Critic's view - Sunday, April 3h
The Age
Thursday March 31, 2011
The Lost ThingABC1, 4.45pmWHEN this small but perfectly formed film won the Oscar for best short animation in February, its Australian creator, Shaun Tan, noted that: "Our film is about a creature that nobody pays any attention to, so this is wonderfully ironic." It is less-wonderfully ironic that the ABC has decided to air the film in such an obscure timeslot, virtually ensuring little attention will be paid to its free-to-air debut. It's a shame, because it is a wonderful work whimsical, sad, evocative and beautifully rendered. Co-directed by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann, it is based on Tan's illustrated book about a lonely boy, living in a dystopian near future, who befriends a strange thing that looks like a cross between an enormous pot-bellied stove and a sea creature. He takes it home but his parents want nothing to do with it. The inhabitants of the city an industrial wasteland of imposing walls and uniform housing, bleached of colour and life don't notice the thing, lost in the drudgery of their existence. The boy takes it to the Federal Department of Odds & Ends (motto: "sweepus underum carpetae"), where he is given a pile of papers to fill out. But another creature warns him not to leave the thing there: "This is a place for forgetting, for leaving behind." He gives the boy directions to a world of colour and life, into which the thing happily escapes. The optimism of that scene, however, is tempered by the final one, in which the boy has grown up and admits he notices things that don't fit in less and less. The Lost Thing is an intriguing work whose message is not entirely obvious. It hints at a joyless Orwellian future of conformity and omnipresent bureaucracy ("Truth overrated, explains Minister", reads a newspaper headline). This is softened, however, by the innocence of its protagonist and Tim Minchin's gentle narration, so ultimately the tone is more melancholy than menacing.Bondi RescueChannel Ten, 8pmALONG with the usual mix of swimmers doing their best to drown, this episode follows Bondi lifeguard Kobi Graham's rehabilitation and ultimate comeback after breaking his neck in huge surf south of Sydney. This is by-the-numbers factual television but Bondi always looks nice and throws up plenty of interesting material.Midsomer MurdersABC1, 8.30pmPRODUCER Brian True-May recently claimed that the success of this show was due to its lack of "ethnic minorities". Perhaps that's true. It might also explain why the show feels so dated. Tonight's episode is interesting in light of those comments, dealing as it does with an alien intrusion into the bland monoculture of Midsomer in the form of a modern house. The founding member of the Midsomer Conservation Society has taken exception to it but after an altercation with the developers she is murdered. There are suspects galore and as Barnaby and Jones stroll through the investigation, the death toll rises. At the end, of course, everything is neatly tied up so the citizens of Midsomer can get back to ensuring the racial purity of their little patch of Britain.Who Killed Maggie Thatcher?SBS One, 9.30pmAFTER a ludicrously overblown introduction, this gets down to the business of recounting Margaret Thatcher's last weeks in power. An impressive line-up of former Tory ministers and advisers recall how, after Thatcher's re-election in 1987, she became increasingly dictatorial. Her insistence on going ahead with the hugely unpopular poll tax and her brutal treatment of ministers set the scene for a revolt that she underestimated and was unable to counter. It's a fascinating story, effectively told. It's hard to feel much sympathy for Thatcher, who was not given to public displays of compassion or self-doubt, but the footage from a tearful interview not long after her resignation in 1990 reveals another side to the so-called Iron Lady.
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