Campaign for change

Last night's TV reviewed: News at Ten; Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change; The Apprentice; Escape from Alcatraz: The True Story; Those Were the Days

Tuesday's News at Ten (ITV1) led on the McCanns and how they felt last August when they were named aguidos in the investigation into the disappearance of their daughter. We already knew that the McCanns were aguidos, of course, so the news - the biggest story of the day according to Sir Trevor and the team, bigger than petrol prices, or the housing market, or Austria, or Ken v Boris - was that Kate McCann says she felt "angry" and Jerry found it "surreal" when they became people of interest to the inquiry. Bong: Kate McCann was angry last summer. Bong: petrol's £5 a gallon. Bong: the horrid Austrian man is definitely both father and grandfather to lots of kids. Kate had revealed her anger in a new documentary to be shown the following evening. So Sir Trevor's top story was essentially a trailer for another show: the main news tonight on ITV1 is that there's another programme on ITV1 tomorrow. I think that's shocking. And they wonder why twice as many people watch the BBC News at 10 (which inexplicably missed the McCann scoop and went with the mortgage squeeze).

Anyway, what about the documentary itself, last night's Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change (ITV1)? Well, there's a clue in its awkward title. It felt like two films, a compromise between what the film-makers and the McCanns wanted. This is speculation, but I imagine that Madeleine: One Year On is what the film-makers wanted to make, a documentary in which the McCanns spoke openly and candidly about their past year, hopefully with some sensational and newsworthy nuggets. Which they got, but as part of the deal they also got the film the McCanns wanted, about their campaign for a European equivalent of the Amber Alert in America, which allows for the rapid dissemination of information about abducted children. It was clearly the opportunity to push for that change, as well as jolt their daughter back into the minds of the general public, which had motivated them to take part in this film, trading some of their private life and their private emotions for a commodity – publicity – that they still believe might be life-saving. So anyone who wanted a forensic, minute-by-minute account of what happened on the evening of 3 May last year, or a detailed account of the rumours and half-truths that swirled around the couple in the weeks and months that followed, would have been disappointed. This wasn't for conspiracists or McCann obsessives. But anyone interested in what it felt like to be the focus of the year's most hysterical news coverage couldn't have failed to be moved and appalled in equal measure.

It made for a bloody great sprawl of a film. Two hours! That's too long for most feature films, and much too long for an interview with two quite ordinary people. Yes, they have been through the most terrible thing anyone can go through. No, that doesn't make them worth two hours, especially as anyone who's opened a newspaper in the past year pretty much knows every detail of the story already. And, in spite of what the people at ITN think, there were no new revelations. Although the people at ITV could have dealt with that. When, for example, we followed the McCanns to America to meet the father of Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old who was abducted for nine months in 2002, it might have been useful to give us some background, rather than cut to the 24th close-up of Kate McCann’s helpless, grief-crumpled face. And on the subject of missing children in general, how about some more information about those who disappear every year (one minute it was 10,000, the next 12,000).

For every chat with the couple’s cheerleaders, how about a set-to with their enemies; whoever it is in Brussels who opposes the introduction of the US-style Amber Alert system that the couple want to have introduced across Europe; the Portuguese police. There was a good bit when it emerged that leaked police statements had coincided with the day of the McCanns’ Brussels trips, a smear, the McCanns thought, but soon we were back to too many shots of empty swings and deserted playrooms, and an obsession with capturing on camera every single one of Kate McCann’s breakdowns. Of course, it's difficult to keep the visuals stimulating for this length of time. We saw the McCanns at home in Leicestershire; Kate and Jerry talking on the sofa. But you can't have two hours of sofa, so we joined them in a lot of taxis - in Portugal, London, Washington. And there were plenty of lingering tree shots - leafless, winter trees (this is a sad story, after all). And a flying heron ... eh? Why must television do compassion? Why, when faced with a captive audience, a prime-time slot and a story that could, if they’d let it, tell itself, must television turn to mush and mutate into a series of treacly Hallmark bereavement cards?

