Understated and understateder

Here at Sandy Beach I can hardly get reception of ABC News Radio, so I often listen in via the Wilson's Almanac Radio and TV portal.

What I like about that station is that you get a mix of much more than ABC, including Germany's Deutsche Welle, Britain's BBC and America's NPR. I don't know any other station in the world where one can get such a diversity of good news and current affairs programming.

I like the BBC segments, even though BBC correspondents tend to sing their reports. But other cultural traits are very interesting as well. The British tendency to understatement never fails to fascinate.

Today, a BBC reporter was interviewing a British museum official (perhaps from the British Museum), about finds of mummified human remains in Argentina (or Argentinia as the ABC presenter called that country). The interview was extremely odd. The BBC man asked the museum man a few questions and the museum man talked about how indigenous peoples worldwide often protest about the display of the remains of their ancestors, especially when those indigenous people have suffered at the hands of Western colonialism.

After this, the first odd question the BBC man then asked was whether this was happening a lot, to which the museum guy of course replied that it was. (I should have thought that this was common knowledge, and besides, the museum bloke had just said that it was.)

Then the BBC guy asked, and I think I have this verbatim: "Do you think that this has anything to do with post-colonial politics?"

The museum guy was as understated in his reply as the interviewer was in his strange question. But I bet he's still talking about it in the museum tea room.

Tagged: abc, australia, media, radio, postcolonialism, post-colonialism, bbc, museum, museums, indigenous