Clive James on Ashton Agar and the Ashes "I cannot believe how much love people have shown me," she said. About the hatred the Taliban had shown her she had less to say. Why is it specifically women that the Taliban don't want educated? And she sounded a bit optimistic about the difference that the education of women would make. Our books are our most powerful weapons... one book can change the world. Yes, but there are armed fanatics, many of them brandishing a book of their own, who operate on a different principle. It will be interesting to see if Malala is encouraged to run for office in Pakistan. Judging from the fact that she was draped in a shawl that once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, somebody has already had the idea. For now, though, Malala is an inspiration. Her speech was not really all that good, but she was. Still on the subject of bits of footage you can get from blogs after the pictures have travelled like lightning around the world, I was thrilled by a compressed version of Ashton Agar's 10th wicket near-century in The Ashes match at Trent Bridge. Thus edited, the innings seemed to consist mainly of the ball flashing to the boundary while the English fielders ran themselves ragged, but there were many opportunities to study Agar's grace as he struck. Nominally a bowler, he sure can bat. I haven't seen anything quite like that since, in my youth, I watched the greatest Australian team ever as it faced the greatest West Indies team ever at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Those were the days, and now, suddenly, here they were again. Some might say that the intervening years belonged to Kerry Packer, who offered the players a decent wage and ruined the game as a consequence. But others might say that the game gained along with those who played it. The point is moot, and makes for absorbing drama. Plunging us back to 1976, the Australian mini-series laboriously entitled Howzat! Kerry Packer's War (BBC Four) showed how the media tycoon wrested the game from the suffocating clutches of the Cricket Establishment. This latter group was impersonated by every male actor in Australia who could do an old-style English accent, while Lachy Hulme, in the role of Packer, blasphemed and fulminated in fine style. Unless they were members of the aforesaid Cricket Establishment, all the characters were clad in the bizarre schmutter of the 1970s - the visual paroxysm of flared trousers, chemical shirts and mutton-chop sideboards that reached its baroque apotheosis in Australia. The only point of understatement was the wig worn by the actor playing Richie Benaud: it was less extravagant than Richie's real hair. Otherwise, the whole show was, in the Australian expression, as rough as guts; and all the better for it. These were my countrymen, and I am still one of them. There was poignancy, however, in the phone calls from Sir Donald Bradman; never seen, but referred to by all as "the Don." He hated the very idea of the new dispensation. In his day, a man could score 452 runs in a single innings and be paid fourpence. But the Don's day was done. Famous from her role in Mad Men, Elisabeth Moss was the visiting female super-tec in Top of the Lake (BBC Two), rather as Gillian Anderson was the visiting female super-tec in The Fall. Though co-written and directed by the usually original Jane Campion, this new serial, partly perhaps by an accident of timing, keeps reminding you of other shows. The face-off between hippies and rednecks looks like a re-run of Easy Rider, or Deliverance. But the lake-scapes of New Zealand's South Island are too beautiful to miss.