Masonic handshakes

They were at it in Ashes to Ashes the other week. And now in Inspector George Gently, George's trusty young assistant John Bacchus has signed up for the Freemasons. I work pretty close to Mason HQ in Great Queen Street in Holborn, ugly great thing it is, always full of short fat old men in blazers going in and out. Shiny brass buttons, you get the idea. It's like a Rotary Club version of Angels and Demons. In Ashes, Gene Hunt faces Alex Drake's withering scorn when she assumes (along with the audience) that he's gone over to the junior Illuminati, only to reveal how he'd played the system to get a result.

In Gently, Bacchus is more conflicted, going all the way with the trouser-rolling, while still trying to do his job as a copper, which leads his long-suffering wife to suspect he's getting his leg over on the side. It's a beautifully made series, very low key period detail unlike the Rock and Roll Years soundtracks of Ashes to Ashes or Heartbeat. But it has one very central flaw: Martin Shaw, doing the sort of stupid forced gravelly voice rivalled only by whinging primadonna Christian Bale as Batman.

I can't get beyond Martin Shaw being the unsexy one from The Professionals, an uppity genre telly ac-TOR in the mould of Leonard Nimoy, and a new age religious nut to rival Sting. And his absurd performance as George Gently isn't helping, frankly. A perfectly good detective series spoiled by this over-strained old ham. The seeming popularity of Shaw and his telly peer Robert Lindsay are mysteries to me. Surely people can't seriously enjoy watching them parade their questionable egos all over the BBC? You only have to watch Philip Glenister, effortlessly splendid even in the terrible Demons, to know that some actors deserve to feel confident about their skill. But Martin Shaw? I don't get it. And I even watched Rhodes. You can't say I haven't given him a chance.

A talent for understatement

I've finally got round to watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Why on earth it has taken me for so long I have no idea – it was always going to be something I was going to love. I have an obsession with twentieth century history, and I recently read a wonderful account of le Carré's work in Dominic Sandbrook's postwar British history sequence, Never Had It So Good and White Heat. Sandbrook saw le Carré's writing as a reaction against the increasing glamourisation of spies in Cold War fiction, typified by James Bond's lavish lifestyle and gaudy exploits. Colour in le Carré's work, like fuss, is kept to a minimum. In the 1979 BBC dramatisation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the most colourful things are Beryl Reid's force of nature performance as former head of research Connie, Warren Clarke's bizarre queeny cameo as doorman Alwyn and Bernard Hepton's shirts. Hepton was one of my Mum's many unlikely crushes, alongside Alice Cooper, David Bowie and BBC legal correspondent Joshua Rosenberg.

The series starts and ends with two of the most terrifyingly tense sequences I've ever seen – Ian Bannen's journey into Communist Brno and his inevitable ambush, and the interception and unmasking of the top-level Soviet spy by George Smiley, played with detatched amusement and controlled rage by Alec Guinness. But outside of those two moments of thrilling action it's the greyness of this world that is most fascinating – the drab files, nondescript offices, unremarkable public schoolboys in senior positions, petty politics and anonymous meeting points. It shares with Yes, Minister a thoroughly believable depiction of the upper echelons of British power in the 1970s, devoid of any of those cliched signifiers of the age, be they disco or glam, hippies or punks, studs or bitches. The skill here is the lack of ostentation, both in the operations of the world it represents and in the plotting and characterisation. Here you see a world that the British could really excel in – an industry of undemonstrative irony and banality. The public school subplot makes clear that they believed the Cold War would be won on the playing fields of Eton. A whole echelon of society is sketched out here.

The characters are studies in emotional unintelligence. And that is what makes the ending so shocking: not the unmasking of the traitor, but the revelatory performance of Sian Phillips as Smiley's oft-mentioned wife Ann, who hears of all of the regime-shattering revelations from her husband with the sort of amused tolerance of a mother listening as her child relates stories of his boarding-school adventures. George, this all-knowing collossus of British Intelligence, is left blinking in the sunlight as his wife mocks his uncomprehending response to her thoughts on love: 'poor George'. Here it is, the real face of what the British ruling classes deemed intelligence: a man so wedded to the subtle intricacies of the politics of his work that he can no longer understand his estranged wife's direct emotional response. Clever, subtle, beautiful stuff. And I stil have Smiley's People to go!

