Current Events Overtake PBS Democracy Series

Don’t expect to see a segment on China in Patrick Watson’s 10-part series “The Struggle for Democracy,” coming to public television stations next month. The rumblings that led to the massive student uprisings in Beijing caught the TV journalist and documentary film maker, like a lot of other people, by surprise.

For that matter, don’t expect more than a minute or two of news clips from the Philippines, where Corazon Aquino’s democratic revolution took place just before Watson began filming in the spring of 1986.

“I didn’t have my money together when all this burst out,” Watson, a Canadian, said this week with a shade of regret.

And don’t count on watching scenes from Hungary, Poland or even the Soviet Union, where democracy in one form or another and in varying degrees has recently begun to show its face. Watson had wanted “enormous participation from Mr. Gorbachev.” There were “serious” discussions, and “we ran out of time.”

No matter, says Watson. Democracy is “expanding by leaps and bounds” and he figures he would need 10,000 hours instead of 10 to show “an encyclopedic account.”

From June, 1986, through the end of 1988, Watson and mostly Canadian Broadcasting Corp. crews shot in 29 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Some, such as Papua New Guinea, where until 40 or 50 years ago cannibalism was still being practiced, he sees as positive examples of democracy. Others, such as the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, and Libya, despite public claims of democracy, turn out, he said, to have “precious little.”

“Probably (democracy’s) single biggest trigger,” Watson said in an interview in West Hollywood, “is information, technology and trade--the fact that even in non-democratic countries or countries that aren’t quite in a state of liberty now, because of technology, trade and fax machines, people are seeing how the rest of the world lives and are getting very excited about it. Countries such as China, for economic reasons, are sending thousands of students out to the West to get trained, these students are coming back” and talking up democracy.

The 59-year-old Watson, with his shock of white hair and mellifluous voice, is a relatively familiar figure to American public-TV audiences. Since 1983, he has hosted the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts; indeed, a “Mostly Mozart” concert from New York’s Lincoln Center will air July 12, the night after “The Struggle for Democracy” debuts.

Watson has also hosted the daily newsmagazine “The 51st State” for New York’s WNET. In 1976, he produced a 90-minute documentary, “The Last Nazi,” built around his interview with Albert Speer. He is said to be on a short list of possible replacements for Canadian Broadcasting’s president Pierre Juneau, who retires later this year.

At $8 million, “The Struggle for Democracy” was the most expensive documentary series ever made for Canadian TV, which aired it in January. Accompanying the series is a $29.95 coffee-table-like book, co-written by Watson and Benjamin Barber, director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

What is democracy? “There’s a lot of different notions out there,” Watson says in the first program. “But I think they’re all talking about the same thing finally--power. About who has the power in the end--not the state, not some strong man, but the people.”

Watson starts his odyssey at home in Canada, noting that his interest in democracy began in 1970 after an uprising in Quebec and the imposition of martial law. As he noted this week, it was the government’s way of saying, “ ‘Here, you nasty little nuisances, stop nibbling at our trouser legs and start behaving.’ It has echoes in Beijing right now.”

The series moves from a look at democracy’s beginnings and the economic conditions that made it bloom in ancient Athens in the first program, to its evolution in the second program, called “Reborn in America.” Among those shown in the second hour are a homeless family, originally from Texas, whom Watson found living in a car under a bridge “at the edge of Los Angeles.” The father says: “It’s hard to get started but I believe we can do it.”

In “Tyranny of the Majority,” the fourth program, Watson explores the American civil rights movement, the land claims and civil- rights activities of Australian aborigines, and the disputes between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Oliver North and Rep. Lee Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat who chaired the Iran-Contra hearings in the House, appear in “The Rule of Law,” the fifth program. In the sixth, he explores the issue of women’s rights, including an all-women’s political party in Iceland.

Other programs deal with freedom of expression; the “price of democracy” and the connection between wealth and democracy; the role of the military in Argentina, France and Israel; and, in “Whither Democracy?,” its future, faced with the challenge from nuclear weapons and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

Asked about the state of American democracy, Watson said that while it has “an enormous capacity to heal itself when its problems are gotten out in the open,” as with the civil rights movment, “the biggest single thing that perplexes America’s friends abroad” is the “tremendous, massive poverty.” In dire poverty, he says, people don’t “run their own lives.” Yet he was also surprised by those, like the homeless man living under a bridge, who still have hope they can improve their condition.

Ironically, Watson, who in 1964 had been allowed to film in China and returned in 1981 to do a series, is not quite sure how to label the student uprising.

“I don’t think that the dissidents and students and agitators in Tien An Men Square were thinking a whole lot about democracy as interpreted by you and me,” he said. “I think they were thinking a whole lot about personal freedom, to speak and to write and listen to broadcasts. . . .”

Weren’t they talking about power in the hands of the people?

“I didn’t hear them saying we want to take responsibility for running the country. What I did hear them saying was we want the leaders to be responsible. And that’s a vast difference. . . . Because ultimately democracies only work because people take control.”

And yet Watson sees democracy eventually coming to China, if not in the next 20 years, then within the next 40. He also has hope that the people of Libya, who are getting certain democratic experiences through people’s congresses, might yet establish a democracy once Moammar Kadafi’s “out of the way.”

“I’ve come out of this,” Watson said, “feeling a lot more cheerful about the world.”