Art of violence
The makers of LA Heat (STAR World, 8pm) boast of the show's extra 10 minutes of on-screen violence per episode, as compared to other so-called action series, and it is easy to see why.
The new series begins with a hail of bullets and a rogue cop armed with a flame-thrower, which he uses to blow up the bad guys and several vehicles, even while they are driving away.
The latter is, of course, the hi-tech equivalent of shooting a man in the back, but never mind.
It soon becomes apparent that the extra budget required to create all these fireworks has been taken from the writing department, and that the producers have in fact lifted the main characters almost entirely from the Lethal Weapon film series.
Steven Williams plays the Danny Glover character, an older, calmer cop with many years on the job, and Wolf Larson is Chase (Mel Gibson), young, crazy and dangerous to know.
The twist in his character is that he has a creative side. His girlfriend simply cannot understand why he actually wants to be a policeman when he could be an artist. 'You could make as much money in two years with your art as you could in 20 in the police force,' she tells him crossly, clearly a girl who believes in the Andy Warhol/Julian Schnabel approach to modern art.
'The art is great,' he explains with a big soppy smile, 'but this is what I am! This gives me a purpose!' It is certainly a 1990s take on the old dilemma of the struggling artist, desperate to get out of wage-slave drudgery. In the 19th century, painter Henri Rousseau toiled away as a customs official by day to support his painting by night. But this guy is so unbelievably talented he actually prefers meaningful moments shooting bad guys to wishy washy art stuff.
Today, local journalists are probably more anxious about falling advertising revenues and poor circulation figures than they are about overt censorship. In Hong Kong's profit-driven media world, the bottom line is directly linked to the dollar.
At the same time, it does not make sense to underestimate the forces of censorship that are present in the SAR. Christopher Leung, who worked for a local television company, found out first-hand that some subjects are taboo when he made a film called The Wolves Are Howling in Tianshan, about the separatist movement in Xinjiang. His employers refused to screen the documentary, and Leung felt obliged to resign.
He and a group of other journalists discuss the kind of pressures they have faced in the 15 months since the handover, in Hong Kong Connection, (Pearl, 6.50pm).
However bad things might seem, it is worth pointing that this is the second time that Leung's story has been told on local terrestrial television. ATV World's Inside Story covered it a couple of months ago. If censorship in Hong Kong was really heavy, we never would have heard about this once, let alone twice.
