From Russia with angst

Weekend's TV reviewed: Russia: a Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby; Wild China; Secrets of the Forbidden City

Russia: a Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby (BBC2, Sun) began in the Arctic Circle. Finding himself in a region where the summer sun never sets and the winter sun never rises, Dimbleby soon went for the first of the programme’s big metaphors. “In a way,” he told us, the Russian Arctic is like Russian history – because “the story of the country is one of extremes”. Well, as Dimbleby vividly pondered the main historical events in each place he visited, the extremes were certainly there. (Allowing the history to emerge rather haphazardly from the geography also worked fine. After all, that’s what most of us do on our travels.) Nonetheless, his opening image felt only half-true. What seemed to be missing was any period at all in which the metaphorical sun shone brightly on the people of Russia. Or on Dimbleby himself for that matter, where the pre-publicity about a tragedy of his own seemed to steep the programme in a melancholy beyond even that normally associated with the country's history.

Take that apparently laughter-filled scene in which Dimbleby was treated to a performance from the flirtatious babushkas of Karezia. Their song ended, one of the grannies embraced Dimbleby. “All my life,” she said, “I am going to remember such a handsome man clasped me to my breast. If I die it is all right now.” She had not been hugged by a man for 30 years. The women were widows, bereaved by the vodka and tobacco consumption that reduces the average Russian male's life expectancy to 58. But the moving thing was that Dimbleby seemed grateful for the affection. Later, outside the oldest bath-house in Moscow - the sort of location documentary-makers can never seem to avoid - he read from a brochure that promised the banya would provide “the health and joy of a full life of harmony and self-confidence”. Said Dimbleby, about to take a plunge that would leave a birch leaf stuck to his left buttock: “I need all of that.” A few minutes later, naked in a steam room and being whacked on the arse with birch twigs, he attempted to squeeze out another metaphor, something about feeling like the Russian people. It didn't really work and you started to suspect that the flagellation was serving the narrator rather than the programme.

While many of the more fascinating sections of last night’s episode generally took place in the parts of Russia we know less – or possibly nothing – about, there were still plenty of familiar urban set-pieces. Dimbleby spent time in Murmansk, for example, giving a quick reminder of the wartime Arctic convoys, before he showed us a statue commemorating the city’s annihilation by German bombers. In St Petersburg, we heard how thousands of slave-workers died realising Peter the Great’s dream of a Russian city to match any in Europe. Even so, Dimbleby pointed out, the grand buildings have always co-existed with “the other St Petersburg” where, under both tsars and Communists, ordinary citizens lived in squalor. And from there, he moved on to the siege of Leningrad, which killed half of its two million inhabitants.

There is, it has to be said, something rather old fashioned about this kind of programme - grand Englishman travels around, trying to make sense of a place. A bit of history, a bit of politics, a bit of awkward chat with ordinary people, the odd metaphor. There was more need for it in the olden days, when no one went anywhere themselves, so it was nice to tune in to Whicker's World or whatever, or read a travel book by Paul Theroux. Nowadays, we can and do go to these places ourselves if we want to. Half of south-west London and half of north-west England will be in Moscow next week.

Maybe there is some sibling rivalry going on here as well. David did his tour of Britain recently, so Jonathan's taking on something a bit bigger, and more challenging. I don't know how David replies. Space, I suppose. In many respects I have always thought Jonathan the lesser - if you count his father, the least - Dimbleby, a nervy on-screen presence. His heart has always been in the right place, but his tongue does not always get there in time, sometimes rendering him almost inarticulate. But yesterday, as he travelled from the northwest of the continent on the first leg of a five-part, 10,000-mile journey, he was expressive, serious and receptive.

In a book accompanying the series, he writes that he almost pulled out after breaking down in St Petersburg opera house during an aria once sung by his lover, the soprano Susan Chilcott, who had died shortly after he fell in love with her. Although by the time of the filming he was once again in a relationship (he is now remarried and a father again), depression could still ambush him. Perhaps it is why this trip through a tragic country works so well. Walking with an academic round St Petersburg, a man interrupted him with a spontaneous memory of the great Second World War siege. His starving family had, he said, exchanged his grandfather's gold watch for horse feed. Dimbleby did not have to look for such stories. Like his grief, they found him.

BBC2’s other big new series of the night was Wild China, which makes no bones about its desire for landmark status. The music is by the BBC Concert Orchestra. As the narrator, Bernard Hill announces almost everything, however unremarkable, in tones of awed disbelief. (“It’s a landscape of hills,” went one example, “but also of water!”) Luckily, it does have other landmark characteristics too – not least that virtually every shot is sumptuously beautiful, and that there’s plenty of jaw-dropping footage of rare creatures in never-before-seen action. It is, undeniably, stunning - lovely terraced paddy fields, water buffalo, swooping swallows, the dudes with the lampshades on their heads. Some of it is familiar. Cormorant fishermen, egg-carton landscapes and the little crocodiles that need to be saved before someone eats them. They say that in South China they'll eat anything with legs except a table, and anything with wings except a plane. The caves were good, too - full of bats, swifts, and lots of guano.

On a slightly more uncomfortable note, the series was made in co-operation with China’s own national broadcast service: which, if you didn’t know already, you could maybe have guessed from the programme itself. The country’s politics, for instance, were dispatched in a single non sequitur right at the start. (“We know that China faces immense social and environmental problems – but there is great beauty here too!”) This is the China that China would like the world to be looking at in the run-up to the Olympics - the good news. Perhaps the tourist board had some input, too; it certainly looks like it. The depiction of rural life often had a distinct whiff of old-school Socialist propaganda about it, as the smiling peasants worked together in harmony with each other, nature and combine harvesters. It's all lovely and washes gently over, without troubling too much; like flicking through a copy of National Geographic magazine while waiting for a six-monthly check-up.

Similarly, Secrets of the Forbidden City (Saturday, BBC Two) should have been stirring, too. The story of the Ming Emperor Yongle, who built it, had it all: murder, massacre, natural disaster and a cast of CGI-generated thousands led by eunuchs and concubines. Beijing's imperial palace is the grandest grand design of them all. Its architect, Yongle, deemed himself the Emperor of Perpetual Happiness. The distinction between him and a ray of sunshine must have been, on the contrary, all too easy for his subjects to discern.

The documentary looked marvellous - think Raise the Red Lantern,Crouching Tiger etc - but was trivialised by being told partly through an over-acting eunuch and partly by a script that tramped from cliché (“the exquisite women who warmed the emperor's bed”) to cliché (“clawed his way to the dizzy heights of power”). The narrator Cherie Lunghi told us his victims were “rent, ripped, split, torn to shreds”. Boy, hadn't her Thesaurus been thumbed.