Creatures Inspire Bitter Debate And Uplifting Stories, Which Puts Them Two Up On The Olsen Twins

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday October 12, 2004

Robin Oliver. Doug Anderson is on leave.

Insight: Animal Farm

SBS, 7.30pm: You have to hand it to Jenny Brockie. Calm, confident and head and shoulders above the rest as the best of our moderators for that curiously unsatisfactory television device, the studio debate.

Here a number of determined and well-meaning people debate a deliberately hot topic: whether animal rights activism is running out of control.

Not one of them will give an inch to opposing voices and they will thus become over-excited and aggressive - and, when this happens, a total switch-off.

Not here exactly, but in Britain and the United States, where some apparently well-organised animal rights activists have been labelled "animal rights terrorists".

So, they want to be heard and expect to be unpopular in some quarters, but is that any excuse for casting reasonable argument aside and promoting extreme violence against corporations, institutions or individuals who are seen to profit from experiments on animals?

The question which Brockie gamely handles is: how far is too far? She has scientists, farmers and animal rights activists in her audience as well as special guests Jeffrey Mason, the author of The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Dr Jerry Vlasak, an American trauma surgeon and radical animal activist, Professor Graham Jenkin, a British physiologist, and Fiona Shepherd, a victim of spinal cord injury.

Passions flare quite nastily and abusively to the point that the voice of reason is lost, as is eloquence that might be persuasive from either side. However we view the issue, this is uncomfortable viewing - and should that be the medium for the message?

Out There

ABC, 5.25pm. An entirely different view of animals, as might be expected from a never less than uplifting series. It revolves around a group of youngsters who have volunteered to work at Wildspring, a friendly veterinary clinic somewhere in the bush, though, one fancies, it is not too far from the influence of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

This admirable institution of reason, personal crises and ultimate calm, is run by the Archers (Genevieve Hegney and David Roberts) and maintained by recruiting teenage interns.

The program is reasonably rewarding for more adult eyes, a classy-looking BBC production in association with Sesame Workshop, of Sesame Street fame, Blink Films and Zenith Entertainment. It is now near the end of the second series, but the individual stories of growing friendships make it easy to pick up the threads.

Likeable performances all round - this time Aggie Thackery (Jade Ewen) has her hands full trying to prevent a dog becoming lunch for an escaped python.

Oprah Winfrey Show: The Olsen Twins

Ten, 2pm. Oprah's force-fed glimpses of the wonderful world of the well-heeled takes a look at the lifestyle of 18-year-old twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose principal claim to fame - apart from being stinking rich - is that when they were nine months old, they were chosen to alternate in the role of Michelle in Full House, a light family comedy that ran on the ABC in the US from 1987 to 1995.

We won't be allowed to forget that the twins have grown from TV tykes to successful tycoons now worth $215 million each as, apart from attending high school, they run their own billion-dollar business empire. They tell Oprah about on-screen kisses and off-screen love - and, of course, their extremely modest allowance. Yukko! Robin Oliver

© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

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