen on other Anglo-Saxon TV, it's unique - so stylistically subtle whilst being holleringly funny. My favourite by far is a bit they did about Philip Ruddock, an old attorney general, minister of immigration and multicultural et cetera who oversaw some very bad things, wherein for once Clarke actually changed his act to ape the man, and ended it bizarrely with a quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was funny and chilling to the bone - perfect - I mean, what the fuck? Quoting poetry? Even a poem 80% of the Anglo world's highschool students have been forced to read? That's not for us brainless noughties, is it? But it is.

So yes, I'm rather going on about things nobody reading this can be expected to be interested in, but I have to say I'm endlessly fascinated by Australian history and society at the moment. If we do move there, it'll be, hopefully, the last big move I make. The next place needs to be much more permanent so I can make babies and establish the lifestyle I want. So the more I know about Australia, the better - and aside from all that it's a fascinating and fucked-up country. Just finished reading A Secret Country, by John Pilger. Not the world's biggest fan of John Pilger. I find his documentaries hard to watch because the man's voice is like a bucket of clumpy cream thrown at a blackboard, scraped through over and over with a screwdriver. It's beastly. Luckily when you read his books you can't hear his voice and at least in the case of A Secret Country the result is good, although it seems to go all messy at the end in terms of its construction. He needed more of a martinet for an editor. But interesting enough to finish.