Bill Bailey and why he loves his old rock

Bill Bailey fell in love at a young age – not with a girl, but with Stonehenge. The hirsute comedian, who, in a certain light, could be mistaken for a wizard, reveals that “my bond with the place started when I was just a youngster. I remember at that time there was a big battle at Stonehenge between the police and the hippies. It was quite a dramatic scene. There were lots of beardy, long-haired people hanging out of the back of Transit vans, smoking funny cigarettes and dancing in a silly way. Sadly, it got quite unpleasant. All the hippies were bundled into police vans, and afterwards the authorities said, ‘Right, that’s enough of that. Let’s put up a fence and keep the hippies back’. I wasn’t actually there in person – I was at home diligently doing my geography homework. But I was there in spirit, and I thought, ‘Those hippies are my kind of people’. I’ve felt an affinity with Stonehenge ever since.”

So it was Bailey’s “dream job” when the History Channel asked him to front a documentary on Stonehenge. The first episode of a new series entitled My Favourite Place, it homes in on the monument’s mystique. Nobody knows what this conglomeration of about 60 stones is for – and that’s just the way Bailey likes it, reports James Rampton

The 44-year-old – who made his name as one of the team captains in the enduringly likeable BBC Two pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks and is a rare example of a comedian who is as funny off screen as on it – is delighted that the monument can’t be rationalised. “Even as a child, I had a sense of the anarchy of Stonehenge,” he muses. “It’s a maverick, anti-Establishment monument. It’s become synonymous with alternative lifestyles and been claimed as their own by Druids and pagans. I like the fact that you can’t enclose it. You can put up railings, but Stonehenge is still there for all to see. It’s not cloistered away.

“What are the stones for? Aliens, perhaps, dropped them there and used them as a beacon, a landing platform, or a pod. The Arthurian legend is that giants brought them from Africa to Ireland as healing stones, and then Merlin carried them across the Irish Sea using some special, wizardy telekinetic skill.” Or, Bailey posits with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Stonehenge “could be one giant musical instrument, a huge windchime. That puts those nasty little bamboo ones into perspective, doesn’t it? My own theory is that it was all one massive stone at one stage, and it’s just been chiselled out by ants.”

Another proposition is that Stonehenge, which is a Unesco World Heritage Site, has significance because it lines up directly with the sunrise at the summer solstice. “Could it be a giant calendar for worshipping the midsummer sun?” asks Bailey. But, the comedian affirms with satisfaction, “one can only speculate so far. What is great is that it will always be a mystery. No one knows what really went on at that site, but Stonehenge is still there. It’s been standing there for 5,000 years – and it endures. I love the fact that after so many millennia, it remains such an enigmatic and charismatic place. I’ve got a feeling Stonehenge will always keep some of its secrets.”

In the film, Bailey digs out some of the remarkable stories surrounding this astonishing feat of prehistoric engineering that has fascinated everyone from Charles Darwin to Spinal Tap. The presenter is tickled, for instance, that in 1913 Sir Cecil Chubb gave Stonehenge as a present to his wife, having purchased it through the estate agents, Knight Frank and Rutley. “I’d love to know what the estate agent’s blurb was,” says Bailey with a smile. “For sale. Henge. Pleasant outlook. Good local travel links. Needs attention. 24 bedrooms. Would suit wizard, hermit or wild man. No chain.”

Making My Favourite Place gave the comedian the opportunity to get up close and personal with the stone circles – something that is now forbidden to the rest of us. “In the past, Stonehenge was so accessible – you could just pitch up and wander around the stones,” Bailey recalls. “But I suppose it was inevitable that one day the British Establishment bureaucracy would say, ‘This isn’t right. We need a guard rail and a gift shop. For any national monument to function properly, you need to be able to buy tea towels and key rings!”

Looking back on the project, there is just one thing Bailey would have done differently. “It was so cold, I wore a hoody. The problem is, on screen I look like an unsavoury character let loose at the monument. I appear to be the sort of person David Cameron wants to hug. It was an ill-advised fashion choice. Next time I’ll wear a three-piece suit.”

Bailey concludes that, despite the hoody, “the best thing about making this documentary was the chance to walk around Stonehenge when no one else was there. We had to get there before the official opening. It was six in the morning and it was wet and freezing, but it was so worth it. Nothing beats the feeling of having the place to yourself.”

My Favourite Place, The History Channel, 8pm/11pm, Thur May 8

Child over time

Over the past eight years, BBC1 has been conducting a unique experiment. In Child of Our Time the channel has followed 25 children from their births, and subjected them to rigorous examination. As science broadcaster and academic Professor Lord Robert Winston puts it, ‘Nobody’s done anything like this before.’

