Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Ship - Big Brother Is Colonizing Your Land

09:24 / 21.08.02

Watched this last night (well, half-watched, I was doing some sewing at the same time) and thought it was possibly an interesting premise: a bunch of people, including women (all white, I think) and some Australian aboriginal and New Zealand Maori men, are recreating part of James Cook's voyage round the coast of Australia. Obviously, I'm particularly interested in the way they deal with encounters with the colonial past (and equally obviously it looks like it's mostly trying to be a slightly more worthy "Big Brother In Space" deal), but what both fascinated & pissed me off particularly about the first episode last night was the way that they dealt with an Aboriginal protest: a few people drove out in a motor-boat flying the Aboriginal flag to complain, presumably, about the Second Coming of the SS Endeavour to their shores. After a couple of shots of the motor-boat, the documentary switched to a white female academic on the Endeavour explaining how she could understand that the Aboriginal people would be upset "no matter how sensitive we try to be, this is a symbol of oppression", then to a shot of the motor-boat driving away with the narrator (white [I think] man) voice-overing: "Soon the protest was over and we were on our way". As if this encounter was just a mild inconvenience. It just made me feel... hopeless, like the whole project is nothing but a reinscription of colonialism: "we have billions of pounds of BBC money behind us, so no matter how you try to protest, we will a) speak for you, b) edit you out of the documentary and c) carry on regardless".

Wondered what other people thought and whether this is being/has been shown in the antipodeal regions - and if so how it's going down there?

Jack The Bodiless

15:06 / 21.08.02

While I didn't see the programme itself, it strikes me that realtv shows like Big Brother/The Ship always seem to have a superficial element of 'study' to them ("We're going to examine the effect of locking ten young strangers in a house for three months with no outside stimulus...and film them necking nekked") in a bubble - they're fine with the repercussions of the journey as focussed on the participants in the show, but uneasy with relating the repercussions of the show to the outside world. While all manner of pundits speculated on the relations of the inhabitants of the BB house, very few tried more than a cursory analysis of the relationship between Big Brother and the audience at home, and those mostly only looked at cases of extremity - the 'Kill The Pig' campaign, for example, which generated a couple of worried leaders in the broadsheets.

They don't actually care about the implications of what they're doing, basically. But it's not entirely hopeless as long as someone does.

01:18 / 22.08.02

Wondered what other people thought and whether this is being/has been shown in the antipodeal regions - and if so how it's going down there?

I haven't heard of it.

11:29 / 23.08.02

uneasy with relating the repercussions of the show to the outside world.

Thanks, Jack, I think you've put your finger on it. I suppose this particular set-up just makes the weirdness of that dynamic more visible, since there's such an obvious, uneasy relation between attempt to respect aboriginal peoples & attempt to recreate massive invasion & fuckery, that the "hermetically sealed historical recreation" just becomes more obviously disingenous & dodgy.

11:48 / 23.08.02

In an attempt to give Deva and Jack a happy, I will offer a more positive view of the British Broadcasting Colonialists' documentary.

like the whole project is nothing but a reinscription of colonialism:

But it's not, surely, because it was acknowledged that colonialism = oppression, a darn sight more than happened first time round, when it was all 'for their own good'.

"we have billions of pounds of BBC money behind us, so no matter how you try to protest, we will a) speak for you,

Hmm... they did quote what the guy said, at least, and had the grace to acknowledge they didn't know whether it referred to them or Cook's ship.

b) edit you out of the documentary and

Not totally, or we wouldn't be talking about it. Don't mean to snark D, but that's a rather enormous exaggeration there.

c) carry on regardless".

Hmm... carry on in the knowledge that what they are doing is historico-politically controversial, at least to some people? Is it not better to do this than to pretend colonialism never happened?

Oh and if that hasn't cheered you somewhat, then console y'self with that slashtastic male-on-male snog before the watershed on The Bill last night! That should be enough to give anyone a happy. Except Richard Littlejohn. And most of the people in the UK, prolly.

07:18 / 24.08.02

they did quote what the guy said, at least

I missed that, then: I just heard the woman saying what she thought she would be feeling in his place. And okay, okay, they didn't edit the protest out completely - but actually that pisses me off just as much, because this way they look like they're being "sensitive" by name-checking colonialism whilst carefully editing out the content of any actual encounters and/or not dealing in any detail with the implications of what they're doing, beyond a vague "Colonialism bad. We're not doing that. Okay, back to the latest argument about salt beef."

Totally missed pre-watershed boy/boyness on the Bill! Hooray for ITV! Thanks for telling me.

12:40 / 26.08.02

Hmm... that's a good point, actually. (The first paragraph, that is.) But I think this is basically a no-win situation. By which I mean, er, as Gore Vidal says, "history is a nightmare from which we're all trying to awake". And can't.