Rich Hall's Red Menace

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.