God bless the Beeb

Last night I tuned into the BBC and chanced upon "Signs and Wonders", a drama about a vicar's daughter who gets cuaght up in a nasty American cult and has to be kidnapped and "deprogrammed". A touching story of the kind you could see in many made-for-TV American or Canadian films (Hallmark TV is particularly fond of this genre - so many time I look at the blurb for a film and find something like "Heart-warming drama about a divorced haemophiliac mother who finds her heroine-addicted daughter has AIDS"). What made it so wonderfully BBCish was that it had a subplot in which the vicar's son is a deconstructionist scholar who finds that his idol Cornelius Van Damme (read Paul De Man) was a Nazi sympathiser. This puts a whole new spin on the deprogramming of cult-girl. "Words speak us" and all that.

I love the BBC.