The English Channel Connection: Discovering Transmanche: Kent, England, And Nord-Pas De Calais, France

With the backing of the European Commission, Canada 3000, and Region Transmanche, you might expect a fairly nice travel video about southeast England and northeast France. And there is lovely videography of the White Cliffs of Dover, Dunkirk/Dunkerque Beach, charming towns and forbidding castles. However, the problem with this tape lies not with what it has, but what it has not: a writer. Producer and host Anne Martin takes the viewer back and forth across the channel, back and forth in time, back and forth on subjects ranging so far apart that the whole tape comes across as a hopeless hodgepodge. In the middle of a discussion of Henry VIII's break from the Church of Rome, we drift to Anne Boleyn's home, Hever Castle, then drift from the splendid gardens there to other castles and gardens, then pop back to an earnest discussion of the Counter-Reformation and Huguenot persecutions in France. For some reason the expert interviewees are people like a city councilman in England and the head of a tourist board in France. A writer might have organized the whole program and made it work, but as it is, it's too confusing, even for those with a decent background in European history. Not a necessary purchase. [Note: another Anne Martin title, Canada: The Train Journey, is also available.] (R. Reagan)