by Clif Garboden

THURSDAY

7:30 (2) Basic Black: Walter Mosley. A talk with the novelist about his latest, Walkin’ the Dog. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Local News: There’s No Place like Home. The final installment of this chronicle of a TV station’s scramble to improve its news ratings has the anchors and other victims of the upgrade reflecting (positively) on the changes they’ve endured to sell their efforts. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (44) Antiques Roadshow UK: Glamis Castle. Just south of Birnam Wood, a few mountainous blocks from Cawdor. To be repeated on Saturday at 7 p.m. on Channel 2. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Frontline: Gunning for Saddam. Who sent that anthrax? Some, including Clinton CIA guy James Woolsey, say such assaults (plus the first WTC bombing and other terrorist activities) can be traced back to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and are lobbying to unseat him in the next round of the war of terrorism. Others caution that doing so would destabilize Saudi Arabia and turn some of our "allies" against us. (Until 10 p.m.)

FRIDAY

10:00 (2) Life 360: Junk. A look at that other person’s treasures with a visit to e-Bay and the Nantucket town dump. To be repeated tonight at 2 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Austin City Limits. Featuring music from Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris. (Until 11 p.m.)

SATURDAY

4:00 (7) Tara Lipinski’s Hip-Hop on Ice. No, this is not a Saturday Night Live skit. The "Who We Be" couples routine is not to be missed. (Until 6 p.m.)

7:00 (2) Antiques Roadshow UK: Glamis Castle. Repeated from Thursday at 8 p.m.

8:30 (7) Shakespeare in Love (movie). Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes wade into the deep end of the shallow pool for what honestly has to be described as enormous fun. Gags for all levels of intellectual accomplishment abound, and you can’t fault something for knowing how to be popular. With Geoffrey Rush and Judi Dench. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:30 (44) Johnny Cash: The Anthology. Cash is a good guy and, thank God, an influential figure in American music. This is his life — featuring interviews with George Jones, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and Glen Campbell. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

10:30 (44) Austin City Limits. Music from Dolly Parton and Nickel Creek. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

11:30 (44) Country on Tour. WGBX’s Down Home Opry continues with this half-hour of industry hype featuring chat with Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, and Jo Dee Messina. (Until midnight.)

SUNDAY

1:00 (4) Football. The Pats versus the Buffalo Bills.

4:15 (25) Football. The New York Giants versus the Arizona Cardinals.

8:00 (5) Saving Private Ryan (movie). Tom Hanks, America’s youngest World War II vet, bumbles around Europe looking for Matt Damon. Steven Spielberg’s opening invasion sequence is famous; the rest of the movie is, well, pretty lame.

8:00 (44) To Have and Have Not (movie). A 1944 Howard Hawks Hemingway adaptation (via screenwriter William Faulkner) with Humphrey Bogart as a fisherman sucked into the French Resistance. Hoagy Carmichael does some great bits — including a duet with Lauren Bacall (in her first movie role). Lots of fun except for the disturbing Walter Brennan character. Something about a dead bee. What’s that mean? (Until 9:45 p.m.)

9:00 and 10 p.m. (2) The American Experience: War Letters. It was a relief during the 50th-anniversary D-Day hoo-hah to have Operation Overlord survivors come out of the closet and explain how terrifying and out of control the whole thing was. Continuing that theme, WGBH gives us excerpts from Andrew Carroll’s book War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, human and personal accounts from various fronts, from the American Revolution to the Gulf War. Why is this being shown twice? Perhaps there are two shows. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44, and on Tuesday at 2 a.m. (Until 10 and 11 p.m.)

9:00 (4) I Love Lucy’s 50th Anniversary. Nothing you haven’t seen a million times. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:45 (44) Dark of the Sun (movie). A 1968 jungle adventure with Rod Taylor on the trail of diamonds and providing refugee relief in the Congo. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

11:30 (44) Indie Select: Who’s the Caboose? Repeated from last week. A spoof of the Hollywood moviemaking machine — in mockumentary form — from filmmakers Sam Seder and Charles Fisher. (Until 1 a.m.)

1:00 and 4:00 a.m. (44) The American Experience: War Letters. Repeated from this evening at 9 and 10 p.m.)

MONDAY

8:00 (7) The Weakest Link. A celebrity edition with stars of the WWF. Can’t be funnier than the trash-celebrities show with Tonya Harding and Kato Kaylin was. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: The Cazalets, part four. Cousin Somebody-or-Other refuses to enlist to fight WW2. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44, and on Tuesday at 1 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (5) Football. The Baltimore Ravens versus the Tennessee Titans.

10:30 (2) American Roots Music: The Times They Are a-Changin’. And for a few years there, popular music was about people, politics, and life instead of selling records. Where’d that go? A look at the folk/blues/gospel revival that propelled the public discourse out of narcissism. However briefly. To be repeated tonight at 2 and 5 a.m. on Channel 44. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

1:00 and 4:00 a.m. (44) Masterpiece Theatre: The Cazalets, part four. Repeated from this evening at 9 p.m.