Now, with all the participants aged around eight, differences between the sexes are becoming much more apparent. The opener to the latest series looks at the influence of sex and society on the children, and the experiments that its presenter Lord Winston and his team perform reveal the remarkable extent to which boys and girls differ even at a very young age. ‘Eight is a really good stage to look at this,' Lord Winston tells Matt Warman. ‘It’s when children have a clear idea of the differences between boys and girls and have very different aspirations. We weren’t sure how well that would be delineated – but it turned out to be very well delineated indeed. I think what we are showing with a small number of kids represents a generality within children of that age.’

The tests range from studying the difference gender-targeted packaging makes to a child’s choice of soft drinks (boys are drawn to rockets, girls like pink princesses), to setting up a mock ‘shop’ in which the children dress up just as they please (ie without any parental input). The boys’ fashions (hoodies, baggy jeans) contrast sharply with the girls’ (pretty dresses, fishnet tights).

Lord Winston believes children’s gender attitudes are swayed by contemporary trends. ‘I would be hesitant to say attitudes to gender have become different over the years,’ he says. ‘But the influences have become different.’ Thus Child of Our Time cites the modern cults of waif-like models when it shows that modern boys are generally indifferent to body shape while even young girls yearn to be thin. ‘What we’re saying is that this is something we see now, and something we may need to address in our children,’ says Lord Winston. ‘Presumably their rather narrow prejudices have been sorted out by the culture in which we live. But we’re not trying to make judgements; we’re trying to observe. I think that’s the value of the programme.’

This policy of dispassionate, informed observation has allowed the series to show a remarkable development arc in the period it has covered so far. But it can also make some of the participants’ more emotional statements even more arresting because of the scientific context. When one child’s father is shown to be worryingly absent for long periods, the girl’s tears carry all the more significance because the programme has already stressed the importance of a stable home. Her mother’s suggestion that she’d be disappointed if her daughter married a man like her husband also carries troubling undertones. ‘Relationships change between parents all the time,’ says Lord Winston, ‘and obviously we knew that that would be the case when we started making the programme. After all, nearly 50 per cent of marriages break up, but we try very hard simply to be a lens. And on the whole the children that we’re seeing cope pretty well.’

It’s not, however, the children’s resilience that surprises Lord Winston most. ‘The most remarkable thing on a series like this is that all the children and all the families have stuck with it,’ he says. ‘Now we’re quite attached to each other, and I think they enjoy what we do with them – but things might be more difficult when the children reach puberty.’ Those fruitful relationships between the families and the programme-makers are formed through an unusual mix of scientific and social analysis, and Lord Winston is fiercely proud of being part of an accessible programme about science that is shown in primetime on a major channel. ‘Generally, however, I’m very disappointed with the level of science on television,’ he says. ‘The BBC has not in this respect totally filled its public service remit.’

Although he maintains that there are plenty of fine presenters, and that what science there is on television is largely well-handled, Lord Winston reserves his sternest words for BBC1. ‘The channel has tended to go for easy options like light entertainment and has forgotten that science programmes consistently had extremely high ratings,’ he says. ‘When I made The Human Body [a six-part series shown in 1998] it was watched by millions of people. It’s still cited as something that got a lot of people into science at university. Child of Our Time is now the exception – it’s on BBC1, but still brings in a lot of science. The series’s existence shows that it’s perfectly possible to be both populist and scientifically accurate.’

Child of Our Time is on BBC1 on Wednesday, 7 May at 8.00pm

A working life of pain

What does it take to forge a career leaping off tall buildings? Just a healthy fear and a childlike sense of fun, Dean Forster tells Leo Benedictus...

Dean Forster gets asked about his job so often that he has learned a routine. "It's usually five questions," he says, casually self-assured in wraparound shades as we sip coffee together in Henley-on-Thames. "Have you met anybody famous? Have you been hurt? Is the money good? How did you get into it? And ..." He falters for a moment as a cold wind whips around our faces. "... something else."

So how does he deal with it? "For years I used to shrug quite a lot and say, 'Oh, I'm embarrassed.' Then I realised that's what the job entails, and now I love it. Absolutely love it." He does not have to convince me. His pleasure at the prospect of talking about his job is unmistakable - even if some of that early bashfulness still lingers at the edges of his schoolboy smile.

