Life's a beach and then you die

Last night's TV reviewed: Out of the Blue; Age of Terror; Holby City; Our Daily Bread; Scallywagga; Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts

BBC1 must have been gutted when Neighbours ran away with the man next door, just because he had more money to throw around. After all, it was the BBC that had launched Neighbours' British career, way back in 1986, and the BBC that had stayed true to it ever since. And, suddenly, just after lunchtime every day, it had to look mournfully over the fence and see Neighbours displaying its charms for Five instead. When a long-running relationship ends messily like this, there are really only two courses of action for the spurned party. Either go out and look for an identical replacement, or move heaven and earth to find something more youthful and more attractive, as a way of getting your own back. And since Five already owned the rights to the other established Aussie low-lather soap, Home and Away, the BBC had little choice but to do the latter. Out of the Blue, a co-production with an Australian television company, is a grow-your-own affair, set on Sydney's Manly beach and already commissioned for 135 episodes.

And it's at this point that the metaphor won't quite work any more. Because whereas novelty and lust tend to go together in human relationships, mating an audience with a brand-new soap faces exactly the opposite problem. This is a partnership that typically starts out with mild curiosity or indifference and only builds to a raging infatuation after weeks or even months have passed. Cannily, the makers of Out of the Blue have decided to help viewers through that initial, awkward getting-to-know-you stretch with an instant narrative hook. "What I never could have imagined," said Gabby, shortly after introducing us to a variety pack of tousled twentysomethings gathering for a school reunion, "was that in less than 48 hours our lives would be ripped apart again because one of us would be dead and someone close to us, maybe even one of us, would be the killer."

It may be that I'm not the natural target audience for this kind of thing, because I found myself hoping that the killer might offer a two-for-one deal, so perkily attractive and effervescent are the cast members. This being a reunion, there was an alibi for a certain amount of squealing and hugging, and the scriptwriters made the most of it, as well as chucking in a bit of minor-key tension over the arrival of old flames who had never been fully extinguished. That and writing lines such this, delivered after light-relief klutz Addo asked his brother why he covered up the fact that he'd been out all night. "Oh, well, you're my brother, you've been away in Queensland for the last five months, and now you're back and we're sharing a room... I'm just trying to bond with you." Smooth... I doubt there was a viewer out there who realised they'd been fed a back story.

The received opinion about Neighbours – that the only time it features anything gritty is when someone forgets to rinse their feet after coming back from the beach – isn't entirely accurate, but Out of the Blue is clearly aiming to sell itself as a much darker kind of proxy sunshine. Along with the feel-good, white-teeth ensemble joshing, there are hints of more sinister storylines. Tess had only just met her mother-in-law and already she'd found a wad of money and a handgun in the tea caddy by the kitchen sink. Addo had narrowly escaped being beaten up by underworld heavies. And I would have high hopes of Jason making a surprise appearance at some point, since his body was never found after going overboard from the Manly ferry years earlier, an incident that put something of a crimp in a previous party night and has yet to be fully explained. No, that wasn't him floating in face down on the dawn tide; that was Philip, an ex-alcoholic who helpfully had a furious row with several characters in the presence of numerous witnesses. And if the audience stick around long enough to find out who killed him – and get hooked on milder cliffhangers in the meantime – he won't have died in vain.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou

art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.

This always makes me think of Jane Asher. Last night she was shimmering, glassy, cool, translucent and red-haired, round Holby City (BBC1). It is as well to have a bit of Milton up your sleeve when watching the long-running Casualty spin-off, because without something to fill in the longueurs when you hit a "filler" episode like last night's, it becomes almost unendurable.

This week, Asher's Lady Byrne was trying to find a nurse both comely and compassionate enough to appear in a photograph accompanying an article in Nursing Weekly about Bristol's most overstaffed and understretched general hospital. This proved tricky. Nurse Jackson was desperate for the job, but pouted so strenuously for the camera that the resulting photographs looked as if they should be lining a telephone booth. Staff nurse Tyson was too busy being ping-ponged away by concerned colleagues from anywhere she might bump into former squeeze Abra "I Do Keep Doing Her Wrong" Durant (Adrian Edmondson), who had turned up drunk and dislocated in the car park. And Nurse Anderson was tied up with trying to find money to send home to her family, fending off a jealous boyfriend and touching senior doctors inappropriately.

