Life on Mars: Season 2, Episode 3

 "Why don't we bring in that well-known terrorist, Dana...?"

A stronger episode this time, as the inevitable happens and Life on Mars does an episode based around the Troubles. Sort of.

Inevitaby, given the sensibilities of 2007, in the wake of a Northern Ireland Peace Process not yet imperilled by Brexiteering insanity, as opposed to those of 1973, the twist is going to be that the bomber has nothing to do with the Irish. This leads to a rather good whodunit which is cleverly done and just about manages to hide the fact that, if we assume the bomber isn't Irish, there's only one possible suspect.

What the episode does, thogh, is shed a light on the discrimination and bigotry faced by Irish immigrant labourers at the time, through the eyes of Patrick O'Brien as example. Not only do we see police brutality and stereotyping (Gene Hunt, of course), but discrimination in terms of employment and housing. O'Brien may well have several chips on his shoulder, but those chips are well-fried.

There's also a nice culture clash as Ray returns to work too soon after having been caught in a bomb blast, with counselling for his PTSD being eschewed in favour of a round of drinks.

The meta-stuff about Sam's coma is really there to add suspense and drama rather than develop any kind of arc, as usual, but for the first time in a while we see the Test Card Girl, subtly recast but no less creepy. 

The overall effect is impressive. This is rather good and, I note, not written by one of the showrunners.

Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa

"What's the point? what's the bloody point?"

These BBC 4 dramas always were excellent telly but this 2006 masterpiece... well. You don't get much better telly than this. Michael Sheen is the king of truly inhabiting a real life figure, Tony Blair or not. And Kenneth Williams... he is one of the most fascinating personalities who ever lived. If only he'd, you know, gone forth and had sex with the men who would willingly have had him. this is a quietly effective damnation of the effect of mid-twentieth century homophobia, even on those who had the brains to know that the pre-1967 law was "barbaric". And the need for approval of a socially conservative public didn't help. Neither did what happened to Leiester's very own Joe Orton.

But the angst over his sexuality, his dying a horrifically repressed virgin at 62, is only the half of it. This working class intellectual always struggled with the conflict between his origins and his intellectual yearnings, a classic case of culture clash between two alien English cultures. Even his multiple voices and accents, so sublimely done by the outstanding Sheen, are as much about the codes and anxieties of class as they are about performance.

The real quotes from his diaries give us a true feel of the man’s inner life, so different from the well-known performer on the surface. And there is real tragedy, from the murder of Orton to the heavily hinted-at suicide of Williams’ father, shortly after a very casual rejection. Something like that would traumatise, however awkward the father-son relationship. All this is done with restrained writing; this is not script that draws attention to its own tricks and cleverness, but in its structure, choices and the voice it gives to Williams itself it is as much a triumph as Sheen’s magnificent performance itself.

A televisual triumph, then, and the finest hour of the late, lamented BBC 4 drama.