TVReview: Friends and Crocodiles BBC1, Sunday. Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes BBC2, Tuesday. Tony Blair Rock Star Channel 4, Thursday. No Place Like Home RTÉ1, Sunday
The 1980s - shoulder pads, big hair, Thatcherism and loadsamoney - should have been a fertile subject for a writer of Stephen Poliakoff's repute. Friends and Crocodiles began his ambitious, if rocky, exploration of the fading years of a millennium; its sequel, Gideon's Daughter, set in the 1990s against the background of the birth of New Labour, will be screened in the future.
Poliakoff's work makes painterly television. Friends and Crocodiles was beautiful to look at: the country estate; the dappled, watery picnics by the river; the sumptuous beds covered in crisp linen and tautly amorous girls; the swan-shaped pedalos navigated by deeply rich drunks against a darkening sky glowing with Chinese lanterns.
Poliakoff's canvas was faultless, but his sprawling tale of the working relationship between Paul (Damian Lewis), a wry, self-made, Branson-esque venture capitalist, and his practical, strait-laced assistant, Lizzie (Jodhi May), was as flimsy and unsatisfying as a fistful of Duran Duran lyrics.
The charismatic Paul surrounds himself with a sycophantic entourage of intellectuals, revolutionary educationalists, artists, girls with wavy hair and journalist William (Robert Lindsay) who, if it weren't for Paul's generous patronage, would still be writing for the local rag instead of fanning himself with a boater.
Paul is also fond of crocodiles, seemingly because they survived the extinction of the dinosaurs (let's not work too hard to read the symbolism here). He keeps a miniature croc in his messy office, where he also hoards ideas for the future in a small tin box.
Enter serious Lizzie, who colour-codes his genius, babysits the reptile, keeps her tights on and generally plays Jiminy Cricket to his unconstrained hedonism - until it all goes pear-shaped, that is, when Paul invites home a bunch of central-casting anarchists who throw the office into the swimming-pool.
After this extended set-up, Poliakoff begins to run out of time for his ambitious historical survey. We've barely gotten over the introductions when it's a decade or so later and Paul is on a muddy self-sufficiency trip, with multifarious offspring and two concubines in a steam-bath. Lizzie, meanwhile, in noisy high heels, is selling her soul to internet start-ups and facilitating the decimation of a workforce. Prophetic Paul, too smooth to be caught in that grasping trap, decides instead to invest in bookshops and wind power. The revolutionary educationalist reappears, now espousing traditional grading - and then, bang, it's over.
Poliakoff is out of time.
Paul and Lizzie, with barely a moment left to stir their cappuccinos, recognise their professional attachment to one another and agree to work together again - this time by e-mail.
In its rushed progress from floating swans to e-biz, this wasn't a drama so much as an obtuse conundrum. No one mentioned the crocodile - perhaps it went on to be a policy-maker for the new Conservatives.
WHILE TRUMPETS HERALDED the busy crocs-n-mates, a feast of food, sun and sensuality was unfurled in Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes. This beautifully made film reconstructed the writer's culinary journeys of discovery through France, Greece, Italy and Spain. Watch it and weep: David's unspoilt Mediterranean was a gastronomic and visual paradise.
Catherine McCormack played the tetchy, elegant, unconventional cookery writer who educated our dull northern European palates by introducing Mediterranean foods to our mothers' larders, replacing the suet dumplings with garlic, lemons and olive oil.
In a brisk and pithy script by Amanda Coe, linked by narrated extracts from David's books, it became clear that David was a cook and a writer, not simply a writer of cookbooks. Plagued by the demons of bohemia, by too much booze and too many fags, and by her obsessive love and sexual desire for her long-term lover, Peter Higgins (Greg Wise), hers, it seems, was a life different from that of the majority of her readers.
David, having lived in Antibes and Egypt during the second World War (she eloped first with a young actor and later married an officer), returned to a dank London and a rationing book.
