TELEVISION / Empire of the censors

YOU may be impressed by the arguments in Professor Edward Said's new book, Culture and Imperialism. But would you buy the film rights? Arena did (BBC 2), and last night we watched it attempt to turn a thick slab of literary analysis into a visual treat.

Culture and Imperialism is a weighty tome, but no problem; Arena was going to make it look like a kid's pop-up. The decorations were computer rococo. On came the dust-jacket. And before our very eyes, the book opened up, and BOO] there inside was Edward Said, reading from it. Later, while Said discussed Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we had to endure a bank of television screens flashing 'the horror, the horror'. This progamme seemed to have been designed by someone who saw one too many shows on the last U2 tour.

Bravely talking on through this visual salvo, Said advanced the thought that books conceal ugly things about a society's cultural take on the world. If you read Jane Austen, you should bear in mind the colonial slavery which informed her; if you thumb through Camus, you should tune in to the Algerian War of Independence, and so on.

It is one of the unfortunate by- products of literary arguments like this that, though by no means intended to dismantle literary reputations or take a machine gun to the canon, they do have a depressing belittling effect. Suddenly it becomes difficult to retain faith in these writers. They appear to be imperfect gauges of the world - stooges, badly circumscribed, disseminators of partial, corrupt ideologies. Then again, Northanger Abbey is only about colonial oppression in the sense that watching Arena is about perpetuating state-subsidised television. There's room to believe this point is no more than a dressed up version of the obvious remark that things are a product of their circumstances.

Mixed in with the book readings came a biography of the Professor. Considering it contained an exile (Said was born in Jerusalem and decamped to New York), it was a tale strangely short of anecdotes, as if the life of his mind extended right out into all other areas, rendering them conceptual. But Said did recall his one meeting with CLR James (author of The Black Jacobins), though even this seemed mildly disappointing, as encounters go. The writer, then an old man with a blanket over his knees, persistently turned away from Said to watch the cricket on television. Otherwise, was anything unusual being said here? Was it striking to hear that Kipling - though a lovely little writer - was somewhere to the right of Mussolini? That Conrad's writing had an imperial undertow? And it's not as if the framework is new to Said. 'Culture and Imperialism took him 10 years to write,' said Arena. Yet many of these arguments were at least pre-rehearsed in his earlier book, Colonialism. Perhaps the principle here is, 'what oft was Said, but ne'er so well expressed.'