Boxing clever

Which box is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? asks AA Gill. Here’s a clue. Your children were watching it at 6.30pm on Saturday, April 5. That’s right. It’s the television. You can get the whole world and the universe and God and multiple deities and Simon Cowell in your telly.

Your kids were watching Doctor Who, who merely has a telephone box. The beginning of the new series attracted 40% of the television audience, which sounds a lot more than 8m, but, in television terms, it’s what is known as Tristram’s goal: that is, young people on a Saturday evening. Why young people should be any more moreish, pert and attractive than the rest of us, I’ve never worked out. Maybe they’re more susceptible to the advertising. But, then, they don’t have any money and they don’t pay the licence fee, and there’s no guarantee that, if they like Doctor Who, they’re going to grow up to love Panorama. But the Doctor does donate an audience of 7m to I’d Do Anything and then on to Casualty.

Now, which box looks bigger on the outside than on the inside? David Beckham in those risible knicker ads. Golden Balls was on Headcases (Sunday, ITV1), which is the son of Spitting Image, a topical, political satire done as electronic Punch & Judy. Satire is tricky stuff to get an audience to switch on to. To begin with, you have to make assumptions about how nerdily au fait they already are about politics, how much they’re going to get. It’s also a genre that, at its best, is cruel, wholly unfair, relentlessly vicious, partisan and increasingly brutal as it scents blood. But, when it comes to its audience, it has to sing to the choir. It needs you to already agree with its objectives. Satire is not reasoned debate, it’s not point-scoring. Nobody’s mind was ever changed by a satire. Its purpose is to add flint and venom to an already held prejudice. And it takes time to find like-minded souls and to settle its level of sophistication.

Given those excuses, Headcases still has a long way to go, all of it uphill. It just is satire no-mates. The computer graphics are boring, clumsy and cack-handed, and the characters don’t look like who they’re supposed to be. I had no idea who a third of the characters were. Gordon Brown doesn’t look like anybody you’ve ever seen before and doesn’t sound remotely familiar. And if you can’t get the prime minister right, it’s going to be tricky. The genius of Spitting Image was Fluck and Law’s puppets. Before they’d even opened their mouths, they were mortally wounding.

The spitting Hattersley, the slug Kenneth Baker, the two Davids. It would have been better to have gone for South Park-style cutouts than these softly nervous, unimaginative, courtroom-lite likenesses. Then there’s the content. For all its clan of credited writers, the laugh-to-gag ratio was about what you’d expect from a Robert Mugabe speech. Mostly, we watched with a strained smile, willing it to come up with something properly shocking and unfairly cruel. But it didn’t happen. The setups were either generic old jokes or too obvious to be going anywhere. No politician is going to dread Sunday evenings or walking into the office on Monday morning. Neither are they going to be asking for stills to frame in their loos. The producers seem to have forgotten or failed to understand that the root and drive of satire isn’t humour but anger; that comedy is the bow, fury the arrow.

It would be nice, just once, to be able to say something positive about Louis Theroux that wasn’t, “He’s got a talented brother.” If you’re a television critic, you can’t help bumping into him in your living room occasionally. And it’s wearying, always ignoring him and turning over. So I watched Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday (Sunday, BBC2) with, if not high hopes, then knee-high hopes. This is a story I’ve done myself in print. How would Louis tackle white Africans breeding game to be shot by white Americans with crossbows? Within two minutes, it was déjà vu, but without that French sense of mystery and expectation. Louis has one programme format that fits all scenarios. If it doesn’t fit them, they get it anyway. He is still, after all these years, doing that faux-geek business, the whispered questions, the conspiratorial chumminess, the fake squeamishness, the ingenuous slowness, the winking confusion. It doesn’t matter if he’s talking to fundamentalist Christians, porn stars or Paul Daniels, the routine is identical, the outcome the same. The world is really just there to be his straight man, the feed for his cowardly, retrospectively edited mockery.

The denouement of this show was: would he or wouldn’t he shoot a warthog? Of course he wouldn’t. Not doing it, whatever it is, is Louis’s leitmotif. In this instance, he was so set on the rails of his limited shtick, he missed the real story roaring in his face: the truly endangered and threatened species here were the Afrikaners, the unlovable but grudgingly admirable farmers. The breeding and ritualised murder of wild animals that were once plentiful and free but are now caged and culled is the perfect metaphor for their own species and lives. They were such a rich and interesting subject, but he was only interested in bagging as many of them as he could, not realising how very, very like the fat American hunters he was. They, too, just wanted big dumb heads to hang on their walls.

Clowns (Monday, BBC2) is one of those programmes that made you think: “Why on earth has no one made this programme before?” Everyone who is a parent or was ever a child, which pretty much covers the audience, knows about these slightly desperate, borderline spooky men who turn up at kiddies’ parties. Their lives were as weirdly furious and thwarted as you’d always expected. But they were also very strange and touching and quietly funny in an unslapstick way. There are few things that can be as humiliating, exhausting, unrewarding and pitifully life-destroying as being an indoor clown. The cruellest curse of an adult life is never, ever being taken seriously. This film blissfully and tenderly did do that, and if Peter Fincham, who’s just taken over at ITV, isn’t at this very moment commissioning a pilot for a sitcom about three children’s entertainers, then he wasn’t paying attention.