Clothier plays Bush in Acts of War, a three-part CBC documentary about the Gulf War that begins Sunday at 8 p.m. Actor Hrant Alianak plays Saddam Hussein in this intriguing production by Michael Maclear (Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War).

While the use of actors spouting lines from the public record might at first look like a gimmick, it also serves a purpose crucial to the program's point.

More about that in a minute. First, it should be mentioned that Sunday night's TV lineup features two Canadian programs that prove there is more to documentaries than talking heads.

On BCTV at 9 p.m., Double or Nothing: The Rise and Fall of Robert Campeau relies heavily on dramatization to trace the career of the Canadian entrepreneur who built, then lost, a billion-dollar business empire.

While Campeau producer Paul Cowan has captured some remarkable interview footage, it would have been commercially impossible to tell this story on television without the dramatic material.

Double or Nothing uses Campeau's story as a metaphor for the laissez-faire '80s, when market forces rules North America and corporate buccaneers became pop culture heroes.

In scenes based on interviews with participants, Cowan (Justice Denied, The Kid Who Couldn't Miss) follows Campeau's turbulent entry into the major leagues of U.S. finance and shows the peculiar kind of frenzy that seizes the players in corporate takeovers.

This part of the story simply could not have been told through the more traditional documentary techniques of talking heads and stock footage.

The show's fanciful opening sets the tone. Campeau is shown as a boy, part of a large and poor francophone family in Sudbury. The family is seated at the dinner table, saying grace, when young Robert peeks out the window and sees a vision of a stretch limo parked outside.

We next see him, still a boy, selling newspapers on the streets of Sudbury. Then we leap forward to the collapse of the Campeau financial empire. As the limo he dreamed about takes the defeated Campeau through downtown streets, a newspaper boy hawks a paper with the headline "Decade of Greed Over."

It may not be Citizen Kane, but these opening scenes establish very clearly what sort of show we are about to see.

Quebec actor Marcel Sabourin gives a strong performance as the egotistical tycoon. His Campeau is all bluster and cunning, with a chip on his shoulder and a massive need for approval that is matched only by his inability to relate to most of those around him.

For the amateur psychologist in us all, Cowan presents Campeau's chaotic family life--in 1970 he divorced his wife of 28 years, with whom he had three children, to marry his girlfriend, with whom he already had two children.

For the amateur economist and sociologist in us all, Cowan presents the consequences of Campeau's billion-dollar deals--to pay for his massive debt load, the chain stores Campeau bought laid off thousands of employees.

One former collegue(sic) [colleague] sums up Campeau by saying: "He has a daunting will and a complete absence of understanding of how foolish he can look at times."

Daunting wills and the ability to look foolish were also two of the characteristics of the chief protagonists of the Gulf War, George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

Acts of War argues that the war of two years ago was very much a personal conflict between these two men, even though it was their surrogates who died in Iraq and Kuwait.

In a series of interviews conducted by Ann Medina, world leaders, bureaucrats and diplomats discuss what happened after Saddam invaded Kuwait and the U.S. discovered that "its biggest military client was out of control."*

Long before his advisers and the rest of the world were ready to contemplate going to war against Saddam, Bush was vowing military action in private.

Sunday's episode--the series continues Tuesday and concludes Wednesday--shows how Bush put together a military coalition to take on Saddam, even though the allies expected heavy casualties.

Actors Clothier and Alianak are used to personalize and symbolize the macho forces that caused the war.

Maclear could have used stock news footage for all the dialogue they are given. But seeing the pair standing back to back while issuing their taunts to two banks of TV sets sums up everything this show has to say about the nature of the war and its causes.

It must be said that the effect would have been more powerful if Clothier sounded less like Perot and if Alianak looked and sounded less like Saturday Night Live's Father Guido Sarducci.

But Acts of War's blend of interview and drama still makes a convincing case. It proves that, even in the first live TV war, the significant events still happened when the cameras were not around.

