Selling the world

Weekend's TV reviewed: The South Bank Show; Mad Men; The Comedy Map of Britain; Love Soup; Match of the Day Live; Wild China

It’s ITV1 and the two men on the screen are discussing Aristotle and the essays of Montaigne. So yes, it can only be The South Bank Show. Quite how Melvyn Bragg gets away with bucking television trends so heroically, I’m still not sure. Nonetheless, when the result is as good as it was here, your main reaction has to be one of simple gratitude. Bragg was interviewing Gore Vidal, something he did 20 years ago, when he was in his 40s and Vidal was in his 60s. We saw a clip of them as they were. Now Bragg is in his 60s, and Vidal is 82, returning to America after four decades in Italy for what he calls, with characteristic lack of euphemism, “the hospital years”.

Now the last survivor of that generation of great American writers who’d fought in the Second World War (the others included Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut), Vidal did need the odd moment last night to gather his thoughts. Yet, once he had, his fondness and talent for a good scrap proved as stirring as ever. In the end, the effect was like seeing an old prize-fighter who may not be as fast as he used to be, but who can still land a punch with the best of them. Vidal’s targets were wide-ranging – from John Updike to the entire history of Christianity.

After a sticky start in which Bragg pretended to be amused by the old story of Madame de Gaulle and her mispronunciation of the word happiness, Vidal, now 82, hit some sort of aphoristic stride. He confessed that after years of quoting Aristotle he had “broken down and read him”, noted that while he seldom met a boring six-year-old he had never met an interesting 16-year-old and concluded in relation to the Bush years: “In a normal republic I would have probably raised an army and overthrown the Government but we don't do anything so vulgar these days.” Naturally, George W Bush got it in the neck for being, among other things, “literally demented”. But the President’s policy of “perpetual war for perpetual peace” was also placed in its long-standing historical context, which meant an equally thorough pounding for Harry Truman and John F Kennedy. And with that, it was on to homosexuality. Vidal’s novel 'The City and the Pillar' may have shocked even liberal Americans with its suggestion of what their boys really got up to in the army. (“Did you know all hell would break loose?” wondered Bragg last night. “Oh yes,” replied Vidal with some relish.) Nevertheless, he has no time at all for the gay movement – founded, as he sees it, by “some poor little queens” who’ve fallen for the pernicious idea that they’re a separate race.

For Vidal fans, all of this will certainly have had the air of a greatest hits collection, complete with the effortlessly patrician delivery and the epic name-dropping. (Asked about Robert Kennedy, Vidal began his answer, “Jack was very funny about Bobby…”) Needless to say, though, it was none the worse for that – not least because the career-spanning aspect reminded us that even Vidal’s wildest polemics have often turned out to be true. And anyway, think how you’d feel if you went to see The Rolling Stones and they didn’t play their most famous riffs. So while Bragg has hardly changed over those 20 years, Vidal has grown more frail but ever more imperious. He settled in his chair and tried to project his aphorisms stealthily, so they would go unnoticed. But Bragg noticed them. It was a good piece of theatre. I wonder if they'll have another crack at it in 10 years' time. We can but hope.

The attractions of Mad Men (BBC4) are obvious after about five minutes - it's a drama set in the early 1960s, when the world was simpler and less screwed up. But hang on a minute - wasn't it more screwed up? In this episode, there's an office party, and one of the male characters pins a woman down and pulls her skirt up to have a look at her knickers. That's pretty screwed up, isn't it? But then she gets up and they go off, arm in arm. They are smiling. And maybe that's even more screwed up. It's 1963, and the mad men are the ad men of Madison Avenue, in New York. The women are their wives and secretaries. I wondered: why are the women so sexy? Why are they so much sexier than the women in Desperate Housewives and Lost? It's because they conform to the dress codes of their time. They're not allowed to expose much flesh, so they have to be actually sexy instead. Guys are smart, in suits and ties, so a tie at half-mast, or a slouchy walk, actually tells you something. People smoke all the time, which means they don't smoke so hungrily. And they drink all the time, too. When one guy offers his wife a drink, and she turns it down, you know there's a serious problem. I was familiar with these people immediately - I felt the steady hand of American drama.