Maria seemed to be the only one seeing any patients. She encouraged Shirley, a woman impaled on knitting needles, to stand up to the vicar who kept giving her too much ecclesiastical admin, and was rewarded for her devotion to duty by being asked out on a date by said vicar. He was a nice man, after all, you see! He had been deliberately overloading Shirley to provoke her, because she had become too dependent on him after her husband died. This is a level of plot sophistication that would disgrace a Bunty picture story, but onward, brave - and/or catatonic - viewer, onward.

Maria also looked in from time to time on Jamie (whose recently replaced aortic valve was coming loose) and his girlfriend Emma, who was suffering from a terrible case of galloping cliche, a nasty disease that involves buttonholing random members of staff as they go by and spewing great gouts of inanity over them. "The crazy thing is, I love the big git," she said, although absolutely nobody had expressed the slightest interest in her emotional attachments. "Sometimes I wonder whether he takes anything seriously. Least of all me." My dear girl, I am inches away from injecting you in the neck with a toxic dose of Thorazine, and I've only been around you a few minutes. You are lucky Jamie has found a way to detach himself from the situation (although his heart valves do seem to be taking the approach a little too literally.)

Anyway. In the end, Nurse Anderson gets the job because Robert Powell has become avuncular since Hannay and notices that she needs the money. More next week, and doubtless - yet inexplicably - for years to come.

One of the effects of Peter Taylor's edge-of-the-seat Age of Terror (BBC Two) is to remind you how remorseless the 24-hours news agenda is: big events lost in the backwash of the next day and next day after that's big events. Somewhere in the ether, I'd forgotten/misplaced the hijack of a plane scheduled to fly from Algiers to Paris on Christmas Eve, 1994. Taylor and his team reconstructed elements of the hijack and collated the gripping testimonies of passengers on the aircraft, the co-pilot, a steward and stewardess, and a couple of French secret service operatives, to retell the trajectory of events. Last night's story also benefited from the extraordinary advantage of archive film of the final shootout, including a barely credible moment when a hijacker's bullet hit the gun barrel of a French special forces man, somersaulting him backwards down the aircraft's steps.

Age of Terror combines the best of broadcast journalism with the precision of short-story telling: each programme is tight, revealing and colourful. “The fate of the French capital hangs in the balance,” intoned presenter Peter Taylor, who’s possibly better at the sleuthing aspect of journalism than the writing part. “Four hijackers are about to vent their fury on France.” Luckily, Taylor’s material is generally so strong that even his most solemn clichés turn out to be true, and so it proved again here. The story that followed – or, in Taylor-speak, “the drama that unfolded” – was both riveting and historically resonant. As the Air France plane stood on the tarmac at Algiers airport, four men with Kalashnikovs got on. The plane had 220 passengers and 11 crew. Jean-Paul Borderie, the co-pilot, saw sticks of dynamite in one of the men's pockets. Then one of them announced: “We are the soldiers of mercy. Allah has selected us to fight for him.”

They soon identified one passenger as an Algerian policeman (and so a collaborator) and, once he’d begged for his life, shot him in the head. They then forced the female passengers to cover their heads with scarves. Roland Martins, a GIGN (French security service) officer, was about to spend Christmas with his wife when the call came through about the hijack. Algeria's security service, the “Ninjas”, lay in wait around the plane, which alarmed the passengers even more. They thought they would be killed in a firefight between their captors and would-be saviours. A second man was killed, then 63 Algerian passengers freed.

The human drama that we rarely hear, as the headlines from these events bellow all around, was brilliantly told. One of the flight crew, Christophe Morin, passed a note to a passenger, Zahida Kakachi, who he guessed might be freed, to pass to his parents to say that he was thinking of them. The leader of the group was unmoved by his mother's pleas to give himself up: “I love God more than you and we shall see each other again in Paradise.” As night fell, one of the hijackers recited prayers, adding to the sense of claustrophobia for Morin; Kakachi remembered the silvery light of the moon on the tarmac. Cristophe said to a hijacker that if he was murdered, he would want his killer to look him in the eye. Another passenger was killed; another flight attendant recalled stepping over the dead bodies to collect food trays being bussed in from the terminal.