2:00 and 5:00 a.m. (44) American Roots Music: The Times They Are a-Changin’. Repeated from this evening at 10 p.m.

TUESDAY

8:00 (2) Nova: Bioterror. Probing the ugly realities of bulletless warfare. Including reports from the New York Times team who authored the book Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War. Found any dead sheep in your backyard lately? (Until 9:30 p.m.)

8:00 (44) Secrets of the Pharaohs: Tut’s Family Curse, Lost City of the Pyramids, and Unwrapping the Mummy. Three Ancient Egypt documentaries. Always a crowd pleaser. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:30 (2) Greater Boston Special Edition. On the subject of bioterrorism in Boston. Keep in mind that most of the world is wholeheartedly against biological weaponry. Only a few unprincipled nations like the United States refuse to condemn it. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:30 (7) Frasier Clip Show. As if to remind us that the show was once smart and funny. (Until 10 p.m.)

1:00 a.m. (2) Masterpiece Theatre: The Cazalets, part four. Repeated from Monday at 9 p.m.

2:00 a.m. (2) The American Experience: War Letters. Repeated from Sunday at 9 p.m.

WEDNESDAY

9:00 (2) Warship: Submarines and Aircraft Carriers. The history of subs from the sinking of the Lusitania to the present, followed by a look at the role floating military airports played in World War II. To be repeated on Thursday at 1 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (44) Indie Select: Fools and Heroes. Filmmaker Ondine Rarey examines World War II through the lives her two grandads — both Greenwich Village artists, one a fighter pilot, the other a conscientious objector. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Oflag 64: A POW Odyssey. Personal accounts of being POWs in WW2 Poland. (Until 11 p.m.)

THURSDAY

7:30 (2) Basic Black: Isaiah Jackson. The music director of Boston’s Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra discusses his life and honors — which include being the first African-American to take the podium before the Pops and the Cape Town Symphony. (Until 8 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Frontline: The Saudi Time Bomb. An effort to answer the question, whose side are the Saudis on? George "Bully Boy" Bush says the friends of our enemies are our enemies, and Saudi Arabia hasn’t exactly jumped into his anti-Taliban campaign feet first. What’s a warmaker to do? (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (5) Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. If it were really a secret, they wouldn’t have told us. (Until 10 p.m.)

The 525th line. Any totalitarian government worth its thumbscrews has a Ministry of Fear — a domestic propaganda agency charged with inflating state enemies to bogeyman stature just to keep the population feeling sufficiently dependent that it doesn’t mind being beaten by the secret police once in a while. Democracies, of course, don’t have such government agencies per se. Democracies have commercial mass media to do the job. Anyone who remembers the Cold War knows what it’s like to live with the nagging possibility that Comrade Scary over in the USSR could decide to nuke New York, or Cleveland, or Brookline High at any second. Facts and reason never got in the way; the press fed us a steady diet of right-wing-inspired fear fodder, and until people wised up sometime in the late ’60s, it was a very effective means of inspiring conformity and mindless patriotic loyalty.

Now just because politicians and ratings-hungry broadcasters exaggerate a threat doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real, and nobody wants to be the guy who said, "Aw, don’t worry about it," the day before some fundamentalist fanatic parks a Lexus SUV full of dynamite in the Callahan Tunnel, but our local TV news outlets have been playing into the hands of the current war machine’s propaganda engine way too facilely. It’s bad enough that our "elected" government goes on television and tells us to get antsy about a new terrorist threat but declines to give us specifics. But when California governor Gary Davis spills the beans about West Coast bridges being targeted, Boston news reporters get silly. They leap at the chance to assure us that the yet-to-be-used Zakim Bridge is being guarded. But not the Tobin? We suspect the authorities didn’t want to publicize that they were — or perhaps weren’t — guarding what would be a more realistic target, so the TV guys settled for the irrelevant crumbs they were fed. (Gotta have some story. Give us the local angle.) It was equally comforting to know that the Halloween block party in Salem was heavily patrolled. Guess we are surrounded by enemies. Guess we’d better fall in line with our idiot president and give him all the guns he wants. Guess we’d better give up the Bill of Rights after all. Guess we’d better not question the wisdom of correcting decades of bogus foreign policy by going to other countries and killing people.

It must be fun for the small-time TV news teams to play professionals and pretend to report on this stuff. But the information we’re getting is laundered, manipulative, disheartening, and, in terms of helping us protect ourselves against terrorism, useless. Be afraid? We’re afraid. We’re afraid something’s really going to happen and they won’t tell us because all their cameras are trained on a bridge to nowhere.

Issue Date: November 8 - 15, 2001

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