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention the names. Smiley, of course, is anything but. Toby Esterhase is a name that will buzz about in my head forever, it being so wonderful to say. But it is Control that captivates. Control. An actual character called Control, amidst all the banality of the Bill Haydens and Roy Blands. Is the name an indication of a more mysterious and professional past to the Intelligence Service? Is it a courtesy? A joke? Did he turn up at work one day and tell everyone, 'I want you to stop calling me Dennis Jones, from now on I want you to call me Control.'
'Is that Dennis Control or Control Jones?'
'No, just Control.'
'Well, that's going to mess up the phone list.'
Best of all, they don't call him 'Control'. They call him 'Controle'. Rhymes with Mole.

Hero Corner No.3: Dennis Potter

In honour of Cathode Ray Tube's splendid article on The Singing Detective here's my all-time favourite TV moment...



My mum was obsessed with Dennis Potter, and I think she saw a lot of herself in Marlowe's isolation, aloofness and frustration (as, increasingly, do I). There were uncanny echoes of the long spells she'd spent in hospital over the years and her escape into a fantasy dreamworld of old pop songs. For me, the brilliance of Potter's talent was being able to capture the bewildering complexity of real people in his work. His writing holds more profound truths than the kitchen sink naturalists he'd graduated alongside simply because he approached the way he communicated so differently. He used every facet of the medium to take those characters to their most wonderful or terrifying extremes. It might be a horribly ironic song and dance routine haunting the protagonist, adults playing children at their cruelest or an inversion of conventional morality, such as the devil raping a disabled girl back to health. There's echoes of that daring melding of character and style in Kaufman and Almodóvar films, but I can't think of another writer who managed that so successfully on TV.

The Bleedin' Obvious

Gosh. No. Really? I am surprised.

I can't abide Britain's Got Talent, a show for people who have never considered that singing or dancing isn't just the preserve of the cosmetically pimped. Or Parky, what a terrible chat show host he was for all but his own coterie of showbiz mates, a man who usually just asked the most obvious of questions to receive the dullest of replies. He'd been coasting on those Mohammed Ali and Billy Connolly interviews for a long time. Funny, he doesn't ever mention his Damned Utd stint at TVAM when he, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and a couple of other charmless bores, a kind of even less successful SDP, were hastily vanquished by Frank Bough and efficiently replaced by Anne Diamond and a glove puppet.

Worst of all, Question Time. If I can't be bothered to watch members of the public teach their dog the rumba on BGT, I'm certainly not going to be gripped by the thought of watching angry teachers from Burton On Trent try to get one over on media trained fucktards trapped in an escalating spiral of hand-wringing me tooism. This week it should have been satisfying watching MPs squirm as they were resoundingly bollocked about their expenses, but Margaret Beckett and Ming Campbell have for many years been their parties fall guys, sent on to grovel in their own shit for the pleasure of Paxman or a Dimbleby. Seeing them at it again while all of those real bastards, the grey wardrobe-skinned nonentities we'd never heard of but were happy for us to pay for essential moat cleaning or porn, toughed it out in Westminster clubs, no doubt watching Ming and Margaret on a plasma screen through a haze of G&Ts as they struggled through their usual duet, Islands in the Shit Stream.

Interesting comment from soon to retire Tonight host Jay Leno: 'I like CSI and SVU and Law & Order, but there isn't any comedy. When I was a kid, you'd have a whole night of comedy. Now it's all very serious, it's all murder'. It's the legacy of George Bush, I guess, a fucked-up country gets fucked-up drama. This is also possibly why I've given up following American series, and why the new Star Trek film is so endearing: they've not done the now obligatory 'dark' reboot, but have instead made something lighter, funnier and more entertainng than the original. Now there's a thought.

