Rich Hall, the perennial grumbly and gravel-voiced comedian who has been about fifty-odd for what seems like a billion years, is supremely adept at opening sarcastic windows for BBC4 viewers to gaze wryly at modern American culture through. He's done quite a few of these documentaries now and they are always at the very least supremely fascinating - his gaze is a particularly idiosyncratic one and when looking at something as serious as postwar US-Soviet tensions it's deeply refreshing to see it so bafflingly stared at.
What's nice here is the strangely reassuring human foolishness of both sides which is plucked at - details I'd never really heard or properly considered like the many occasions where human error alone nearly pushed both countries over the brink - how bombs more powerful than those that annihilated Hiroshima accidentally dropped from a plane onto a rural community in South Carolina and how the churches in the area benefitted from the fallout (or lack thereof).
Hall's patented world-weary Southern drawl is as strangely familiar to me as the sound of the six o'clock pips on the news every night - and I hope he continues to open these windows for us silly Brits for many more decades to come.
What's nice here is the strangely reassuring human foolishness of both sides which is plucked at - details I'd never really heard or properly considered like the many occasions where human error alone nearly pushed both countries over the brink - how bombs more powerful than those that annihilated Hiroshima accidentally dropped from a plane onto a rural community in South Carolina and how the churches in the area benefitted from the fallout (or lack thereof).
Hall's patented world-weary Southern drawl is as strangely familiar to me as the sound of the six o'clock pips on the news every night - and I hope he continues to open these windows for us silly Brits for many more decades to come.