The Memory Hole? "The War on Poverty" and "Victorian Values"
Two TV documentary series that left an impression on me were Victorian Values, a British series shown on Discovery when that channel was intelligent in the late 1980s, and The War on Poverty, which was shown on PBS in the 1990s.
A while ago, I looked for them online, and they are nowhere to be found. The only possibility is the companion book to "Victorian Values," maybe.
I even sought out the producers of The War on Poverty, the same production company that made Eyes on the Prize, and they replied with a terse, "We have withdrawn that series from circulation."
So why could this be?
Victorian Values was about Victorian English approaches to various aspects of society, and it was highly critical of punitive attitudes toward the poor and reverence toward robber baron economics, two features of the modern British Conservative Party. Yet the Brits are usually pretty tolerant of "subversive" TV, given that they have shown dramas such as A Very British Coup and documentaries such as The Power of Nightmares.
The War on Poverty was a five-part series that showed that, contrary to Ronald Reagan's remark (a favorite of disdainful conservatives) "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won," the War on Poverty failed because it was sabotaged by powerful interests across the country and in Congress, who thought charity was just fine but didn't like it when, for example, VISTA workers told Appalachian farmers and urban slum dwellers about their legal rights.
So why would such a series and the British one be withdrawn from circulation? (They're not on YouTube, either.)
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