"Who do you think you are?" - SBS's five star program

One of the more pleasing developments in Australian television in the last few years has been the gradual transformation of "multicultural" government television channel SBS into something other than a national outlet for extreme doses of political correctness. Surveying the program guide I often see something on SBS that I would like to take a look at, if I had the time and opportunity - and access to the television. That's in contrast with the commercial channels that have become a wasteland littered with nastiness, sordidness, crudity, crass political and social bias, and ignorance.

A program that I did see on SBS - and was sorry that it was one of the last in a series - was the UK produced "Who Do You Think You Are?" It is based on a simple idea: asking a well-known person to undertake a journey through their immediate ancestry. The viewer takes the journey with the person experiencing the surprise - and sometimes shock - at what is revealed. The program I saw was on British comedian/actor Stephen Fry. It revealed a side of Fry not normally seen. Knowing now where he has come has added a new dimension to his public image. One startling discovery came through the maternal side which was Jewish from Austria and Slovakia. The viewer felt the tragedy as Fry discovered one by one that all his Jewish relations had been murdered by the Nazis. His mother and his descendants survived because an English factory offered his mother's physicist father a job well before the Nazis came to power. You can imagine his feelings.

It has been a brilliant move by the programmers at SBS to produce an Australian version of this series. The first two programs have been utterly enthralling, the first on Jack Thompson and the second on Kate Ceberano. The Kate Ceberano program was first class. I have no hesitation in saying that it will be one of the best programs this year on Australian television. I taped it and watched it twice on the same day. Anybody who sees it will never think of Kate Ceberano in the same way. In her own words, Kate was used to thinking of herself as a sort of "mongrel" Australian with a background of "pirates and bums". What she discovers floors her and the viewer. Absolutely gripping viewing. The next program will be on expatriate lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.

There is an intellectual side to this program. As a philosophical conservative I place great importance on history, "the march of Providence in the world", on knowing what has happened in the past and what the significance has been of settled social arrangements. In philosophical terms, the conservative attributes an epistemological (knowledge) function to custom and traditions. The conservative's great criticism of that whole class of rationalist theories aspiring to perfect human society is that there is a massive disconnect between social (rationalist) theory and actual circumstances - real life. The disconnect explains the madness that often comes from the mouth of the politically correct. "Who Do You Think You Are?" gives instructive historical substance to the subject of the program, as well as the viewer.

If the viewer after seeing the SBS program never sees Kate Ceberano in the same way, it is sure that Kate will not see herself in the same way. Knowledge of where she has come from and what it means has changed her forever.