They still get a lot of letters, the McCanns, sorting them out into boxes marked "well-wishers", "ideas", "psychics" and "nutty". They also need a box marked "nasty" for messages such as the one that Gerry read out at the beginning of the film. "How can you use money given by poor people in good faith to pay your mortgage on your mansion? You fucking thieving bastards. Your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance. Shame on you. I curse you and your family to suffer forever. Cursed Christmas. If you had any shame, you would accept full responsibility for your daughter's disappearance and give all the money back. You are scum." This heart-warming expression of support had been written inside a Christmas card. The Daily Express, by contrast, chose to print its hate mail on its own front page, confident that there were enough readers out there who would prefer infanticide to unresolved mystery – or to no McCann story at all. And all the time, the McCanns themselves live a life horribly suspended between what might have been and what could happen next, between "if only" and "maybe".

It's a "quasi-real" existence, Gerry McCann explained, haunted by the child who isn't there. "With three kids, there's always lots of washing," Kate McCann said, explaining that routine chores sometimes offered a distraction, and forgetting, even as she spoke, that she now has less washing to do. And the suspended uncertainty must be far worse than grief, since it has every agony grief can command without its promise of eventual parole. "There are a host of scenarios under which your child could be alive," the head of America's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said, trying to reassure them. But virtually none that a parent could bear to dwell on without screaming, you thought. The McCanns remain practised at the rhetoric of confidence – the insistence that one day she will return – but even they can't keep it up perpetually. "We need to know," said Kate. "The thought of living like this for another 40 years isn't exactly a happy prospect."

The film’s director, Emma Loach, the daughter of Ken and seemingly one of the more professionally compassionate people working in the industry, answered questions at the preview screening wearing the kind of furrowed brow that she might have swiped off the actress Emma Thompson in empathic mode. Loach let it be known that, as a parent herself, she felt the McCanns’ pain. But just in case the audience didn’t, one presumes, she had decided to overlay the entire two hours with Mentorn’s answer to Philip Glass. As we watched poor Kate McCann breaking down again and again in front of the camera, the piano went berzerk. This Is Moving, it told us not altogether implicitly, lest a year’s worth of 24-hour Maddie news coverage had partially eroded our capacity to feel. Which it has, of course. But is an orchestra the solution? The music was oppressive - the same four cello notes, again and again. A cello always signifies sorrow. It was annoying at first; after two hours, it was maddening.

Journalists and commissioning editors like round-figure anniversaries, which is why, nearly one year on from Madeleine McCann's abduction, ITV1 cleared two hours of its prime-time schedule for a programme about the worst 12 months in her parents' life. Yet, one of the more piercing elements of the programme was the reminder that for Kate McCann there are no moments that aren't commemorative. "Every minute, every hour, is time without Madeleine," she said, recalling the day after she'd discovered her daughter had been taken. "That Friday, I was watching the clock in the police station... so, that's so many hours, that's so many hours, and then it's 24 hours, and you're back to another dark, cold night." And she's been assailed by other anniversaries since, too, marking off the calendar with straws to clutch at. "I remember in the early days, someone saying a little boy had been taken, he was returned at 17 days, and, you know, it seemed like a lifetime... but then we went past that, and then I can remember Sabine Dardenne, I think she was 80 days, and we went past that... but I think the one that's kind of kept me going really was Elizabeth Smart... it was 278 days for her, and it's 278 days for us tomorrow..." At which point, the number caught in her throat and she couldn't carry on. Counting how many days have passed isn't just a matter of editorial scheduling for her: it's a life sentence.

What, perhaps inadvertently, came out of this film was a worrying portrait of a woman so obviously poleaxed by grief that, a year on, she is no closer either to finding out what happened to her eldest daughter or resolving in her mind the events of last May. What she is really doing is falling apart, but too much gloop from the director turned the McCanns’ terrible situation into a guilt trip that made me want to watch The Apprentice instead.

Speaking of which, there’s been some grumbling that this series of The Apprentice (BBC1) has gone down the Big Brother route by choosing contestants who handily double as caricatures. In theory, of course, this is a Bad Thing – but I can’t pretend the result hasn’t been fun. Last night, for example, it was soon clear that whichever team lost, we were in for some highly entertaining hubris. Leading Alpha was Michael Sophocles whose claim that “there isn’t anyone I wouldn’t screw over to win” was delivered in tones of immense pride (rather than say, shame). Even so, he was effortlessly trumped in the weird self-belief stakes by Kevin Shaw, the captain of Renaissance. “As a leader I inspire devotion,” said Kevin inaccurately. He was also keen for us to understand that he hadn’t wasted his youth enjoying himself. After getting his first mortgage at 20, he’s now set his sights on something slightly more ambitious: “to be the most successful businessman the world has ever seen by the age of 40”. Sad to report, the consensus in the house is that Kevin is suffering from Short Man Syndrome.