Somewhat mysteriously given that this was a flight to Paris, their only demand was to fly to Paris. After some stalling tactics from the Algerian authorities, the plane took off on early Boxing Day, by which time two important developments had taken place. First, there was no longer enough fuel for a direct flight. Second, a French mole among the Algerian Islamists had revealed the plan was to crash the aircraft into the heart of the city. Seven years before 9/11, Taylor hardly needed to contextualised events with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Leonard Cohen could've intoned, the soldiers of mercy are not departed or gone.

So it was then that the plane landed in Marseilles for refuelling. Here, after the control tower successfully played for time, Martins and his colleagues stormed the plane. Amazingly, none of the passengers died in the ensuing gun battle. Morin lay on the floor and imagined he had been shot. Borderie jumped from the cockpit. The terrorists were killed. Kakachi, whenever she sees footage of 9/11, imagines that it is her hijacked plane hitting the centre of Paris. The one component missing was the (dead) terrorists. Martins said he saw the last one to hold out against the GIGN as a “warrior”.

The mission lasted 20 minutes – which wasn’t much shorter than it took Taylor to tell us about it, with his usual deft use of eye-witnesses and archive footage. Even so, I was left with that slight feeling of frustration which the whole series has created. By concentrating on one incident in such admittedly impressive detail, Taylor once again had too little time for the wider context – which in this case meant the apparent lack of consequences for the fight against terror. At the end, we were simply left wondering what happened to the knowledge that Islamists had planned to turn planes into missiles – and to the tactic of using moles. Of course, had the series been called 'Four Terrorist Atrocities', such frustration probably wouldn’t be there. As things stand, however, I still think we’re within our rights to expect a history that joins up the dots a bit more.

The universally hailed Our Daily Bread (More4) exposed the ugly truth of industrial food production, we were promised. Nonsense. It was a gorgeously mounted, damning photography project. We went inside polytunnels, fields and large buildings, but without narration this heavily stylised film told us nothing new about our era of overfarmed, overmechanised mass production.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's film recalled the beautiful, though menacing, panoramas of office and work environments in Andreas Gursky's photographs. With only the rumble of motors, and no analysis or explanation, you were left with heavily signposted righteous indignation. More4's website even invites you to submit your “strong views on the subject” - presumably all against the production processes highlighted.

Our Daily Bread was stunning to look at but, because of its lack of inquiry, unaffecting. In pictures, it told the easiest part of the story. The harsher truth wasn't explored: we, the consumers, are just as responsible as the faceless, animal-eviscerating mega-corporations.

Now, new sketch-shows traditionally like to begin with one of their strongest jokes – which made it rather puzzling that Scallywagga (BBC3) started with a bloke in cycling gear running along, and suddenly realising he’d forgotten his bike. Before long, though, the mystery was solved: this mildly amusing idea was one of the strongest jokes.

Scallywagga is definitely put together with a lot of care and a nice sense of visual coherence. Unfortunately, it’s gone to all this trouble without getting the script right first. If it was giving a chance to some novice writers, that would be one thing. In fact, it’s written by Stuart Kenworthy whose pedigree includes Smack the Pony and Green Wing. Perhaps, rather than following his instincts, Kenworthy has tried too hard here to give BBC3 what he thinks they want. (And, needless to say, he might be right.) Certainly, there’s a big emphasis on youth culture, but also a reluctance to attack it with the kind of vigour that might put off the target audience. As a result, the comic punches constantly feel pulled – and what could have been some good dark laughs give way to pale smiles instead.

In the second episode of Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts (BBC3), our six young people start working in a sweatshop in Delhi to learn just what goes into making the cheap clothes they buy on the British high street. Richard is not impressed with the parlous state of the region's streets - "How fucking difficult is it to, like, stick all your rubbish into a tip or something?" - or indeed with anything else.

Because Richard was born on a council estate but now runs his own advertising business, he believes that everyone should make the effort to haul themselves out of poverty. To watch him harangue factory employee Ali (who works 15 hours a day, seven days a week and sends all his wages home to a family hundreds of miles away) about why he doesn't make the effort to go to night school, is to watch a level of ignorance in action that is virtually indistinguishable from imbecility. It might, just about, be forgivable in a teenager, but Richard is 24. By the end of three days working at the sewing machines by day and sleeping under them at night with the rest of the "filthmongers", there is a tiny glimmer of understanding ("Perhaps the opportunities don't exist? It's made me feel a bit less harsh"), but altogether it is a programme to make you weep.

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