|
Call me snobbish but I have never hidden my disappointment with Chinese television. In general, that is. I am not ruling out the occasional decent show. When I flip through the 60-something channels, I rarely stumble upon anything to my taste. Not educational programming like Discovery or PBS. For that, I have to trek to a certain stall in southern China whose owner has a warehouse of great discs. Recently, I got a box set of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, a BBC series that functioned as the "open sesame" to a world of Western civilization for me, while I was a graduate student in Guangzhou, in the early 1980s. My German-born English professor borrowed canisters of films from the British Embassy and for the first time I realized that great art does not necessarily spring from class struggle. Sure, CCTV10, as well as an array of imitators, is attempting to fill this void. Its runaway hit The Lecture Room does a service to various aspects of Chinese culture. But a lecture filled with graphics and footage from period dramas does not equal a good documentary with high production values. And focusing on only a few Chinese classics does not make what Francis Bacon called "a full man". Why not broaden the vista to embrace other fields, such as modern Chinese literature, or French Impressionist paintings, or Shakespeare? Speaking of production values, Chinese soap operas have come a long way from the not-too-distant past of shabby costumes and haphazard lighting. But I can hardly bear to put myself through a whole show because I can tell from the first episode what will happen by the grand finale. Worse, whenever a character says his or her line, it is easy for me to predict the follow-up line. | 
