Thinky TV

Traffik is the 1989 C4 miniseries which was later adapted, quite successfully by Stevo Soderbergh into a big budget thingy only to be remade into another miniseries a few years later. Over the six original episodes it's multi narrative approach looks at the heroin trade in Europe and the cultivation over in Pakistan with a poppy farmer, recently arrested German trafficker and a UK government minister and his junkie daughter as the main strands. It's a honest, very earnest look at the problems faced by individuals and governments in trying to "solve" our problem with opiates and with great performances from Bill Paterson, Julia Ormond and Lindsay Duncan this drama stands up really well especially so given it's 21 years old. It's a terrible indictment of our policies and governments that things have improved little in those intervening years. Seems like you can watch it all on YouTube here

I'm still tracking down Sidney Lumet stuff and found this little HBO special called Strip Search written by Tom Fontana of Oz fame. It's a peculiar post 9/11 drama about interrogation and human rights with the same script used simultaneously in two very different scenarios: Glenn Close interviews a Middle Eastern man in the US while Ken Leung interviews Maggie Gyllenhaal in China. The acting is good and I'm on board with it's political stance but I'm not entirely convinced by the clever-clever script device - it certainly helped make the point but another pair of stories would been much better. Lord knows what the original 120 min version was like, but as it is, an hour was quite enough for me.