The Amazing Mrs Pritchard BBC1
Dispatches: The Blunkett Tapes C4
Death of a President MORE4
Panorama BBC1
What We Did on Our Holiday ITV1
As some readers may have noticed, the beginning of The Amazing Mrs Pritchard passed without comment in this column. I'd like to put the omission down to stunned amazement. But in fact my critical paralysis was born of something still more apposite: apathy.
Apathy was the subject of the first episode but its treatment was the purest whimsy. The effect was rather as if someone had tried to relieve your boredom by relaying at extended length their previous night's dream. A cure that's infinitely worse than the ailment.
When we were first introduced to Mrs Pritchard, played with blameless northern professionalism by Jane Horrocks, she was an ultra-efficient supermarket manager. Having witnessed two squabbling politicians, she instantly grew so disenchanted with mainstream politics that she formed her own party and, after a brief appearance on Newsnight, became Prime Minister.
In episode two she met the Queen, to whom she confessed her second thoughts about leading the nation. 'Pihaps we should teck advice,' suggested Her Majesty.
'Perhaps we should,' agreed Mrs Pritchard.
'No,' said the Queen, the obligatory corgi registered at her side, 'I mint me.'
It was the closest Sally Wainwright's scrupulously inoffensive script came to humour. The rest of the time, when characters weren't reminding Mrs Pritchard of her 'extraordinary' achievement, it relied on a kind of queasy down-to-earthiness.
Having sent special forces into Iran and bent the ear of George Bush, Horrocks explained to an assistant: 'These are big decisions Kimber-lay. It's not about whether to risk ordering any more organic jam tarts or not.'
Speaking as a voter who is fairly disenchanted with the main supermarket chains, I would have preferred that Mrs Pritchard focused her efforts on grocery orders. Someone who delivered fresh seafood and edible tomatoes to the big supermarkets, now there's a heroine I could truly root for.
Instead The Amazing Mrs Pritchard was like one of those trolleys with a wonky wheel. Everything kept lurching off in unlikely directions and it required all your concentration to ignore the fault. In itself the idea that Jane Horrocks might become PM, while far-fetched, was not that preposterous. After all, a great many people were happy to pretend that Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Foot were in with a chance.
The deeper problem was that there was no edge to the piece. It came down to two bland observations: from the outside politics looks simple; and from the inside it's more difficult. That may do for one of Nick Robinson's standing-outside-Downing-Street reports - and Robinson, incidentally, turned up on Mrs Pritchard playing himself no more convincingly than he does on the BBC news. But for a six-part drama about getting switched on, it amounts to a big turn-off.
If you believe David Blunkett, real politics is much less fantastic than Mrs Pritchard, and far more absurd. In Dispatches: The Blunkett Tapes, the former home secretary recalled the second time he lost his cabinet job. He went to Tony Blair expecting to be sacked but instead he was backed. Then when he left Number 10, the rumour was so widespread that he had lost his job that he felt compelled to give it up.
'Whether I've resigned or not, the situation has changed and I've gone,' he said, sounding like a football manager still grappling with the meaning of the chairman's vote of confidence.
The programme could have done with more anecdotes in the same vein. The titular tapes turned out to be inaudible, so an actor read out Blunkett's recorded diary entries. He had his work cut out, for Blunkett is no phrase turner. 'I was literally churning inside,' was a typical description. And nor is he a master of revelation.
We learned that Geoff Hoon was 'gung-ho', that John Prescott was left out of the loop by Tony Blair, and that Blunkett once became so angry with Gordon Brown that he broke a pen. At the end of a very long hour, the doggedly melodramatic narrator announced: 'Part two of this exposé next week.' It won't be easy, but I think I can wait.
A year ago, Blunkett was the subject of a satire called A Very Social Secretary. At the time I thought that it was an unfairly cruel intrusion into a living person's private life, and I couldn't believe the sanctimonious tone of the writer, Alistair Beaton's defence: 'This film explores how Blunkett became a metaphor for Tony Blair's decadent regime.' Where are we, Saudi Arabia?
But actually Bernard Hill's portrayal was so good that Blunkett appeared a more sympathetic character in the lampoon than he did in his own account. And by comparison with how George W Bush has been fictionalised, Blunkett got off lightly.
In 2004 Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, a novel that discussed in lingering, even enthusiastic, detail a plot to kill Bush. Last week Death of a President presented a fake documentary about his assassination in 2007.
