TV Review: Fox News doesn't display the terror alert level on the bottom of the screen these days. For a while there it simmered away at yellow (elevated) and orange (high), but never dipped to green (relax) or blue (go to the beach). When the terror alert dropped, Fox just dropped the terror alert graphic from the screen. It's not that it doesn't want to worry its viewers any more, it's just that putting the nation on Blue Alert lacks a certain apocalyptic frisson.
It finds other ways to keep you sweating. Early on Monday morning, Rev Jerry Falwell was interviewed, as he regularly is on the channel. He was talking about gay marriage when he made mention of how America has upheld natural law for 220 years, just as civilisation has for 6,000 years. There was something about the remark that nagged at the twilit brain. Then it dawned. He was not being so specific because civilisation began upholding natural law 6,000 years ago. Falwell was being specific because he believes the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. As Eddie Holt explained in these pages last week, Falwell is the millennial preacher who first spotted Tinky-Winky's obvious homosexuality. Falwell's world view stems from one important point: he ain't descended from no apes.
Yet Falwell is considered mainstream enough to appear on the highest-rated cable news channel, in favour of George W. Bush, and is free to use such rhetoric without the interviewer twirling her finger around the temples as he speaks. Political debate on US news has become so polarised that those on the edges of reason have been welcomed into the middle. Just as that move to the edges has meant that reasoned debate on US television has increasingly given way to rhetorical cock-fighting, where conflict rather than erudition is the prime motivation.
Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares indirectly joins the dots of these phenomena. Previously, Curtis made The Century of the Self, an excellent series on how the Freud family influenced the path of the last century.
This time he is tackling the entwined histories of American neo-conservatism and Islamic fundamentalism. They both, goes his argument, arose from similar observations: that in American prosperity and individual liberty lies moral corruption. And both movements used the tactics of fear, of creating evil enemies, through which to unite and fortify the people. The result is an ambitious, and well-made, three-part series and there is a forceful clarity at the heart of a complex set-up, even if conclusions sometimes appear overly convenient.
In this week's second programme, Curtis tracked the two movements from the Afghanistan war, when they fought together to bring down the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, to the last years of the century, when a desperate group, including Osama Bin Laden, declared jihad on America.
Along the way, both believed they had destroyed the Soviet Union, even if it had, in fact, destroyed itself. And both were to be thwarted in their aims by a public unwilling to follow their path, although this link relied on tenuous evidence to suggest that the neo-cons blamed the public for this failure, just as the jihadists condemned the public to death for theirs.
Inevitably, it has moved towards the neo-cons and their continuing need to find an enemy - or simply create one, if necessary, to act as a foil. After the Soviets there was Saddam, then Clinton and now, says Curtis, al-Qaeda.
Next week, he will argue that the image of this solid network of evil is another neo-con myth, although it will be interesting to see whether he can do this without downplaying the still real threat of terrorism. Curtis's polemic is thoroughly fascinating, and in parts convincing, even if it too relies on the power of nightmares, the conspiracy of a shadowy elite attempting to control the world.
Although, when these are people at the shoulder of the world's most powerful man, it's worth paying attention. They may have his ear for only a few more days, however. Their contempt for the moral relativism of the liberals has become a dominant feature of Fox News's coverage, as it has of George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Through the hardened polarisation can be witnessed the civil war of civilisations of which Tuesday marks an important battle; which side each is on sometimes dependant on how old you think civilisation is, of course. You might intend to stay up throughout Tuesday night to see the outcome of the election. It will, at least, prevent you from having nightmares.
It's a big leap from neo-conservative moralism to Trinny and Susannah's fashion makeovers, although I suppose that the pair are the neo-cons of fashion, seeing stylistic corruption in personal freedom while insisting that their subjects dress as they are ordered to. They are fascistic fashionistas, feeling no shame about interfering in the lives of those they encounter. A couple of weeks ago Susannah reached under a woman's skirt and pulled her knickers off, which must have broken a dozen laws.
In the new series of What Not To Wear, they deal only with volunteers. They used to ambush women, who were sometimes quite happy in their garish individuality, until Trinny and Susannah would arrive to re-educate them.
Now, they choose a couple of women from a line-up. After that, Trinny and Susannah pretend to live their lives for the day. They do their jobs. Raise their kids. Nag their husbands. Finally, we get to the makeover bit. It is a convoluted format, designed largely to stretch the programme out to an hour and to allow the pair to be ever more barbarous. So there's a lot more of them picking through the egos of their subjects and saying things such as: "She's like a faded human being" and "you know you're showing off the entire pudding" and "you've just so let yourself go".
Although, this week we met Helle, who had actually, completely, 100 per cent let herself go, waving plaintively at the disappearing form of her youth. "She's 45 but she's given in to old age," they said. And she had. Helle was how Peig Sayers might have looked if there had been a Jaeger shop on the Blaskets. They rescued Helle by dressing her in a floral kafkan and changing her hair from silver to gold.
Trinny and Susannah were most pleased. If liberty means anything at all, it means having the right to tell people what they do not want to wear.
Unfortunately, it clashes with RTÉ1's Off The Rails, which is not a programme made to appeal to the male viewer, although there was a lingerie fashion shoot a couple of weeks ago, perfectly timed to appear at half-time during the Ireland's match against the Faroe Islands, which was almost as entertaining as the Garda Band. There are makeovers here, but they are not so spun out. Much of the time, it goes straight to the clothes; hanging them off skinny young things, and showing you what they look like and where you can buy them. It has an effective simplicity that seems to have become unfashionable on the other side of the Irish Sea.
Besides that, its presenters, Caroline Morahan and Pamela Flood, are far more likeable. Morahan, especially, is perfect for Off The Rails; she looks like she could happily breathe fabric. She has, by the way, a smile that could reach either side of the Liffey at once.
Finally, if John Peel's premature death had any positive note, it was that it bequeathed us the sight of Mark E. Smith on Newsnight. Smith is the lead singer of The Fall and a man who has clung to his unapologetic punkness as much as John Lydon has become a parody of his.
Presenter Gavin Esler must have known he was heading for trouble when he told us that after an obituary of Peel he would be talking to Smith and to Michael Bradley of The Undertones. Cut to Smith, live from a studio somewhere, slumped so low in his seat that his chin dipped beneath the screen. His face was smaller than his ears, and the earphone wire protruded from him like a drip. He looked unerringly like Stephen Hawking. An anti-Hawking.
When Esler later turned to him for the interview, he was a postman walking into a dog pound. Smith was shockingly truculent, giving one-word answers, mumbling incoherently, in keeping with his singing style, and generally refusing to be in any way helpful to Esler's inquiries. The presenter persisted, but when he asked Smith about how Peel had appealed to several generations, the reply was a curt "whatever you've just said", before Smith asked Esler if he was the new DJ, and Esler, beaten and bitten, answered "probably". And the unfortunate researcher who booked Mark E. Smith is the new tea boy.
