Jeffrey Archer: The Truth BBC1
Doctor Zhivago ITV1
The Adventure of English ITV1
Hitler's Britain C5
It's hard not to write satire, observed Juvenal, the godfather of satirists, almost 2,000 years ago. But as recently as last week Guy Jenkin made not writing satire seem a matter of consummate ease. In his Jeffrey Archer: The Truth all the punishing work was left to the viewer. Or put it this way: it was hard not to turn the TV off.
Few political targets are more poorly defended than Archer. His airport novel of a life has long been vulnerable to mockery but, since his conviction for perjury, the supporterless one-time golden boy of the Tory party has offered a wide open goal. Yet somehow Jenkin, who directed his own script, contrived to miss it repeatedly for 90 minutes.
That he did so with Damian Lewis, a protean actor of meticulous precision, leading the attack was, in its frustrating perversity, rather like placing Michael Owen on the penalty spot without a ball. You kept wondering what he might have achieved had he been given a part to play with rather than an extended sketch.
'This story is based on real events,' ran the cod disclaimer at the beginning. 'Only the facts have been changed.' It was probably the smartest line in the film, but it also accounted for why much of the humour seemed so dumb.
The idea was to take Archer's exaggerated estimation of himself and stretch it as far as it would go. Given the elastic limits of the novelist-politician-businessman's ego, it was an approach that offered no shortage of comic potential. The problem was that all credibility snapped within a few minutes and thereafter the story had no tension and the jokes no spring.
Set seven years in the future, the film found Archer about to become Prime Minister and in the process of recruiting a naive young woman to pen his 'unauthorised' biography. As he seduced her, he charted his rakish progress through the key events of late-twentieth-century British history. We saw him - half-Zelig, half-Bond - dispense song titles to the Beatles, save the hostages at the Iranian Embassy siege, bed Margaret Thatcher and get secretly engaged to Princess Diana.
Flights of absurdity can be amusing, although they tend to amuse most when they are in flight from the mundane. In Archer's case, the real tale is so bizarre that to abandon it for cartoonish farce seems like an unforgivable cop-out. A handsome production and quality cast merely increased the sense of an opportunity squandered. Rarely can so much money have been spent on such cheap jokes.
It was no surprise to learn that Jenkin cut his teeth on Spitting Image. Here there was the same belief, popular in alternative comedy of the Eighties, that puerility is inherently subversive and hysterical. By the same token, the characterisations, typified by Greta Scacchi's Thatcher, were of the kind that work best when you can see the strings attached.
Towards the end, Archer learnt that he was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Edinburgh, at which point he quipped: 'It's uncanny. I've always loved moussaka.' The line would not have been any funnier, or less unfunny, had it been spoken by a foam marionette, but at least you would not have felt sorry for the puppet in the way that you felt sorry for Lewis.
Pity for the actors is one thing, but the true mark of Jenkin's failure was the sympathy his film excited for the real-life people it set out to ridicule, among them Thatcher, Diana and, most counter-productively of all, Archer himself. No one was expecting Juvenal. It's just a shame that it was made to be so juvenile.
The second episode of Doctor Zhivago was a considerable improvement on the first. A limp staginess gave way to something more vital and affecting, if never quite epic. There has been much debate about the compara tive merits of Andrew Davies's dual adaptations, Zhivago and Daniel Deronda. A crude analysis would be that Sam Neill's evil bastard, Komarovsky, is a match for Hugh Bonneville's evil bastard, Grandcourt; Hans Matheson's Zhivago is a better dreamer than Hugh Dancy's Deronda; and Keira Knightley's Lara comes a distant second to Romola Garai's Gwendolen in the elusive love stakes.
Knightley is clearly a great beauty in the Uma Thurman mould but something in her expression reminds me of the snooker player Stephen Hendry in the process of compiling an unassailable break. And following Knightley's seduction by Neill in the billiard room, I have been unable to look at the woman without visualising a succession of red balls methodically disappearing into buried holes. Whether this is a subliminal comment on sex and death and communism only a psychiatrist could say, but it's difficult to believe that it was one intended by the filmmakers.
Nonetheless, out of the two, I still think I favour Zhivago, which lacks the assured touch and consistent tone of the BBC drama but at least strives after real, complex emotions, even if it never quite catches them.
What with Simon Schama's History of Britain, the recent Great Britons series, and the flag-waving background of the Jubilee and the World Cup,there has been a notable upsurge in demonstrative nationalism, particularly English nationalism, over the past year or so.
At first sight, Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English might appear to be an addition to the trend, but in fact it's interested not in the nation's heart, spirit or mind but its tongue. It is a celebration of lingualism, not nationalism.
'England's greatest success story of all is the English language,' claimed Bragg. It's early days yet in the eight-part series but Bragg did not really explain what constitutes success, other than to say that English is the prime language of a billion people on the planet - the same could be said of Chinese, in its various forms.
Certainly it is possible to argue that the pre-eminence of English is little more than an accident of history, and that French, Spanish and Russian could at various points have come to enjoy equal or even greater prominence. In any case, does the spread of a language reflect its power or that of the empire spreading it?
Russian is said to be a uniquely descriptive language, but it was Stalin rather than Tolstoy who compelled it to be spoken throughout eastern Europe.
All these questions may well be resolved in later programmes, so we should give Bragg the benefit of any doubt and just mention that a good thesis sometimes requires more than a bold statement.
On the history, though, Bragg cannot be faulted. He gathered the various strands of the language's roots - Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Norman French - and weaved together a fascinating tableau of a Darwinian struggle to survive and evolve.
Occasionally, when Bragg was listing the etymologies of long strings of everyday words, you wondered what it was that prevented this documentary from resembling an Open University programme. Naturally, the beautiful photography brought it to life. And the absence of beards and uncombed hair must have helped, although not nearly as much as the presence of Bragg. Surely he is the only English male on television who can sport a pink shirt and still look sensible, let alone commanding. Call it craft (old English) or skill (Norse), whatever it is he wears it well.
It has often been said that had this country not won the Battle of Britain, we might all be speaking German now. Such was the premise of Hitler's Britain, the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Channel 5 documentaries that feature the word 'Hitler' in their title.
If nothing else, you have to admire the dogged determination with which the commissioners at C5 set about extracting the very last slither of marrow from this best-chewed of bones.
As usual, a great deal of expense was spared. The budget appeared to allow for only two Nazi uniforms and it looked as if they were worn by the same couple of actors whom we kept seeing, for some reason, entering and leaving a village grocery shop.
The research was fine, as far as it went, but needless to say it did not go very far. Essentially the programme was based on one Nazi document detailing the plans for running an invaded Britain, and the speculation of a couple of historians whose expertise in the field was never established.
One thing we can surmise with confidence is that if Hitler had prevailed in 1940 there would be no Channel 5 today. It could never have hoped to fill the scheduling void in which the defeated Führer now reigns supreme.
