Requiem for Detroit

The best television programme I saw while my site was down was undoubtedly  Julien Temple’s  Requiem for Detroit. It portrayed the city as epitomising the rise and fall of the American Dream in the twentieth century: mass production of the automobile, mass consumption, shopping malls, freeways, racial divisions, white flight, deindustrialisation and ending with the sad spectacle of urban farms. It featured a ready-made soundtrack of Detroit musicians including jazz, classic Motown, Alice Cooper, Madonna and Eminem.