Documentaries the Old-Fashioned Way
Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, BBC Four
If you, like me, are of the opinion that the only documentaries that make it on to TV these days are those overloaded with oft-repeated CGI sequences and which re-state their meagre points every few minutes to appease an imagined and probably non-existent audience of almost unimaginable stupidity, check out this offering presented by veteran broadcaster, doctor, opera director and, it turns out, atheist Jonathan Miller, who shows that yes, Virginia, there are still people who can make good, old-fashioned documentaries.
The three-part series, currently in repeats on BBC Four, was produced and directed by Richard Denton, who deserves a lot of points for doing a good old-fashioned documentary series with a stunningly small repertoire of artificial aids - basically little more than some carefully-chosen archive footage. As Miller notes in the first programme, it's not Walking with Atheists. Denton's previous work includes Did Jesus Die, also for BBC Four. The series took over 18 months to make and includes fascinating interviews with people such as Arthur Miller, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg, plus relevant inserted quotes from a number of famous philosophers on the subject of a lack of belief in God. There's also an accompanying series of extended interviews called The Atheism Tapes running later in the evening.
The series neatly untangles many threads and provides enlightenment at every turn, from learning how some non-conformists in the late 18th century were actually atheists but never said so (they called themselves 'Deists' and professed to believe in God but didn't really leave Him anything to do) to discovering that the Founding Fathers of the USA had such a deep and general opposition to religion that none of them - especially Paine, of course - would stand a chance in a modern US Presidential election.
My only criticism was that the series didn't distinguish a great deal between not believing in God on the one hand, and believing that organised religion is one of the worst things ever to have blighted humanity (irrespective of whether or not you believe in God). The latter appears to be labelled 'anti-Theism', which seems to me a little too broad a brush to do the job.
Never mind: here is straight documentary at its finest, with pace, intelligence and some fascinating observations. And I bet it didn't cost too much either - apart from a decent travel budget.