Last night’s task was to invent a new occasion for greeting cards, and then design them. I must say Alpha’s idea for a Singles’ Day on February 13 seemed quite promising to me – even if they did spend three hours discussing where to put the apostrophe. Unfortunately, the trade didn’t agree. The good news for Alpha, though, was that the competition was hopeless. Renaissance’s plan was for a Love the Planet week, during which we’d all send cards to other people telling them off for their irresponsible use of the Earth’s resources. Naturally, Kevin elected to do the pitches himself and, naturally, he didn’t do them very well. Instead, he began to confuse the fate of the global environment with whether or not anybody bought his cards – which, on the whole, they didn’t. “If that’s the attitude everybody takes,” he lamented after his first failure, “we’re not going to save any planet.” The only problem last night, then, was that there wasn’t much tension about who’d be fired. Still, the final showdown did contain one surprise. Before dispatching Kevin, Sir Alan Sugar came up with a card idea of his own that was even worse. Admittedly I’m no entrepreneur – but I really can’t see a huge market for cards saying, “Sorry Your Beautiful 11-Year-Old Child Got Shot in the Head by a Hoodie”.

In broader terms, if I have one criticism, it's the lack of imagination in the challenges. Last week it was ice-cream, this week it was greeting cards; I just feel I've seen it all before. Selling ice-cream around London isn't so different from selling flowers around London, or fruit and veg, or coffee, or fish. A greeting card isn't so different from a calendar, or a billboard. It's the same old process: idea-design-product-sell. Surely, with a bit of thinking outside the box, or whatever it is these people do, they could come up with something different. Ah, but look - next week, they're off to the souk in Marrakech: that's more like it. Maybe their task will be to source large quantities of hashish, which they'll have to smuggle into Britain and sell on the streets of London. Claire won't make it out of Morocco: she'll be caught, there'll be a spin-off - part Bad Girls, part Midnight Express. Yes, I think that would work.

A new genre is born on Five: the historical documentary meets that part in Blue Peter when they make things from loo rolls. Raincoats in this version. In Escape from Alcatraz: The True Story, re-enactment specialists were breaking out of the prison, again. This was 1962, three prisoners had slipped away from “the escape-proof rock”. Then suddenly it was 2008, and a carpenter in wrap-around shades was glueing together raincoats in his shed. The voice-over explained: “We build a raft like the one the prisoners made to cross the treacherous waters. Would three coastguards succeed with this makeshift raft or would the frigid waters get the better of them?” We were almost on tenterhooks. We went back in time: “The convicts’ code of silence descended like a San Francisco fog.” But then 15 minutes later came the crushing news: “Unfortunately the raft has lasted only about ten seconds. The raft is little more than a flotation aid.” Cut to shot of three coastguards almost drowned in ridiculous Channel Five jape.

Needless to say “Restrained” and “charming” aren’t adjectives that apply to many documentaries on digital channels – but they do to ITV3’s Those Were the Days. The series takes celebrated events, and finds out what a fairly arbitrary selection of people were doing when they happened. In yesterday’s episode, the event was the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

While never spelling it out directly, the programme did confirm my own memory of the Royal Wedding: that it caused a distinct division along gender lines, with the men failing to share the excitement of their womenfolk. Last night, we met a gang of Liverpool mums who’d headed to London for the occasion. The blokes were represented by Dave and Steve, who’d gone fishing. Happily, the programme’s charm didn’t ever turn into cosiness. (We were reminded that in Toxteth, the eve of the big day was marked by riots.) Best of all, the makers didn’t apply any unnecessary hindsight to the wedding itself – except for mischievously including, without further comment, a BBC clip of the couple in their post-wedding carriage. “The escort,” we heard, “is under the command of Lt-Col Andrew Parker Bowles. Last year, Charles and Lady Diana stayed with him and his wife Camilla in Wiltshire – so they’re among friends.”