(review accompanied by three photos from the reviewed TV programmes, captioned:

DANGEROUS GAMES: Robert Clother (left), Hrant Alianak face off in Acts of War; Marcel Sabourin stars in Double or Nothing)

(text of TV programmes review from January 9, 1993 Vancouver Sun)

-I'M STILL PONDERING HOW TO STRUCTURE THE BOOK(S) ABOUT MY "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN THAT I'VE RECEIVED THE RECOMMENDATIONS THAT I WRITE.
IN DEVELOPING THIS WEBSITE ABOUT IT AND HAVING TO LEARN THE HTML COMPUTER LANGUAGE ET AL--WHICH IS, INDEED, ONE OF THE REASONS WHY SOME TIMES I PUT DATES FOR WHEN I PLANNED TO OPEN A CERTAIN TERM OF REFERENCE, AND THEN WAS UNABLE TO BY THAT DATE: THE COMPLICATED LEARNING PROCESSES--I REALIZED HOW PERFECT A CD-ROM THIS WEBSITE WILL MARKET. I THINK THAT I COULD PREPARE A CD-ROM YOU OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO CONSIDER THE CONTENTS OF AS LONG AS YOU HAVE NETSCAPE® OR MICROSOFT EXPLORER® ON YOUR COMPUTER (OR AN OFF-LINE BROWSER AS I ALSO HAVE ON MINE SO OPENING A NEW WINDOW DOESN'T CLOSE A STILL RELEVANT ONE TO WHAT I MIGHT BE DOING), WITH ALL THE HOTLINKS IN THE WAY I PLANNED ITS PRESENTATION, WITH ONLY TWO EXCEPTIONS THAT REQUIRE BEING CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET: THE FIRST IS THE FOOTNOTE TO THE TEXT OF MY AUGUST, 1989 SUBMISSION TO SENATOR TEDDY KENNEDY, WITH ITS HOTLINK TO THE FREE HONG KONG-BASED WEBSITE:

AND NOW, BECAUSE OF THIS EXPLANATION/DEMONSTRATION (NOW THERE'S A WORD WITH A DOUBLE MEANING, EH, PERHAPS RELEVANT TO WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.).
.
MY FELLOW CANADIAN ALANIS MORISSETTE, A FEW YEARS AGO WAS TRASHED BECAUSE THE LYRICS OF HER SONG, "IRONY", ACTUALLY DIDN'T SEEM TO BE ABOUT WHAT IS BY DEFINITION, IRONY. (REGARDLESS, I LIKE THE SONG, THE ALBUM, AND HER.)
PEOPLE ON THE RECEIVING ENDS OF QUITE A FEW OF MY SUBMISSIONS OVER THE YEARS IN CONTINUING THIS "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN KNOW THAT NUMEROUS TIMES, IN INCLUDING PHOTOCOPIES OF TERMS OF REFERENCE TO AUGMENT THE CONTENTS AND RELATE THEM TO THE WORK'S GOALS AS WERE EXPRESSED IN THE 1977-78 ELEMENTS OF MY "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN, I LEFT THE ADJACENT ARTICLES, OR PARTS OF THEM, INCLUDED.
...I SUSPECT I WOULDN'T BE CRITICIZED AS MUCH FOR WHAT I REGARDED AS IRONY IN DOING THIS THOSE TIMES, BUT WE'LL SEE, WON'T WE, WHEN THE BOOK(S) AND CD-ROM ARE RELEASED FOR WIDEST POSSIBLE PUBLIC EVALUATION?
THE POINT I WANT TO MAKE WITH THIS FOOTNOTE IS THAT ADJACENT TO THIS TV PROGRAMMES REVIEW ON THE ORIGINAL PRINTED PAGE IS AN AD WITH THESE WORDS:

"BE WARNED:

IT'S NOT FOR THE PRUDISH OR FAINT-HEARTED. A SIZZLER."