'I even went to Margate and spoke to a gay person'

This week it's make or break time for me and The Apprentice. Although fun this series hasn't been a patch on the last couple. It does always warm up as it goes on, but there's no splendid Raefs or Badgers left to keep the momentum up.

This week is all about rebranding Margate. Ben's idea of a family holiday is the Seychelles, Mona can barely say the words gay and lesbian without choking, James is worried about suggestive licking, Nick's concerned about the gays looking stiff, Margaret's in fits of laughter watching the munting models strip off. And Lorraine has never seen text over a photo – one presumes she's never bought a book or has seen an advert.

Deborah bullies her team into submission, especially Howard, who tries (and fails) to instill some basic common sense into their poster campaign. Consequently their leaflet remains half-finished. Her team actually work very well together, but she manages to scupper that with a dismissive, aggressive arrogance only she can carry off. I wouldn't have done Howard's job of having to pitch that amateurish shit of a campaign for all the 99 flakes in Margate. In the boardroom Deborah sits there blinking like a big fat shiny clockwork owl, Mona twitters like a tiny sparrow, James puffs up like a nesting booby. Nothing much happens.

Not up to standard. Where's the fun? Sir Alan needs to work harder or this will be The Apprentice going into a deep depression.

TV loves itself

How Britain Got the Gardening Bug used some fantastic old film footage of gardens from the second half of the twentieth century. All those glorious, grainy shots of grow bags being hauled off the back of flat bed trucks, small villages in ludicrous bloom and people having sad little barbies in their back gardens really cheered me up. Shame that each decade was introduced with tedious cliched footage: the eighties filofax, champagne, red braces montage, for example, was so far removed from real life it undermined the rest of the documentary. Exactly how accurate were they being about garden history when they mangled social history so badly?

Slightly random collection of guests: Penelope Keith, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, Nigel Slater and Germaine Greer ('I would shoot down hanging baskets') and all the gardening establishment. The usual talking head bullshit: Did pampas grass mean you were swingers? No, shut up, James Double-Barrelled whatever your bloody name is. And shut up the woman who wanted to go at the lovely pampas grass with a pickaxe and bonfire. Gnomes. Topiary. Dwarf conifers. Yes, the weight of cliched soundbite snobbery came down heavily on all of them.

There was some gorgeous old 70s Gardeners' World, with giant vegetables and a couple of old blokes admiring the length and girth of the shaft of an engorged leek. As one of the old geezers said to the other as he handed him a trophy, 'that exhibit of celery I shall remember for the rest of my life'. But half way through the documentary it stopped being about real gardens and became a clip show of Don, Titchmarsh and Gavin.

Love Geoff Hamilton. But James Wanker-Cockspurt claimed that it is almost impossible to hate Alan Titchmarsh. The 'almost' is key here. Oh god, I fancied Dermot Gavin at one point. Now I'd happily feed him into a composter, the arrogant prick. But as the real garden footage disappeared from the documentary so did any of the non garden mafia talking talking heads and any reason to carry on watching. Such a shame. It was a good demonstration of how TV has stopped being the observer and has become the story, in the same way that viewers have become the stars in the last decade. There was a great little documentary trying to get out here, but by the end it was just another excuse for otherwise unemployable media types to namecheck each-other and smile ruefully at their badboy reputations. I'd have much rather seen interviews with some old geezers and their giant marrows.

'Maybe he's dressed as Pat Phoenix and wanking into a desk tidy.'

Repeats of The Thick of It specials in the wake of the success of In the Loop have given me the opportunity to snigger all over again at the verbal extremities and staggeringly believable performances.

Best bit: terrifying Jamie locks himself in a stationery cupboard with potential leadership candidate Claire Ballantine and emerges moments later revealing that 'She's addicted to online poker', which leads to my favourite line from the entire series: 'You know what they're calling her already? Ugly Betty'.