Oh, and I'm going to have to go ahead and take that stapler from you.

Perhaps the truest film ever made.

Oh, and firefly I'm going to have to ask you to get a copy of the film as soon as possible...OK? Could you do that for me? A lot of people have seen it, but it would be just great if you could do it too.


;-)

Great show!

This is how I'm able to spend fifty nine minutes of each hour at work web surfing. I do the hours work in sixty seconds. Shhh...don't tell anyone!

Why didn't they put Richard Hammond (or even better Jeremy Clarkson) in this vehicle, that's what I'd like to know!

Well, you know how much the Eastern Europeans like their accordion music!

I'm still getting over the Finnish winners from the year before screaming heavy metal while dressed as devils!

No, no, no! You should have gone for Q!

Oh dear God no...they've taken an hysterical woman and given her super strength. She could destroy the world!

What would you bet that he urinates in every tenth bottle of "Miracle Spring Water" while shouting "The power of Christ flows through me!" ;-D

The Panorama programme showed the museum to be apparently using images of the Holocaust to sell its message which Sweeny said had upset him before he was confronted and harrangued by Tommy Davis - not that it excuses the outburst but it makes it a little more comprehensible. I also like Sweeny's comment in the Panorama programme: "I apologised then and I apologise now. I lost my voice, but I didn't lose my mind" - sadly it gave them enough ammunition to slur him once he rose to their bait.

I have an ambivalent attitude to this Scientology stuff - I consider all religion to be a cult, it is just that some have the weight of thousands of years (and millions of lives) behind them forcing certain beliefs and attidutes on those in their thrall.

I also feel that societies are similarly 'cult based', and people have no choice in where they are born or how they are brought up, just in their preferences and groups they join later. It makes this battle between the BBC and the Scientologists a kind of a clash of culture as well, between who can utilise the media better.

Similarly the shouting fit thrown by John Sweeny and the intimidation techniques used by Tommy Davis are the kind of nasty nose-to-nose confrontations that occur between people every day of the week on the street, in bars, in offices etc.

However, having said all that, watching the Panorama programme showed Scientology to be extremely creepy. I have nothing against people, much less Hollywood stars, giving all their money away to a cult if they want to, and even have some sympathy with the Scientologists getting upset at being investigated but listening in and then interrupting interviews with people with dissenting opinions by walking up to an interview in progress and relating the interviewees faults and criminal convictions in lurid detail is incredibly rude and insulting as well as creepy.

They just seem to be incredibly insecure - if you have to follow people around and confront them if you see them speaking to 'undesireable' people then you must be worried about what they will say and perhaps even have something to hide that you might be worried about them talking about.

Surely the best way is to let people with dissenting opinions talk - even if they have a good point there is a good chance a lot of people will still sympathise with the Scientologists! The confrontation however just makes the Scientologist look weirder for acting up, and Davis immediately lost any sympathy from me when I saw him get upset at Sweeny just trying to conduct an interview. It is also interesting to see from the Panorama programme that Sweeny shouts at Tommy Davis after Davis has already tried to shout him down (and we have been shown two other incidences of Davis shouting Sweeny down and Sweeny backing off and letting him have his say previous to this)

I'll be very interested to see whether Anne Archer, Juliette Lewis "and the rest" who were interviewed for the Scientology cause but then withdrew their comments have any influence in preventing the BBC from showing their films or programmes etc or whether they will still turn up on the BBC in the future - i.e. whether their 'beliefs' are stronger than the almighty dollar.

I'm also surprised the BBC didn't have a little ticker at the bottom of the screen ticking off the number of times they used the word 'cult' in the programme! That would have lightened the tone while still pissing the Scientologists off! I counted around 14 uses of the word (15 if you count that one that described Tommy Davis, but I might have heard a 'l' instead of an 'n'!)

You can watch the full Panorama programme at this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/programmes/panorama/default.stm

Isn't our defence policy run in deference to the Americans who have their nuclear missile silos and Knebworth Hill monitoring station based here, rather than anything to do with what is in the British publics interest? (is the Mark Thomas Comedy Product episode where he flies a hot air balloon over Knebworth Hill up on the sift yet?)

I bet that meeting never happened!

They were interesting shows. I’m not a big fan of these shows that make a derisive comment on the people they are interviewing and I think Louis Theroux (and Nick Broomfield in film) were the first sign of the nightmarish reality shows that were to come. However, compared to the sneering tone taken to contestants on The Apprentice, Survivor or Big Brother (whether they deserve to be sneered at for agreeing to go on such a show in the first place apart!), it is strange to be able to look back on Louis Theroux’s shows nostalgically – at least he was interviewing people the public were interested in knowing more about in the case of these When Louis Met… docs, or of cults, crazies and strange sub-cultures in his Weird Weekends programmes. I was interested by the way I was never sure whether I found Louis endearing in his curiosity or whether his naivete was an act, and I think his subjects felt the same way. I think a more important thing is to think that Louis gave his subjects ample rope with which to hang themselves!