Looking to make a living, she claimed to have two areas of expertise, "food and sex" and, as she said, food, in that particular climate, seemed the more marketable. She didn't like the cold: "The French," she remarked to an unlucky lover in a damp English bed, "have the climate for adultery." Her passion was reignited by her husband's friend, Higgins, a stockbroker and debonair sophisticate who, despite his relationship with David, maintained a certain distance and had other lovers. It was for him, David said, that she wrote, so that Higgins would see she had a talent, see that she could have a life during the longueurs between his visits. When he finally left her and married someone else, she was devastated; in a moving scene, McCormack's precise, meticulous, almost scientific handling of the kitchen equipment was superseded by an impotent rage as she threw dishes and utensils against the walls.
Shortly afterwards, David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, her "dreary punishment", as she described it, for having "love without marriage, marriage without children, and an awful lot of sex". She survived to open a shop in Pimlico and become the most influential cookery writer of her age, a forerunner of Nigella, who, although making a damn good fist of it by appearing to cook in her nightie, has nothing on her predecessor.
POOR TONY BLAIR, battling a frosty cabinet and a new opposition leader with cheeks as fresh as a baby's bottom, and what happens? Just as public pressure to reclassify cannabis mounts, he turns on his telly to find his 18-year-old self prancing around west London in an Afghan coat and a pair of loons, with a head full of margarine (an attempt, apparently, to recreate the tousled look of his hero, Mick Jagger).
Tony Blair Rock Star was a cruel and amusing look at the future prime minister in 1971, the year before he went to Oxford to read law. Freed from his public school, Fettes (where he was caned in his final year for allowing his hair to touch his collar or some nonsense), Blair arrived in London with his trademark grin and a battered case of ambition, to be a rock star.
Best described as a dramatised documentary, the programme-makers cleverly fed an avaricious hour with a very small loaf: a couple of colour Polaroids, the reminiscences of friends and teachers and, centrally, a fantastic, almost luridly good imitation/reincarnation by Christian Brassington of the naive and goofy teenager.
Unfortunately for Blair, the doyens of west London basements, fresh from their own public schools, weren't too impressed with his two-chord strumming and rather polite rendition of I Can't Get No Satisfaction.
Undeterred, he and his mate, Alan Collenette, went into the rock-promotion business, running gigs in church halls, and while not having reached the pinnacle of his ambition, Blair at least increased his pulling power - "spin the bottle" had never been so much fun.
After eight months sleeping on Collenette's floor, Blair went to university, his rock dream still unfulfilled. It was in his first year there, in his still hirsute Afghan, that he auditioned for a band, Ugly Rumours, who were doing Rolling Stones covers. Being the only auditionee who knew all the words, he got the gig.
The band, which by all accounts was less than memorable, wilted after a handful of performances, and three months later Blair, already worrying about his legacy, joined the Labour party.
Poignantly, the programme ended with a 1994 quote from Blair: "I desperately wanted to carry on with the band; I always wondered could I have actually done it." Gordon Brown should buy him a new Fender Stratocaster.
THE SECOND PROGRAMME in the State broadcaster's eight-part multicultural travel series, No Place Like Home (pretty conclusive title), saw presenter Bob Kelly travel to Amritsar, in India, home of Gusheran, who lives in west Dublin and works in the hospitality industry. The stated aim of the series is to "find the exotic in the new realities that lie outside your doorstep", and to this end immigrants to Ireland send Kelly off to "walk a mile in their shoes", visiting their birthplaces and relaying, through video footage, messages to and from absent family.
Kelly is an amiable host, but given the scope of his task - travelling all over the world to discover, as he said, why people choose to live on a soggy island off northern Europe - one can't help wishing he'd drop the Hector imitation (on New Delhi traffic: "this makes the Red Cow roundabout look normal") and bring more depth to his observations. Why Gusheran, the son of a relatively wealthy Punjabi farmer, chose to leave home, and the implications of his loss for his village, remained unclear. But Kelly's journey to the world's largest democracy was riveting, and the notion of understanding more about our neighbours was appealing.
The series continues with journeys to Brazil, Martinique and Cameroon, among others. Tell you what, Bob, I'd fancy walking a mile in your shoes.
