EastEnders BBC1
In Deep BBC1
Nearly Popstars ITV
Langan Behind the Lines BBC2
The West Wing C4
Who shot Phil Mitchell? So many people have strong motives it could even turn out to be JR, but just as with the Dallas shooting, the smart money is on the least interesting and most dispensable character (who remembers Kristin anyway?): yup, it just has to be Dan.
It was vintage EastEnders all week, culminating, of course, in the wedding of Steve and Mel, perhaps E20's most blindingly star-cross'd couple yet. Still, they know how to put a brave face on despair in Albert Square, so the prospect of even the grimmest nuptials is also an opportunity to wear a nice frock. Even desperate Lisa, Phil's ex-squeeze, who had spent Monday and Tuesday looking like a suicide risk, scrubbed up remarkably well for Mel's hen night, sparkly décolletage and all.
I wish Lisa would do something about those eyebrows, though - a pair of acute-grave caterpillars punctuating her face like the panstick crosses favoured by sad mimes. She's a pretty girl but there's something about those brows which scream 'victim'. No excuse for Phil to be quite so vile to her, of course ('Mel's got something you haven't, the ability to satisfy a man,' he hissed. 'But we had something special,' whined Lisa. 'No. You had something special. I had something convenient...'), but she really should pop up west and treat herself to a self-esteem-boosting professional pluck.
Martin Kemp's mum is Sheila Hancock! Gatecrashing the wedding (lovely registry office; surely not in the neighbourhood?) and wearing black with a magnificent hat, she looked just like Camilla Parker Bowles and sounded like Mystic Meg. 'So, tell me, do you know the bride?' she asked Phil, who'd also crashed and to whom, naturally, she took an instant shine. 'And, by the way, your lucky numbers are 7 and 11, your lucky colour is red and the winning Thunderball ticket is in the tea caddy.'
She and Phil made a great pair, and if Phil survives the shooting I hope they will go on to launch a suitably evil joint business venture - stealing dalmatian puppies, perhaps. In the meantime, however, Phil's got his hands full dealing with a long overdue karmic comeuppance for which there are really only two possible outcomes: Phil dies or, in hospital, he loses a lot of weight and turns into Keith Allen. Ooh, scary!
Until In Deep, ex-EastEnder Nick Berry, Mr Nice Guy, Housewives Fave, had never (to my knowledge) played a tortured soul and he isn't playing one now, to be honest. But I can see why, after a thousand years in Heartbeat and that dreadful bit of business by the seaside, he would want to stretch himself, slam a few doors, crease his pretty brow, run around with a shooter and sleep with women other than his wife, just as Ant and Dec will at some point want to appear at the Donmar in Waiting for Godot directed by Sam Mendes. Anyway, if Berry's inner turmoil remains just that - etched only on his insides - his undercover cop partner, Stephen Tompkinson, is distressingly hairy and anguished on the outside and surprisingly good at tortured. Then again, he's got even more emotional baggage than Berry, what with Ballykissangel.
Last week's undercover plot was a sordid though timely trawl through an internet paedophile ring. The Gretel Club was masterminded by Donald Sumpter (right up there with Frank Finlay as the very incarnation of smooth, silver-haired menace), his son and the local GP, while the female officer in charge of cracking the case announced she 'wouldn't settle for less' than life sentences for this lot of sleazebuckets, which was noble but naïve - hadn't she followed the Wonderland trial?
These days, there are far too many dramas relying on paedophiles to drive the plot. You can see why, but even when handled by Nick Berry with kid gloves - and no kids - it's not really a suitable subject for light entertainment, surely. And if the rabble who, last summer, conducted vigilante attacks on paediatricians can get it so wrong, what hope for the likes of Sumpter? Perhaps the News of the World might like to publish an at-risk register for all the poor jobbing thesps who have to play scum of the earth.
Though marginally less horrible than being a jobbing paedophile, life as a fading 'flopstar' still looks pretty grim. We caught up with the nation's favourite failures in Nearly Popstars, the same week that Hear'say (why didn't they just call the band Popstars and have done with it?) made their live debut (with an awful lot of backing singers) at the Brits. Anyway, the hilarious Darius (the tabloids' 'pain in the arius') is still full of it - 'Fame is like a drug. It's a dangerous thing and it has to be handled carefully' - while Claire of 'the unconventional image' (though the only unconventional thing about being fat is, surely, using the word 'unconventional' to describe it) now has herself a manager and a small part in an independent film, but has also declined the advances of established record labels in favour of starting her own (very bad move, Claire).
Sliding yet further down the slippery snake of the poptabulous fame game were Ian, Gary and David who had made the last 20 in Popstars but were now being stalked by Tam, a fat (unconventional?) manager who had two other lads waiting on the sidelines in order to construct a boy band destined for swift and profound failure.
Happily, the three flopstars recognised this and escaped, though unfortunately Ian - the one rejected by Nigel Lythgoe for looking too much like a used-car dealer - decided to go solo. He is now managed by a man called Andy who runs 'north Norfolk's first record label' from a caravan park and who quickly hauled Ian off to a high street photographer for some publicity pics, accessorised by a hubcap. 'Some facial shots,' instructed Andy, who is hoping to get sponsorship for Ian from local second-hand car dealers. I don't hold out much hope for Ian's facial shots or his pop future, but there is undoubtedly a great deal of comedy mileage to be had from Andy's career and I hope we'll be seeing much more of him.
While so much TV foreign correspondence is of the rather earnest, po-faced 'I've got a flak jacket and I'm going to use it' school of reporting, BBC2's Langan Behind the Lines was deeply entertaining and therefore compulsive viewing. Sean just isn't a flak-jacket type of guy which, at times, made his journey through the Middle East (from Afghanistan to Gaza, via Iran and Iraq) a bit like a moveable chat-show rather than a self-consciously improving documentary strand. I've known Sean for years, so initially I had no intention of reviewing Behind the Lines, but then it turned out to be best thing buried in last week's late-night schedules so it would have been churlish not to. Perhaps BBC2 was slightly embarrassed by the show's shameless accessibility, but it really should have been on at eight.
Langan was a guest on Wednesday's Midweek on Radio 4, during which Libby Purves mentioned that he was a former style journalist (the unspoken inference being that a former style journalist was highly unlikely to bring very much in the way of gravitas to a documentary series on the Middle East, though presumably plenty of pithy, if fluffy, observations on Islamic dress codes). Maybe Langan perceived this as a slight (he certainly ignored it) but he needn't have worried: I thought he managed to combine deep gravitas while reporting on the Taliban's trouser-wearing trends with a deft levity when it came to, say, the Gaza Strippers - though of course I would say that, given as I'm a fluffy style journalist whose interaction with the Middle East extends about as far as driving past Regent's Park mosque on the way to the office.
At last! In The West Wing, not only has Martin Sheen's First Lady returned from executing good Democrat deeds in Pakistan - or wherever it is she's been hiding in plot purdah for the last few weeks - but she turns out to be the magnificent Stockard Channing, too. I'm not sure if Hillary was encouraged to show off quite as much heaving embonpoint as Channing revealed during Thursday's awkward state dinner for the Indonesian President, but I love Mrs Bartlet's political style (a Badgley Mischka frock and Manolo Blahnik shoes). But then I would, wouldn't I?