The answers to the five - sorry, four - routine questions are quick to arrive. Yes, he has worked with several famous people (including Gary Oldman and Tom Cruise). His injuries, though minor, have been numerous too. "Just as a chef's going to burn himself," he shrugs, "we get battered and bruised." And at anything up to several thousand pounds a day, the money is indeed good. But if injuries or anything else prevent him from working, he is keen to point out, his income falls to zero. As for how he got into doing stunts for a living, well, he was never really into anything else.

"My family used to own a motorcycle display team called the Mohicans," he explains. "In the 60s, my uncles used to dress up as Red Indians on BSA Gold Star motorbikes and do jumps at fetes and carnivals. As soon as I could walk, they put me on a bike to do little jumps. And it progressed into other areas." From judo and gymnastics to bicycles and trampolines, if it was fast, physical or involved generally throwing yourself about, then the teenage Forster was obsessed with it.

How to make a living from his passions, however, was the thing that gave him more trouble. At first, the closest he could get was working as a lifeguard in his local sports centre, and yet he knew that this was not enough. "I sat down one day and thought, what do I really, really want to do?" he remembers. "And that was it: I really, really wanted to be a stunt performer. And from that day, that's it, that's been my whole adult life - all I wanted to do."

Which is a good thing. Without such single-minded dedication to his work, Forster probably would not have made it. There are no training courses available in the UK for aspiring stunt performers, so in order to build up his skills he had to find work. And yet he would not be able to work without joining the register of the Joint Industry Stunt Committee, which meant producing six separate sporting qualifications at national or county level and finding at least 60 days' employment as an extra in order to gain experience in front of a camera. Even then, once he was registered as a probationary stunt performer, for three years he could only work under the supervision of a coordinator.

"And having those qualifications allows you to go on the stunt register," he cautions. "But it doesn't make you a good stunt performer." For this he had to practise individual skills, on his own or with colleagues, on the job or in his spare time, while trying to impress enough people to build up contacts in the film industry. Even now he is a fully qualified stunt coordinator, the learning continues. "I can call [a rental company] and ask them for an airbag, build a tower, and then spend a day practising high falls," he suggests, by way of example. It sounds expensive. "Yes," he agrees. "But doing the high falls is good money." This is the usual equation for stunt performers, of course: the more dangerous the stunt, the more they get paid. And they get the same again each time they do it.

So how much, I wonder tentatively as we move inside to a more sheltered table, does one actually have to learn about jumping off a building on to a giant airbag? "The higher you go, the smaller that thing gets," says Forster. "You're standing there on the edge ready to jump, and your whole body and mind are going, 'Don't do this. You do this and you're going to die.' When you're looking down like that, then it does become really, really difficult. And it's never as simple as you think. [In my last high fall] there was computer animation above me, and it was going to hit me so I fly backwards. And they wanted me twisting through the air."

What stunt is he best at then? "Fire. Absolutely 100%." He picks up his phone, taps a few buttons, and holds up a picture of a man with a large gun who is wearing a bomber jacket that is engulfed in flames - a lot of flames. "That's me," he announces, bringing the image further forward for me to see. "That's my favourite." It is hard to imagine that his wife likes it much.

In fact, this immolation masterpiece was not even part of a film, he explains, but was taken by a stunt coordinator friend of his for publicity purposes. "It was the first time I'd done it," he says. "There's a lot of science involved. And you do get burned. I know a few people who've got some really bad burns. Touch wood, I haven't." He reaches out for the table top. "When I hit the deck, they said the flames were 15 feet above my head." He is wriggling in his seat with excitement. "We're still kids," he admits. "I think 90% of stuntmen are still children at heart."

But fun aside, surely he is just a little afraid when somebody is about to set him on fire? "There has to be fear, otherwise you become complacent," he says, "and if you become complacent you'll get hurt... You're not nervous the first time, because it's something different. The second time you do it, that's when you're scared, because you really know what to expect... It's not everybody's cup of tea, but it's what we do."

That glint is back in his eye. Clearly he does enjoy a bit of danger - or is proud of himself for braving it, at least. Yet everything he does, he insists, is as safe as it can be. "We're not daredevils," he says. "We take calculated risks... If somebody said to me now, 'Jump through that window.' I'd say, 'No. Do I look stupid?' With a stunt it's different, because they'll put little dents in the window, so the second I go through it it's going to explode. And I'm going to wear knee pads and arm pads to protect myself. And there aren't going to be people walking past the window - or if there are they're going to be stunt performers who know I'm coming through." I glance outside. None of the well-dressed ladies of Henley look like stunt performers.

