Tonight's TV
Press call
Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press
(BBC4, 9pm); Extraordinary People: Half Man, Half
Tree (five, 9pm); Quest for the Lost Ark (C4, 9pm)
THE original title of Stephen Fry
And The Gutenberg Press was
The Machine That Made Us. Attaching
a celebrity to the programme
was presumably a bid to
make it more enticing to viewers.
A programme about the invention of the
printing press doesn't sound the stuff of
which ratings hits are made.
And so it proves. This opener to the BBC's
Medieval Season hardly merits the words fascinating
or interesting, despite Fry's best efforts
to inject excitement into the
proceedings.
The invention of the printing press - for
which we can thank Johannes Gutenberg -
was important, our guide stresses, because it
led to books which are the building blocks of
our civilisation.
He was a man who "launched the first
media revolution and opened the door to the
modern age".
All he was trying to do was make a bit of
money by printing bibles, although Fry insists
"everything that our culture and civilisations
depends on starts with Gutenberg's
invention".
Bet those of you old enough to remember
John Bull printing sets never thought that
as you fiddled about with those little rubber
letters of movable type.
Fry's journey takes him through the Silicone
Valley of medieval Europe, hampered
slightly by the lack of knowledge about
Gutenberg. We don't even know what he
looked like.
His aim was to
build a machine - a
printing press -
capable of
mass prod
u c i n g
bibles. The
press may
well have evolved from the wine presses he'd
seen in the region where he grew up.
Realising that there's not enough to fill the
60-minute slot, the programme decides to
build its own Gutenberg press using 15th Century
tools and technology.
This leads to Fry taking an unexpected
hands-on approach. He does a bit of wood
carving, makes a piece of type (the letter E
which takes him all day) and then a sheet of
paper made the old-fashioned way from cloth
rags.
"So beautiful, my own piece of paper," he
enthuses, holding it up.
Using his hands is something denied 36-
year-old Indonesian Dede, featured in Extraordinary
People. He's a strange and uncomfortable
sight with a body covered in tree-like
warts, with hands and feet resembling
branches and roots.
The condition of this single father is worsening
as the tree-like stuff takes over. He worries
how he'll support his children, although
he earns money as part of The Clan, a group
of people with rare medical conditions. They
perform circus stunts in what some would call
a freak show.
A dermatologist from the US, who arrives
to make a diagnosis and hopefully offer treatment,
says this is the most extreme case of
warts he's ever seen. He removes samples for
testing and suggests trimming the "branches"
on Dede's limbs to make him more mobile.
In Romania, a man with the same condition
on his hands and feet has an operation to remove
the warts and have new skin grafted on
his hands. He's now back driving a tractor.
Dede has so far not taken up the offer of treatment
from the American specialist, but continues
to work with The Clan.
Quest For The Lost Ark has writer and
scholar Professor Tudor Parfitt claiming to
have found the lost ark of the covenant, the
legendary sacred container of the stone
tablets listing the Ten Commandments.
He finds more than one ark in a souvenir
shop in Jerusalem. But he's after the real
thing, telling us his 20-year search for the ark
has ended as he knows where it is.
I won't spoil the ending, but will say his
search takes him to many countries including
Egypt, South Africa, Jordan and
Zimbabwe.
The programme includes a clip from
Raiders Of The Lost Ark in which Harrison
Ford's adventurer archaeologist Indiana
Jones encountered the ark. Professor Parfitt
fails to keep up with the Joneses in his prolonged
search that may have you reaching for
the fast forward button.
10:16am Monday 14th April 2008
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