In last night's episode, everybody hung around in the office to watch the results of the Kennedy/Nixon election battle, a contest that we know finally went Kennedy's way but which everybody at the time expected would go the other way. The ad men want Nixon to win, because they sense a kinship with him. He's crooked. But then it turns out Kennedy is crooked, too - his father bought him a lot of votes. Since election graphics at the time consisted of a man in a studio chalking numbers on a blackboard the election coverage soon came second to eating into the company's liquor reserves and running bets on what coloured panties the secretaries are wearing. When the young woman who has the key to the hospitality cupboard revealed that they are well stocked with crme de menthe, an enterprising account man fills the water cooler with the green stuff and the party really lifts off. I can't tell you how much I hope that someone somewhere once did this. If not, and you can bear to drink crme de menthe, then it may be time for a bit of emulative behaviour. I recommend that you get signed consent before attempting any kind of underwear inspection though.

As the election result starts to become clear, frowns break out on these guys' faces. They are beginning to learn something about the world - that it really can be bought and sold - and we are shown this dawning with a lovely delicacy, as the all-night party turns sour. Meanwhile, the office furniture looks great - the sort of stuff rich people have in their houses these days. Is my sense of nostalgia being manipulated? I don't care. I love it. Troubled Don, the under-boss of the agency and the main guy, was under pressure. Creepy Pete, the ambitious young blade, had discovered that Don's whole life is a lie. He's actually not Don Draper at all, but somebody completely different. I bought this straight away - talk about the steady hand of American drama. Anyway, the point is that these guys are ad men - it's not just Don who's living a lie, it's everybody. They actually believe that being insanely materialistic is good for you. Watching this, you keep thinking: if the world is a worse place, 45 years on, it's these guys' fault.

In the circumstances, the makers of BBC2’s The Comedy Map of Britain could surely get away with a bog-standard anthology of familiar anecdotes and clips. Instead, there’s an imaginatively wide choice of subjects – which in Saturday’s East Anglian episode ranged from Jim Davidson to PG Wodehouse by way of Arthur Smith. Meanwhile, the archive material is, it turns out, carefully selected to illustrate the specific points being made. The choice of interviewees is pretty imaginative too. On Saturday, we met both Dudley Moore’s music tutor (oddly enough called Peter Cork) and Lee Evans’s dry-cleaner, who shared the secrets of removing the man’s famously abundant sweat. There was a nice schoolmasterly turn from Frank Halford, a teacher who’d only ever given full marks for English composition to one pupil: Douglas Adams in 1961. I also enjoyed the city councillor who felt that I’m Alan Partridge “missed a huge opportunity to promote Norwich”.

Alice of Love Soup (BBC One) would be the most irritatingly self-absorbed woman on television - perhaps she is to some people - were it not for some mitigating factors. The first is that she is played by Tamsin Greig, a subtle actor who can do sympathetic and empathetic but won't do pathetic. There is a grace and optimism to her performance even in her character's lowest moments, some of which were plumbed on Saturday in this last episode of the second series. My next plea of mitigation is that at her most dejected, Alice wants to help others, even Cleo and Milly, her co-workers on the perfume counter who have livelier sex lives than she, but not more successful ones. This week she found their male equivalents in a pair of jobbing builders arguing away at the old question of what a woman really means when she says no to your suggestion that you put your hand down her jeans. Forgetting the jigsaw principle of attraction, she was surprised when she brought them together and each party was immediately drawn to the one who wasn't like them at all.

Finally, there is something of the philosopher about Alice - not to the extent of her friend who broke up with a guy when she discovered he was a 16th-century determinist, but to the extent of wondering, as she crosses a road, what is it all about. She argues from the particular (herself) to the general (the entire Universe). On Saturday she was rewarded by a metaphysical resolution to her angst. The ghost of her lover-who-might-have-been, the TV writer Gil who died before they could actually meet, appeared and leant next to her across a country gate. Love Soup is an odder love story than it looks. The writer David Renwick's interest in disability might need examining for instance. Last week we had a TV commissioner with no arms (well at least she couldn't say, “On the one hand we like it, on the other...”). This week a middle-aged neighbour turned out to house a Barbie doll of a wife, perfect in every way except she was paralysed from the nostrils down. The black comedy cuts through the whimsy every time. I don't believe any of its specifics, but, generally, Love Soup is on to something.

