Just A Big Idea, Or Five, To Clear The Air Between Us
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday April 10, 2007
FUTURE FOCUS 8.30pm, SBS: It is abundantly evident that individuals, community groups and the media are setting the pace when it comes to mobilising efforts to protect the environment. Governments in Europe seem more acutely attuned to the facts than those in Australia and America but nothing of any demonstrable consequence can occur unless every government and individual accepts responsibility for the dividends of their lifestyles. The danger of over-enthusiastic media saturating consumers with warnings and dire foreboding is a collateral damage prospect. But can a softly-softly approach contribute to the postponement mindset? A number of program initiatives on SBS illuminate the problems - and the potential solutions. Some involve reactions on the macro scale and others on individual responses - The Eco Challenge series, starting tomorrow night, being a case in point. Tonight's doco examines five possible solutions to global warming advanced by science. These are big-ticket items, some too costly to countenance realistically at present - the trillion "solar umbrellas", for example. But ingenuity and necessity are humanity's alternative options to the adaptive processes of natural selection, so plans for artificial clouds and man-made trees deserve consideration. What about the dispersal of sulphur barrages in the stratosphere to produce a layer of synthetic aerosols designed to diminish the greenhouse effect? Adopting the Gaia principle and seeing the planet as a single living entity makes sense and this is the basis for Future Focus: The Planet at 10pm. Watch it via your pedal-powered plasma screen.
NEIGHBOURS 6.30pm, Ten: In an episode bound to see the sales of stress medication soar to record levels, Rowena Wallace returns to Ramsay Street. One small step for a woman, another giant leap backwards for mankind. What a desperately moribund shower of suds. 20 to 01 7.30pm, Nine: Bert Newton is a living icon and has been nominated yet again for the Gold Logie. Ahhh! Feel the pulse quickening as a massive depot shot of Nine's toxic fragrance Sentimentality Brut Plus Pour Hommes is ram-fed into the sluggish bloodstream of Australia's most inconsequential and compromised cavalcade of self-congratulation. Tarnished gold for hosting a swag of recycled inanity? They have no shame. Tonight's topic is tantrums and dummy spits, with Newton presiding felicitously over another selection of clips dredged up by Arch Ives, the network's video librarian. SHADOW PLAY 1.10am (Weds), SBS: Drifting through the past and enjoying the intemperate behaviour of dummy spitters is not always gentle fun - as this program, conveniently screening very late, illustrates. It assesses the events in Indonesia in 1965 when President Soeharto's New Order movement swept out the Soekarno regime. Top military chaps were the first to fall, followed by a wave of slaughter which cost the lives of more than half a million people. MY KHMER HEART 11.35pm, ABC: An "encore screening" of the doco about Geraldine Cox, an aggressively benevolent Australian woman who is devoted to securing opportunities and hope for Cambodian orphans. This program will be of particular interest to the sub-species of parasitic vermin who broke into a Dee Why framing gallery at Christmas and stole a tin containing money donated to assist these children. Cox is a mess of contradictions but she inspires admiration. The children's needs, and their vitality, make them irresistible.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald