"How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?"

I used to watch BBC America all the time. They featured many DIY type shows that were not nearly as annoying as the American ones. Annoying in many aspects: annoying presenters, annoying topics, and worst of all, people with abysmal taste (the American ones, that is).

I've been watching it less and less, as my full time jobs suck a lot of my time away, and the programming strategy has been to put on a lot of lowest common denominator shows, as those tend to get ratings in the US. Also, I have DVD collections of many of the programmes. (note the spelling, he said with a flourish).

When I was living in Europe for most of 2005, I began watching Top Gear, which was a show about cars and racing.

The Top Gear crew wanted to see if it would be cheaper to come to America, buy a car, and sell it at the end of the trip; or to rent one. So they did an episode about it. I had heard about the episode before, but finally saw it today.

They landed in Miami, and planned to drive to NOLA. They had the stereotypical gator adventures, lack of A/C adventures, and roadkill adventures. When they hit Alabama, the producers had the brilliant idea to paint slogans on the cars, and then drive them into redneck territory to get gas.

Yeah.

Good call.

"Hillary for President". "NASCAR sucks". "Man Love rules OK". "Country and Western is rubbish". Brilliant. Akin to wearing an Everton kit to a Liverpool match. Mookish behavior, and they were chastised indeed.

After scrubbing the slogans off their vehicles, they headed to NOLA. They didn't show the group in the Quarter, drinking and carrying on. They showed the presenters in areas decimated by the Federal Flood.

Transcript from when they hit NOLA:

[voiceover] My word; were we in for a shock. We had seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done, but seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

[The Brits look around]

[Brit #1:] Oh, my god

[Brit #2:] Oh, look at this

[Brit #3:] Well, now this is extraordinary. Every house! I’ve been driving now, what about 15 miles. There isn’t a pavement, there isn’t a building, there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It’s such a vast scale of destruction.

[Voiceover] A year had passed since Katrina had blown through, and we sort of assumed that after 12 months the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it. But we were wrong. How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?

If you want to see the whole thing, you can play roulette on BBC America, or you can go to youtube, and puch in top gear america. It's all there.

In the meantime, here's part of their visit to NOLA.

How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?

How can they? I don't know. But they do, and they do quite well.

Sinn Fein.

Comments

[Aaron]

I ask that question every time I hear about how we can't get funding to rebuild. Like it's already forgotten.

[Matt]

1) We're in the South, which is "backwards"
2) The media has portrayed the areas hit the most as "poor"

poor + backwards = don't bother sending aid.

[oyster]

"How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?"

Still an excellent query. Excellent post, too.

---
I like your link to the Bargain Hunt show because it reminded me of those wonderful moments where they'd find neat antiques that were priced "cheap as chips".

[mark c.]

tommy murphy - murphy's law. i love that show. the messiah, MI-5. their law and order crap is so much better than ours.

[Marco]

Right on post, Perfessor. The rest of America may be sleeping, but I wonder who/what haunts their dreams? Another question is why do we spend $4.5 billion on sleeping aids?

[BanzaiBill]

We were out of the media maninstream over a year ago. My recent trip back home (in October) showed me that the "tourist" world (the New Orleans world seen by tourists prior to the storm) was up and running rather well. For the untrained eye, one wouldn't notice even the closed shops and restaurants in the French Quarter. Magazine Street seemed buzzing, and there were signs of new stores coming on-line. I'm sure that the "bus tours" into the Lower 9th Ward have merely turned into "oddities" trips, similar to Pompeii. "Gee, look at all that destruction.... Isn't it a shame...." without any reflection on who is responsible for the destruction and what hasn't been done. The statement "How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?" assumes that Americans 1) have adequate knowledge about the causes of the levee breaches and knows the Federal Government's responsibility to repair the homes, lives, and levees of all those impacted, and 2) have the empathy necessary to demand this problem be resolved. I don't have confidence in those two assumptions being valid. Banzai

[J.B.]

Among other things, I also felt that episode conveyed well the twilight-zone experience of just how LONG it takes to drive the length of Florida.

Personally, I can't sleep at night at all, although the stress of moving house is probably the culprit in this particular case.

As for BBC programming, "The Mighty Boosh" has gotten me through some rough times. Very, very funny stuff. Free downloads of the radio show episodes here:
http://www.spannerwercs.co.uk/boosh/

[liprap]

Why can't we just farm out all the sitcom writing in this country to the BBC? "Coupling" was such a hoot, and it was shown every Friday night on NYC's channel 13.

At the very LEAST, the folks at WYES can take their dough from fundraising campaigns and invest it in showing mo' better BBC...why fight it? We're not seen as a very American city anyhow, so our local TV choices might as well embrace it.

[PamelaInParis]

My name is Pamela and I'm a Changing Rooms-aholic!!! I was addicted to Changing Rooms and can't STAND Trading Spaces! The magic was completely lost in translation going from charming, bemused Brits to whining American bourgeois. Yuck. That was when I lived in California and now I live in France and can't watch CR anymore... I can't even find it on the pirate sites. So close and yet so far. As for the rest, Americans snooze away while their government violates them in their sleep on so many levels. Why should anyone be surprised that they wouldn't care about New Orleans? Bunch of selfish apathetic lazy... I blog about that a lot myself (here's one: http://pamela.poole.free.fr/frogblog/?p=239). It's infuriating and I've almost lost hope.

[Vicky]

Love Top Gear - I was going to post a clip of the NOLA show on my blog, but I couldn't find one. Thanks for showing it.

[Alan Gutierrez]

Ashley

I just watched Top Gear: Alabama. Which I skipped when last I saw this post. I it hilarious. "They've shot their own sign, what are they doing to do to us?"

Brilliant episode of television.