Documentaries

This column first appeared in the Age on January 11, 2003

There is no doubt that SBS is the King of the documentary, and tonight it continues it's extraordinary range with two highly particular ones. At 7.30 pm we have The Lost Legions of Varus a documentary about the massacre of three Roman legions (20,000 people) by German tribesman in the Teutoberg forest in 9AD. The documentary's historians draw a direct line from this event to World War II. It is bloody stuff, with fantastic reconstructions - but it really is for Roman history and war buffs, and I must confess that after half-an-hour in my eyes started to glaze over. At 10.05pm, and, I suspect, for a totally different audience, is The Pixies-Gouge, about one of the most acclaimed acts in the independent music scene, Boston indy-rock band, The Pixies. While the show can't make the grand claims of The Lost Legions of Varus about events that changed the world, many claim The Pixies influence extends to Nirvana, which was a pretty life-changing band for me.

But the pick of the week, especially if you love a good statistic, is the final in the Empires of Stone series (tomorrow night, SBS, 7.30pm), The Great Wall of China. For those who saw the first episode on The Colosseum there were some pretty impressive figures to do with the number of animals and humans killed in a single day. But The Great Wall of China's statistics are even more exciting, (not to mention the fact that it is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the moon).

The first wall was built around 200BC. 3000 miles of eighteen-feet high wall were built in ten years. 3.5 million people worked on it, which was 70 % of China's population at that time. One million peope died on the job, but, contrary to myth, the bodies were not thrown into the rammed earth walls - not out of respect for the dead, but because decomposing bodies would cause instability in the Wall's structure. Now there's a fact. Instead their bodies were tossed into ditches, specially dug along on the side of wall and their scattered bones and skulls can still be seen today. The numbers of deaths caused a revolution and the overthrow of the Qin dynasty. The third Wall, built during the Ming dynasty and the 14-century, resulted in the deaths of seven million people. And as for the statistics on the number of bricks made per day, and the amount of pressure they can sustain - well, I don't want to ruin the surprise for you. But it's mind-boggling. All in all, you can see why there are only Seven Wonders of the World. You also get an inkling as to why communism might have seemed like a good idea to the Chinese - workers rights weren't real high on the agenda in the good old days.

It's an interesting hour's television full o' fact, and digital reconstructions. And where would the new fangled documenatary be without this latest toy? First seen (by me, anyway) at the beginning of James Cameron's Titanic in which historical objects are returned to their former glory before our eyes. In the case of The Great Wall of China this means we get to watch the wall's ruins grow in height and snake across a total of 50,000 km of mountains and deserts and plains. This is a documentary which brings statistics to life.

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