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In the doldrums

Simon Hoggart

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); American Future: A History (BBC2, Friday); John Adams (More 4, Saturday)

Specifically there is no more water. This was illustrated with pictures of the empty lakes and the Colorado River, which irrigates much of the West, far below its normal level. The scale of the problem was brought home vividly by the farmer’s wife who had been suffering from a drought for several years. ‘It seems it quit raining on us,’ she said, with stoical regret.

Sometimes the choice of material seemed unbalanced. We had a lot of library film of the 1930s’ Dust Bowl and Okies driving west in jalopies. But they recovered from that, didn’t they? Your point is? Meanwhile we were told that Las Vegas was leading the way for the world in water conservation, illustrated by a shot of a water inspector taking a picture of somebody’s water feature — and nothing else. Come on, surely there’s more going on than a crack team of civic officials armed with camera phones?

The programme is a sort of reverse Alistair Cooke’s America. That series assumed that the future of the States would be a glorious continuation of the present and past. Schama is saying that it could all finish very soon. But even he could not resist an optimistic, can-do note at the end. ‘If the resources are shot, America’s resourcefulness is not. That is one well that will never run dry!’ Let’s hope so. As recent events have shown, when America gets confused and bewildered, the whole world suffers.

John Adams (More 4, Saturday) is about America’s second president. It’s very wordy, but the words are usually good and often alarmingly apt for our times. ‘The business of Congress is to achieve nothing...if it were proposed that two and two make five, we should spend two days debating the matter then pass it in the affirmative.’ Throughout the programme Adams is near to despair at the feeble-minded blindness of his colleagues. Thank heavens, Simon Schama wasn’t around to make him even glummer.