He is a particularly good comparison to Nick Broomfield in the sense that their films are much more about their reaction to the people and places they visit than they are about the actual things they are supposedly documenting – not that their subjects are not important, but the presence of Theroux or Broomfield and their reactions are really the primary focus and makes them in a way an audience surrogate where we are exploring the situation with them (and in a more difficult way we are also being given clues of what reaction is expected of us as viewers by the way we see Broomfield and Theroux reacting). This is perhaps best shown in the Theroux documentary which follows him trying to get an interview with Michael Jackson, which he eventually doesn’t get – that infamously went to Martin Bashir – though Louis does get an outside view of the baby dangling incident.

The When Louis Met… programmes were full of pathos (the same pathos Ricky Gervais was tapping into when he had Les Dennis as a guest star in the first series of Extras), since most of the subjects were entertainers from a past television generation: the magician Paul Daniels and his assistant (and wife) Debbie McGee who had a high profile magic show in the 80s on the BBC which I remember watching. They were kind of shown up when David Copperfield became huge in America – somehow seeing the (relatively) ugly Daniels performing middling magic tricks seemed very old fashioned after seeing Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China or making the Statue of Liberty disappear etc, and I think the BBC felt that too since they dropped the show soon afterwards despite his show still getting good ratings (and ratings the BBC would kill for today – in the tens of millions). Then the vogue for debunking magic tricks occurred which destroyed his act anyway.

I remember seeing Jimmy Savilles ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ show in the mid-80s, where kids would write with requests such as wanting to ride a monster truck or meet a celebrity etc which Jim then ‘fixed’. It is just difficult to watch the programme now in these more cynical times without a feeling of watching a dirty old man with an unhealthy interest in children which is probably why the show stopped. Not that Saville ever expressed any such interest, it is just the society has sadly become more distrustful of men and children, and there isn't the possibility of such a programme being shown now without those kind of thoughts popping into the audiences heads!

Chris Eubank, while ostensibly famous as a boxer, was only ever familiar to me from his comical television appearances, which had grown fewer over the years before this Louis documentary was made – probably as he realised that the audiences were laughing at him and his affectations rather than with him.

And I actually saw Keith Harris and Orville the Duck perform on stage in the late 80s – they were very well loved at the time, but again it was perhaps a more innocent gentle humour that didn’t really work as the world changed.

Neil and Christine Hamilton are the odd ones out from the group as they only became famous because of Neil’s accepting cash payments for asking question in Parliament in the early 90s and then being spectacularly defeated in 1997 when New Labour came to power. They were basically just opportunists hungry for publicity compared to the other participants who weren’t adverse to getting back in the limelight but had their limits. They were also minor figures by the early 2000s as well – it is just that they had much briefer fame and hadn’t done anything to be particularly proud of or to be fondly remembered for anyway! (Perhaps making them the earliest examples of people ‘famous for being famous’, ready to do anything to keep their profile in the media up)

Fantastic! It is about time television gets out of this 'aspirational' phase. I actually don't mind the rubbish like Friends, The OC and Desperate Housewives - that is just dreck. The programmes I cannot stand are the ones that are more 'in your face' - the 'What Not To Wear' girls as if normal people should really be so concerned about people treating them badly because of their clothes! Would you ever really want to get to know someone better if you knew that they wouldn't have talked to you the first time you met if you'd been wearing some poor fitting or poorly chosen clothes? I wouldn't and in fact finding out that someone made those kind of petty judgements would be the thing that would lead me to conclude I couldn't be friends with, or have a relationship with, that person myself!

The worst example of this is that 'Ten Years Younger' show that takes a normal looking middle aged woman, shows her picture to various passersby on the streets who comment on how ugly and old she looks, then takes her off for clothes, hair, tanning and dental treatments and plastic surgery to try to prove to these various nobodies who gave callous opinions about the woman that she can look as attractive as they seem to want her to be. This all ends with (different) passersby being shown a picture of the 'new and improved' woman and - what a surprise! - they all think she looks younger! Of course she does, leaving aside selective editing that only shows passersby who think the woman looks younger she now has a plastic face, immovable because of all the botox they've pumped into it and is wearing clothes that would look slutty on a 16 year old! Congratulations you don't look your age any more, you look like every other person who's had plastic surgery - whatever happened to growing old gracefully? The fact that this show says more about the pushiness of the presenters and so called experts and the lack of self-worth of the various women somehow never seems to be brought up!