The fake documentary is, I think, an inherently self-defeating genre. The more authentic it appears, the more parodic it becomes. The interviews with members of Bush's security team and advisers seemed, in presentation at least, just how they would be in a real documentary. But while you can admire the mimicry of how things are said, it didn't make you believe what was being said.
There was also one slip I spotted. Bush's special adviser referred to the North Korean leader as Kim Il Jong. He is of course Kim Jong-il. That was perhaps just a case of the Il being sic. But dramatising a murder that hasn't happened, that probably qualifies as just sick.
Finally, on the matter of politics, to Panorama, and John Sweeney's The Price of Blood. Sweeney, a former colleague of mine, can be something of challenge even when he's on your side. God knows what it must be like if he's not.
God and now David Mills, the estranged husband of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, and former lawyer to Silvio Berlusconi. The investigation was less about Mills's controversial dealings with Berlusconi, than a dodgy Italian blood-selling operation in which one of Mills's companies was once involved.
Mills's method, we heard, was to bamboozle the tax authorities, and Sweeney took a similar approach to the viewer. We saw a lion, President Mobutu, the Channel Island of Sark, Nosferatu, the 'Bounty Bar land' of the British Virgin Islands, The Godfather and much else besides in a thoroughly entertaining, if slightly confusing, story of either criminal incompetence or competent criminals.
As for the notorious £300,000 gift that Mills and Jowell used to pay off their mortgage, there were only two possible sources: 'The man who's about to stand trial for corruption,' stated Sweeney, 'or the man's who's been convicted of corruption.' It says something of the nature of Mills's business that he maintains it's the latter. Mills came across as the epitome of charming. And what was Jowell's friendly criticism of Blunkett in Dispatches? He sometimes lacked charm.
The tradition of taking soap actors and casting them as the lead in big budget dramas is a long and mostly unhappy one. What We Did on Our Holiday, which starred Shane Richie (aka Alfie Moon from EastEnders) was a brave exception.
For a start, euthanasia is hardly the sexiest of subjects, especially when it concerns a drooling old man. And though that was the twist rather than the tale, the film did not spare the viewer the indignities of Parkinson's disease.
Richie was excellent as the loyal but resentful son who takes his incapacitated father (Roger Lloyd-Pack) and manipulative mother (Pauline Collins) on a disastrous holiday to Malta. His face was an atlas of minor disappointments, and there was a wonderfully morose stillness about his performance, as if he knew in his bones that any movement would only complicate life.
The film began with a bravura piece of black comedy. We saw Richie wearing a distant stare on an airliner as the soundtrack filled with the lulling melancholy of The Carpenters 'Rainy Days and Mondays'. Suddenly the music was interrupted as he removed his headphones to hear his incontinent father screaming 'Toilet!'
And it ended in the translucent Mediterranean, as the father drifted off into the deep, in a scene of such bleak lyricism that it could have been culled from an Antonioni film. Thus it went from from relief to release, from taking a leak to taking a life, without ever taking itself too seriously.
In between, however, the tone wandered from broad comedy (some irritating sitcom-style next door neighbours) to midlife angst and on to Latin romance as if it was not always entirely confident of where it ought to be or wanted to go. In addition the subplot concerning a long-lost son threatened to hijack the film while never quite taking the viewer captive.
But these were small complaints. Here was a grown-up, beautifully shot drama of the sort that ITV has all too often forsaken. For once the flaws, and the successes, stemmed from ambition, not the lack of it.
Cops in colour
This week sees the return on ITV1 of Prime Suspect, the finest police drama to come out of this country. Jane Tennison (played by Helen Mirren) is probably the only British cop who's known in America. The rest couldn't get arrested.
The portrayal of our police has always been problematic. The Sweeney excepted, there's never been a decent crash-bang-you're-nicked series of the kind the US produces in abundance. And the procedurals, apart from Prime Suspect, seem to feature endless shots of dull station corridors.
Nor is the fault restricted to dramas. Many documentaries suffer from the same grey approach. But not BBC2's Anatomy of a Crime, which has produced four first-class films in the past month. Set in Greater Manchester, each episode has centred on a particular case, revealing the complexity of even the most straightforward investigation. The detectives appear not only bright but enlightened. And the camera made sure never to dwell on drab, endless corridors.