The cup final coverage (Match of the Day Live, BBC1) started at lunchtime on Saturday. In the old days, it started just after breakfast. Of course, in the old days, this was football's biggest moment. Now it's a strange entity - not quite as important as a big game in the Premiership, but nevertheless an institution, like the Boat Race or the Varsity Match. This year, the final was between Portsmouth, the eighth-best team in the league, and Cardiff, who are in a lower division altogether; one got the feeling that the best teams had not been trying very hard. Now that you have to pay to watch the Premiership, and much of the Champions League - while you can see the FA cup for free, on terrestrial television - nobody takes it quite so seriously. For John Motson, the commentator, it was almost certainly the last cup final, because ITV has next year's contract. I sat there, listening to Motty's tones, trying to feel some of the old excitement. But I couldn't - not quite. It was a pretty good match, too. I just wish it had felt like a more important one.

Despite the fact that it is a medium that puts a premium on watching, most television is irredeemably literary in its approach. Even sporting events, which you might take as an epitome of dumb spectacle, are busily reworked into dramas by the commentary, as if plot and narrative sequence are indispensable elements of any worthwhile transmission. Natural-history programmes are no exception to this rule, artfully (even deceitfully) often stitching the footage together so that a kind of furry soap results. But Wild China, BBC2's new series, is about as purely spectacular as television is ever likely to get. Its model is not a serial drama or a children's story, but a picture book, and while it comes with a commentary it will be no more necessary to most consumers than the essays are in the National Geographic magazine.

What a picture book it is though, a reminder that wildlife programmes are often likely to provoke an combination of rapture and boredom. Rapture because the images are ravishing and unexpected; boring because there's no particular reason why one should follow another. The page turns and another dazzling full-page illustration is revealed to view, and then another, and then another. Look, here's the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, dancing along a branch in what looks like a pair of ostrich-feather bloomers, its lips smeared a bright pink, like a child that's got at mummy's lipstick. And here's a male Temminck's tragopan, flashing a female from behind a rock with his vivid bib of blue and magenta, a West Ham United football shirt sponsored by his own biological exuberance. Enough, move on, here's a bamboo bat, no bigger than a bumble bee and sharing its home inside a bamboo plant with a squirming cluster of its close relatives.

What links these wonders is not a particular line of argument but a geographical location, the mountains of Yunnan, where climate and geology conspire to create a tropical forest where there really shouldn't be one. And it's absolutely stuffed with creatures marvellously and sometimes self-defeatingly adapted to its particular conditions. The bamboo rat, for example, has worked out a way to tug the younger shoots underground into its burrows, so that if you're in the right place at the right time you'll see the foliage shrinking back into the earth (I suspect the film-makers, not being in quite the right place at the right time, used an offscreen bamboo wrangler). No creature though is as startling in its ingenuity as a mammal indigenous to these parts, not to mention virtually every other habitat on the planet. The bamboo rat can do one thing with bamboo eat it but the local villagers can do hundreds of things with it, including eating it in a piquant Yunnanese sauce and then using it as a pipe for a post-meal smoke. Or, most brilliantly, as a fishing rod for hornets. The Dai people bait a bamboo stick with a locust and use it to distract a hornet, while they tie a small flag of white feather around its abdomen. This then allows them to trail the insect back through the forest to its nest, which can be smoked and broken open for a snack of fresh hornet larvae. They have an ingenious solution to the awkwardness of the local terrain, too, zipping across swollen river gorges on inclined cables, with their livestock dangling beneath them, a set of images that were here edited into a lovely aerial ballet. I have a feeling that the heartland demographic for wildlife documentaries gets a bit restive when the camera cuts away from the flora and fauna to dwell on the humans that live among them, but I have to say they're my favourite animals.