Bridge of Reason

This is a very disturbing documentary for, amongst others, the following reasons (from most to least obvious): Racism is alive and punching in the UK The abolition of corporal punishment has proved disastrous Islam is an incredibly destructive force The BBC1 documentary follows two British Muslims who go undercover for eight weeks, posing as an Asian couple in a Bristol housing estate. They are constantly abused, harassed, sworn at, racially slurred, sneered at, subject to missiles of glass and brick, threatened, mugged, reduced to tears and actually physically thumped. It makes one sick to be white and British, and stiffens one's resolve (if it needed any stiffening) against the BNP and Nick Griffin's slippery attempts to sanitise its inalienably racist platform. Firstly, then, the most obvious conclusion is that racism is not dead in the UK, despite Trevor Phillips' assurance that nobody has a problem nowadays living next door to someone of a different ethnicity. Mancunia...

The Big Questions , 27 July 2009, BBC1. I must say, I hand it to this programme for coming up with a very stimulating variety of topics. Chimps and bonobos, apparently, share 98.4% of our DNA and their blood and organs can be harvested for human use. (I did a simple Google, however, and found the DNA similarity may be more like 95% .) The first expert questioned is Professor Colin Blakemore , whom presenter Nicky Campbell challenges concerning whether a creature than can articulate (via symbols) the phrase, "Can I have an ice cream on my birthday?" should not, in fact, be given rights. The professor replies that simian linguistics is a highly controversial field, and that the conferring of rights in theory is not the same as creating a fairer world (as can already be seen amongst us humans!). Campbell then brings out the crunch question: are we part of a 'continuum' along with apes, or do we have a special, divinely-conferred status? The former, says Professor Paula C...