When Television Rocks

If you're in the States, watch this timely piece of work by the acclaimed documentary-makers Brook Lapping Productions. It airs on the National Geographic Channel on Monday, June 22, at 9 pm EST. (A 3-hour version aired on the BBC in February. The British version uses subtitles when necessary. The U.S. version is 90 minutes long and is dubbed by actors with presumably appropriate accents. God bless America... The series producer, Norma Percy, tells me the BBC version is available for purchase .)

Here's part of a review that ran in the Daily Telegraph (London) in Ferbuary:

Iran and the West was made by Brook Lapping, the Rolls-Royce of political documentary makers. The company’s past achievements include The Death of Yugoslavia and Israel and the Arabs, landmark analyses of their respective topics; past interviewees include Bill Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic and Yasser Arafat. Iran and the West should prove no exception. Saturday’s opener included contributions from everyone from Jimmy Carter to Queen Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran’s wife. They’d been so thorough I half expected them to have disinterred Khomeini for the purpose of a few quotes.The documentary required, throughout, the kind of concentration very rarely demanded of us by television programmes these days. There were no sensationalist repetitions of the bloodiest moments of conflict; there were no patronising historical reconstructions with bad British actors speaking in funny accents. There was simply narrative, as impartial as seemed possible, very tightly told. It was told partly through fascinating archive footage from the time, and partly through the words of the film’s interviewees. Interviewees that included a former head of state, but also the figures whose part in history had less to do with their status than their being in the right place at the right time.