Band of Brothers BBC2
EastEnders BBC1
Terror in America: The British Victims and Survivors BBC1
Alongside a largely unknown cast, it was jarring to see David Schwimmer, forever Friends ' geeky Ross, playing the bullying Captain Sobel in Band of Brothers, but at least he didn't hang around drinking double-double-decaff skinny frappuccinos in the officer's mess and whining about not getting a cute date with whom to share his weekend leave.
As absolutely nobody on earth could imagine television's favourite/only neurotic New York palaeontologist leading Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division of the US army all the way from Georgia to the storming of Hitler's Berchtesgarten, within the first hour Schwimmer was necessarily re-assigned to a dead-end job (though not as deadly a dead-end job) after proving to have marginally less in the way of field skills than the large ruminant to which he bears a striking resemblance.
As he made his leisurely, humiliating getaway down an English country lane, Schwimmer's Sobel also avoided leading both himself and 95 per cent of the men in his command to almost certain death, which would have messed with history big time. For Band of Brothers is, of course, the story of real soldiers and specifically the true red-white-and-blue star-spangled American hero, Major Richard Winters, a man who in the form of a dramatically de-gingered Damian Lewis (Hearts and Bones ' loss was Easy Company's gain) won himself a DSO as early as the end of the second episode after commanding an assault on a fixed position (the capture of Carentan, near Cherbourg, in June and July 1944, to be precise) that has become a text-book military classic and is still taught at West Point today.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Winters is still alive - but what, I found myself wondering, ever happened to Sobel? Is he even now sitting in a Florida nursing home regaling fellow inmates with tall stories of his bitter little war? Or has he long since passed on, leaving a family to console themselves with the fact that at least their forebear's numerous failures have been immortalised on screen by a big star? Or was Sobel maybe a fictional construct, conveniently paving the way for the factual glory to follow? In which case, how many of the facts that follow can I take as given? It's pretty likely that I won't get answers to any of these questions - questions that, admittedly, may not have entered my head had Band of Brothers first episodes aired a few weeks back, in a less militarily attuned era.
Whatever: BoB arrives on our screens in a big timely blaze of gung-ho glory, glory, hallelujah, with an unprecedented $120 million spent on 10 hours of telly, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and with each episode directed by a combination of A-list TV and slumming film directors. If this isn't event telly, I'd like to know what is, so shame on the beeb for relegating the BBC/HBO/ DreamWorks co-production to BBC2 on Friday nights: 'too niche', apparently, for the Sunday primetime it obviously deserves.
I'd been warned that the first hour was slow, but that the second made up for it. Admittedly, the first hour may not have been a flash-bang-wallop SFX-fest, but at least it gave us a chance to attempt to get to know the cast. It's a challenge to put names to faces when everyone's in uniform and nobody's a star (though you could spot the Wahlberg easily enough: Donnie, Mark's brother).
In the event I preferred the first hour because, as the company were parachuted into the enemy lines, much of the second was shot at night and I find it difficult to suppress the urge to put the kettle on whenever a TV screen is dark for longer than five minutes. After about 15, I had caved in. I don't suppose this footage was ever screened for the producers on a small telly in a brightly lit living room, but it should have been. I watched it on 32 inches of digital flat screen and still couldn't tell which privates were on parade; none the less, by the time day broke it was clear that our boys (because we're all Americans now) were winning and that was the important thing.
So far there's not been a sighting of a single woman (no, not even the clichés: a uniformed typist/driver/ vamp or a local landgirl, flashing her smalls at the Yanks - easy company for, er, Easy Company), so this is likely to shape up as a wartime romance in which the primary love interest will be a clean uniform, a comfortable trench and a warm Luger, not to mention the character-forming company of men. Apart from some minor stylistic quibbles (some Spielbergian slo-mo during the fighting scenes would have come as a welcome respite from the relentless rat-a-tat), all-in-all it's pretty marvellous stuff, while Lewis's affecting performance consolidates his position as one of our finest actors. But I doubt any young men currently preparing their assaults on fixed Afghan positions will be looking to BoB for hints, textbook or otherwise. Suddenly, Band of Brothers looks about as relevant to contemporary warfare as the manoeuvres of the Blues and the Greys must have seemed to Winters and Co. Just a little light nostalgia, in fact.
Contemporary emotional warfare was the stuff of last week's EastEnders, in which all four episodes revolved around the events of one domestically catastrophic evening in Walford. Or perhaps that should be Katastrophic. For those who remain immune to the genre, this was the week to confound preconceptions; it was simply the finest writing and acting yet seen in a soap. From Dot's melancholic recitation of Dylan Thomas at Lynne Slater's hen night on Monday, through to the extraordinary double-header between Kat Slater and her daughter, Zoë, on Tuesday, and then on into Thursday's seamy revelations around Zoë's paternity, we were eventually left reeling on Friday in the aftermath of Kat's suicide attempt, Harry's night-flit, Peggy's broken-hearted disbelief and the echo of Zoë's high heels bearing her away into the empty night, off to contemplate the web of lies and the betrayals that have rewritten the story of her life. Tony Jordan's script made Medea look like Neighbours.
My biggest criticism of soaps has always been the staccato emotional rhythms dictating that both major and minor agonies and ecstasies are played out in three minutes flat, invariably culminating in a slammed door. But on those rare occasions that the characters and storylines are given room to breathe the results can be breathtaking. Jessie Wallace (Kat) was on screen for the best part of the two hours and gave a performance so well-paced it made you shiver, and while Michelle Ryan, as Zoë, was called upon mostly to react, she did so with a powerful and plausible restraint.
On Thursday night, from 7.30-9pm, BBC1 challenged us to remain dry-eyed as EastEnders was followed by Terror In America: the British Victims and Survivors. I felt very uneasy about the scheduling: from the Slaters' dramatic despair to the very real thing, without so much as a Charlie Dimmock in-between to cushion the emotional blows? My fears were confirmed when we saw, again and again, that footage of the collapsing twin towers. In the current issue of the Radio Times, Mark Popescu, editor of the 10 O' Clock News, is quoted as saying 'we're not showing the pictures of the planes crashing into the towers any more because it's a moment when thousands of people died. To show it over and over again is pornographic'. Given the editorial context of Terror In America , in which we were introduced to some of the victims via old snapshots and video footage and watched interviews with families who, for the most part, still seemed numb, having barely embarked on the grieving process, including the footage seemed at best unnecessary, at worst voyeuristic.
When the scale of the tragedy was still abstract, we could focus on these images with awed fascination, but right now I'm sure I'm not alone in never needing to see them again. And while this programme might have been worthwhile screened on, say, the first anniversary, to be watching freshly fatherless children, briskly coping wives and fiancées and uncomprehending parents all lined up on sofas to bare their savaged souls less than four week s after the event made it painfully obvious that even if people were willing to speak on film, it didn't necessarily follow that they'd come to terms with what they were talking about. Can close-ups of a weeping 13-year-old who lost her father less than a month ago really be considered anything other than intrusive?
