Jamie's Kitchen C4
The Lords' Tale C4
Young, Nazi and Proud C4
Understanding John Birt BBC2
The Office BBC2
Like fried potatoes and bread, Jamie Oliver and the elimination makeover show are a combination that, on paper, seems blandly unappetising. It is, after all, hard to think of either a TV personality or genre that is more tiresomely visible. Yet put them together and, in imitation of the strange alchemy that works its magic on the chip butty, they make for a delicious, if unlikely, sandwich.
Not that Jamie's Kitchen could be described as comfort food. The aim is to take a group of unemployed youngsters (16 to 24 years old) and turn them into chefs. There were more than 1,000 applicants to take part and in the opening episode the number had been whittled down to 60. Yet they knew so little about food it made you wonder if it was possible for the unsuccessful 940 to have known less. Perhaps they could not tell the difference between a knife and a fork.
Suffice to say that the gastronomic revolution has yet to reach large sections of British society. This is not a flippant point, and one of the admirable qualities of the show is its unpatronising handling of young people who are impoverished in more than just the economic sense. Oliver's street-style mateyness, which had seemed in danger of becoming self-parodic, here rings an authentic note of compassion.
The ingredients look promising and, unless it all falls flat, there's every chance the cameras will catch a memorable, and possibly moving, story. As such, it's a set-up, which is the mark of the new-style fly-on-the-wall, or fly-in-the-soup, documentaries that prefer not to trust to fate or time.
The theory behind the old-style fly-on-the-wall documentary was simple: point a camera at a subject for long enough and eventually there would amass sufficient footage of interest to make a film. In practice, it doesn't always work out that way. A recent example of what can go wrong was College Girls, a six-part study of life at Oxford University that took over three years to make and produced about four minutes of worthwhile material.
The lesson is that to get the story, you can't just turn up and expect it to reveal itself. The finest exponents of the form have never been passive observers. They're always looking to take you where they shouldn't be, always ready to take maybe for a no. Molly Dineen, the profiler of Tony Blair and Geri Halliwell, has a term for this technique: 'fly on your bloody face'.
In The Lords' Tale, her camera focused on the desiccated features of hereditary peers as they prepared for their eviction from the House of Lords. It was a subtle, intelligent film, full of characters, but lacking a plot. The reasons for this absence were twofold. She was not allowed access to the Labour life-peers who voted to end birthright entitlement. And British constitutional reform is an even slower process than documentary making.
One old peer, who looked like a superannuated Leslie Phillips, complained to Dineen that he might be dead before her film came out. The film-maker took this as a comment on her tardiness. But at the rate things are going, she might be dead before a new second chamber is created.
So, three years after the end of hereditary peers (except for a token 92), and with no further progress in sight, this chronicle of the events of November 1999 finally reached the screen. Dineen is a great believer in the idea that subject is less important than the eye that is brought to it. But the dusty image of ancient aristocrats is not easily freshened. She tried to show the hidden human loss, the hollow echo of obsolescence, that accompanies the end of a tradition. The result was at times so gentle that one felt like reclining, in long-honoured fashion, into the house's famous red leather benches for a brief snooze.
Perhaps it was during this momentary interlude that it became obvious the House of Lords was, in fact, a giant Tardis populated by Time Lords. The initial clue was the voice of Earl Russell, son of Bertrand, which I recognised to be the croak-cum-whistle of the late John Pertwee, better known as Dr Who. The clincher, of course, is that any institution that readies itself for the twenty-first century without having set foot in the twentieth is clearly not playing by the rules of Newtonian physics.
'I vair much want to go awn,' said one silvery charmer. But after an hour and 45 minutes of him and his friends, I felt it was history and Dineen that were overdue to move awn.
David Modell's Young, Nazi and Proud was the best one-man-and-a-camera documentary screened in recent months. If the House of Lords is a topic that has suffered from too long an exposure (after all, there have been TV cameras in the chamber for years now), then the problem with the British National Party as subject matter is too much exposé.
Despite the BNP's best efforts to present a more democratic face, no one is going to fall over at the revelation that it continues to harbour Nazi-sympathisers. The strength of Modell's film lay less in the reality it uncovered, although it worked perfectly well as investigative journalism, than in the fantasy it conveyed. Namely that of its protagonist, a complex, disarming narcissist called Mark Collett.
In the course of six months or more, Modell filmed Collett as he graduated from university and became a party organiser for the BNP. Often he did not realise he was on camera, and that's when he confided his admiration for Hitler and his hope that militant gangs would rally to his, Collett's, cause. 'Hitler will live on for ever,' he said, 'and maybe I will, too.'
Yet, in a sense, he was more revealing when he was aware the camera was rolling. Then we saw a swaggering young man high on self-delusion. A shot of him strutting manfully in front of Anti-Nazi League demonstrators seemed to capture his almost pathological vanity, a quality with which the extreme right is not unfamiliar.
Had it meant only to demonise Collett, this would have been a much less intriguing film than it proved. Instead it showed that his belief in appearance was perhaps stronger than his appearance of belief. This could well be the case with most members of cult groups - among which Modell correctly placed the BNP. The youthful urge to pose can easily be shaped into a more sinister posture.
We never properly saw Modell, but if he was a fly on the wall, he had a sting in his tail. The final confrontation, when Collett learnt that he had been taped all along, made for gripping television. What I found most shocking, though, were not Collett's views - as predictable as they were reprehensible - but the knowledge that he was a fan of Alan Partridge. How could he appreciate the absurdity of Partridge, you wondered, without recognising his own?
Understanding John Birt was a thoroughly entertaining attempt to fulfil the impossible task it set itself. Birt and his credo of Birtism are to modern broadcasting what Linear B was to Greek archaeology. Everyone has dreamt of cracking the code. Nick Fraser stuck to the official biography, which suggests Birt was born in Liverpool in 1944, and ignored rumours that he was actually a prototype android built sometime in the white-hot heat of Wilson's 1960s.
Apparently Birt only ever had one idea and, according to Peter Jay, it was his. There were a number of vicious testimonies, perhaps chief among them Michael Grade's. Grade kept smiling and joking, as if recalling an old chum with whom he used to banter, all the while insisting that Birt was a corporate arse-kisser. When Fraser pointed out that the former director general of the BBC had faced down his boss, Marmaduke Hussey, over the Diana Panorama crisis, Grade stopped smiling and accused Birt of 'arrogance'. Reading between the lines, you sensed that Birt was not a regular dinner guest chez Grade.
Such are office politics. But as David Brent said, quoting Dolly Parton: 'If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain.' The last episode of The Office was a mini-masterpiece of comic poignancy. Two episodes earlier, when Brent gave his motivational speech, I feared that Ricky Gervais had taken his creation so far into the realms of the ridiculous that the thin thread of dignity that bound him to us was about to snap.
But he edged back, set his sights on new pastures ('Slough's a big place'), and maintained enough pride for it to matter when he swallowed it all and begged for his job. This has been an exceptional series, full of comic inspiration. Sometimes it made you laugh until you hurt. The rest of the time it made you hurt until you laughed.
