SBS documentaries rule

This article first appeared in the Age on January 8, 2005

SBS is outdoing itself at the moment with several outstanding documentary series. There is its not-to-be missed 3-part series The Corporation (Wednesday, 8.30 pm), which asks what the consequences are for human beings, the environment, democracy, and the survival of our planet if we grant so much power to an institution that is structurally amoral and whose prime directive is to create wealth for shareholders. Tintin And I (Tuesday, 10.00pm) is an unusual documentary about the life of Herge the creator of Tintin, a cartoon series that began 1929 and continued till 1982. From the early Tintin in the Congo to the late Tintin in Tibet, this documentary shows, convincingly, how Herge's work expressed everything from his conservative Catholic values, his views on Nazi Germany (he was accused of being a collaborator) as well as his experience of depression and his nervous collapse. Much of the documentary is animated, bringing Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock to life. It also uses a long audio interview Hergé did with the actor and writer, Numa Sadoul, and interviews several Tintin experts.

But I'll save the superlatives for Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English (Sunday, 7.30 pm) which describes both the history of Britain and of the English language, showing us how thousands of years are compressed into the texture of the words we speak each day. How the word body comes from the old English 'bone-house'. How the Viking Invasion bought death, as well as words like 'sky', 'angr', 'husband', 'knif' and surnames that end in 'son'. How poems like Beowulf in the 9th century and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the Middle Ages profoundly changed the course of the English language by naming, it, spinning stories from it and, most importantly writing it down. How the church, and the monasteries were instrumental in salvaging the language from the wrack and ruin of successive wars and invasion and how the visions of Kings and Queens shaped its use across a nation.

English began as a few tribal and local Germanic dialects spoken by a hundred and fifty thousand people and early words were those of the sea - like 'stoarm' and 'boat' - and included suffixes like 'ton' (enclosure) and my own, 'ham' (far). English is now spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people. The language's origins were in the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England in the 5th Century AD and the consequent marginalisation of Celtic languages and Latin - though Latin continued to influence both written and oral English. Bragg moves to the reign of Alfred the Great, who made Old English dominant as the tongue of church and state, an accomplishment nearly destroyed by the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Next weeks we experience the drama of how the Normans, French speakers all, because absorbed into the English language, despite three centuries of history that suggested it would be the otherwise. And, while English remained the dominant tongue, the language of food, would never be the same. Words like 'fruit', market', 'fry' (frire) and 'salade' (salad) are now in common usage as are many words to do with the law, such as 'felon' (felonie) and 'warrant' (warrant). English fought back through interbreeding, political change and cultural influence, its rise assisted by sometimes quite unexpected factors like the Black Death and wars across the seas. The language had an incredible flexibility and facility for absorbing words from other tongues, rather than giving way to them. Bragg's narration is passionate and knowledgeable. Words, he reminds us, are beautiful things, dense with meaning.

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