TV REVIEW : HOST GETS LOST ON SOUTH AMERICA TRIP

Jack Pizzey, a former BBC journalist who now works for Australian TV, spends most of his time during the opening episode of “South American Journey” crisscrossing Bolivia and Chile, wondering why so many of the continent’s countries are caught in the velvet glove of military dictatorship.

Pizzey comes armed with loads of lofty historical theories--none half as revealing as the reaction of a man he has a beer with in a Bolivian saloon. At first, the man feigns indifference to politics. Then, as he stares at a chart on the wall, which pictures most of the country’s 186 presidents (they come and go as fast as New York Yankee managers), the man suddenly becomes agitated. “All crooks,” he says excitedly, pointing at the photos of recent villains. “That one . . . that one . . . and that one. A bad lot!”

It’s too bad Pizzey doesn’t spend more time keeping his eyes peeled for these surprising outpourings of emotion, since they provide the best moments in “South American Journey,” an eight-part weekly “essay” about the region’s divergent cultures and uncertain future that debuts tonight at 9 on Channels 28, 15 and 24; 10 p.m. on Channel 50 .

A veteran TV reporter, Pizzey seems well suited for the assignment. He speaks serviceable Spanish and is well versed on South America’s turbulent past. Unfortunately, first-person essays work a lot better in print than on camera. After a while, we grow weary of watching our amiable (but not especially charismatic) host stare up at statues of Simon Bolivar, hike through the snow-capped Andes and give coins to street musicians.

Sometimes this video-diary approach pays off. When Pizzey checks out of his La Paz hotel, he pays the bill with a two-foot high stack of currency, which dramatizes the country’s runaway inflation more than any of his earnest interviews. On a train ride through Chile, an anonymous passenger--realizing Pizzey is a journalist--slips him a note detailing the country’s political repression.

But too often Pizzey seems greedy for photo opportunities--he stops at so many colorful fiestas and pageants that you can’t resist a giggle when he confesses that he lost his wallet to pickpockets at a festival in Peru.

Pizzey’s problem is that he tries to stake out too much territory. In an upcoming segment on the plight of the Incas, he spends so much time burrowing into myth and legend that he almost misses the fascinating tale of Lima today, where Inca slum-dwellers have established a squatter society that exists totally outside government control. (It’s so free from any intervention that even when a military junta ran Peru, the squatters continued to elect their own local officials.)

Give Pizzey credit--he sometimes captures moments so darkly comic that you’d swear they were lifted straight from a Mario Vargas Llosa novel. Not long after he leaves the teeming slums of Santiago, Pizzey visits a wealthy Chilean landowner who explains the country’s politics as his children play croquet in the yard, darting past a pair of snoozing watchdogs. When asked his opinion of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship (which has turned the nation into a police state with a minus 15% growth rate), the aristocrat placidly replies, “It’s a reflection of the Chilean soul.”