What’s your favourite tree? Mine is the paperbark. I realised it today when I was glancing idly out of the passenger-side car window. It was growing on a nature strip next to the shop where we’d stopped to get milk and bread. It was a feast of graceful complexity, its endless frilled layers catching the sun, its holes and crannies full of webs and seeds and pupae and busy, busy little creatures going about their business. It exemplified the glory of Australian wildness even in our suburban deserts, its colours shading infinitely through every possible aspect of grey, cream, ivory, charcoal, sand, beige, stone—in delicate play of light and shade. I could look at it a long, long time without tiring. If only I could say the same thing about most of the stuff on the telly. I watch probably more than you do—always did like the telly more than was good for me—but frequently as I churn the remote through umpty-five digital cable channels I find nothing that’s any good. Indeed, the very fact that I keep turning back to the ABC and SBS might argue that I’m wasting a great deal of money on cable, especially when I stop to consider that the ad breaks on cable are, if anything, more frequent and intrusively insensitive than on the networks. It seems like a great big scam to make us pay for TV and then show commercials. If it weren’t for Ovation I’d stop. Ovation is great, showing operas, ballets, fabulous jazz concerts and book programs. You really don’t get its like anywhere, except on Sunday afternoons on the ABC. Anyway, something that the ABC has got its hands on before Ovation is a fabulous seven-part series, The Blues, which will be showing all through July and into the middle of August at 10.10pm on Saturdays. If you’re going out, get your teenager to program the VCR for you, because you won’t want to miss it. Each episode is a 90-minute personal exploration of the blues, its history and performers, a different director taking on the task each time. The first one is Martin Scorsese, who takes us to the banks of the Niger and thence to the Mississippi Delta, looking for origins. He explores Delta Blues—as significant to our musical culture as Mozart; the thudding heart of the music of experience won in pain and contemplated in performance