Forster's first paid stunt was in fact very similar to the scene he has just described. It was for a "water explosion" in the film Mission: Impossible. "Tom Cruise is in a restaurant in Prague," he recalls. "He throws his chewing gum at the [aquarium], and the restaurant caves in with water, and then he runs out of the restaurant. I was sitting opposite Tom Cruise when that happened, doubling the actor he was talking to. That was my first job."

Since then, he has worked on The Fifth Element, Tomorrow Never Dies, Lost in Space, Layer Cake, Dr Who, Life on Mars and many other projects. And yet still he is waiting to try the one stunt he has always dreamed of, the one that entices him even more than fire. "My absolute ultimate," he says, getting restless in his seat again, "and I was booked to do this a few years ago - although truthfully I would have done it free of charge - would be the classic jumping off a bridge on to a steam train, and running from carriage to carriage to carriage. Actually I would probably pay to do that. But they found somebody else."

Forster's chance to run along a train may yet come, although his time is running out. At the age of 40, as is normal in his profession, he now takes more work as a coordinator and less as a performer. "I feel like I've got another 10 years of performing in me," says Forster, who keeps fit practising karate. "and then we'll see what happens then. When I'm 50 I don't really want to be knocked down by a car or fall down stairs. Not because I don't want to," he adds hastily, as if anyone might doubt his enthusiasm, "just because of all the aches and pains."

A soup of sicko behaviour

Last night's TV reviewed: Derren Brown: Trick or Treat; Peep Show

Glen is just an average guy. A spectacularly average guy: aged 40, lives in suburbia, two kids, dull job etc. Glen's life is kind of fine, but it lacks something. Enter the antichrist, aka Derren Brown. Suddenly Glen is in a lift, being thrown all over the place. It finally stops, on floor H - for Hell. And there's the antichrist with a choice of cards: trick or treat. Glen picks treat, luckily for him. And his treat is to learn everything about everything, in no time at all, using the antichrist's special methods.

One week later, at the Night of Champions pub quiz, Glen's on his own, up against the best quiz teams in the land. And he knows all this stuff, things he never knew before - George Bush's middle name, what a fight-off in fencing is called, how many of Henry VIII's offspring went on to rule the country. There is only one explanation: sorcery, witchcraft, magic, paranormal powers, whatever you want to call it. It's all further proof - if further proof was needed - that Brown really is the antichrist.

Except he's not actually a very good one, because Glen only comes second in the quiz. Still, it's spooky as hell, with the emphasis on hell. And it makes you think: if he can do that with Glen, could I learn Mandarin in a week, with Derren's help? Or how to play football like Lionel Messi? And these are all clearly treats. What are the tricks like? Maybe we'll find out next time. Scary.

Mitchell and Webb are back, doing what they do best - not That Mitchell and Webb Look, but Peep Show, which is so much funnier. I think the main reason that Peep Show is better than That Mitchell and Webb Look, apart from the whole sketch-show thing feeling a bit tired, is that TMAWL is mainly written by MAW. But they're performers, not writers. Very good performers, as we see in Peep Show, which is mainly written by other people, namely Jess Armstrong and Sam Bain, who are very good writers. It's a winning combination.

Peep Show is a treat - a sordid soup of sicko male behaviour and fabulous inappropriateness. I love it. But I’m wondering how much more of it I can take. Not that the first episode was bad. It was, as ever, excellent. But the lives of feckless flatmates Mark (David Mitchell) and Jeremy (Robert Webb) are becoming so pitiful that, sooner or later, they’re almost bound to feel like killing themselves. The episode was so dark, I had half a mind to do it myself.

When Peep Show started, five years ago, you felt you could take Mark and Jeremy’s neuroses and failures relatively lightly. Mark was in endless forlorn pursuit of Sophie (Olivia Colman), Jeremy’s god-awful band was going nowhere… But never mind – they were in their twenties. They’d get over it, grow up, settle down and live normal lives. Eventually. But now that they’re older, Mark’s ineptitude with women, and Jeremy’s ineptitude full stop, are outright depressing.

Take the ending of the first episode. Mark’s date, who he’d timidly decided was “the one”, muttered that he was a “weird guy” who she didn’t want to see again, and stalked out of the flat. Jeremy taunted Mark; Mark told Jeremy to “fuck off”. That wasn’t wry or rueful or bittersweet. That was mutual loathing. I could feel myself developing a stomach ulcer just watching it.

Perhaps the writers should have a heart, make this the last series and let Mark and Jeremy go out on a high. Or at least a bearable low. Because imagine them in another five years. Back, as they are at the start of every series, to square one: Mark still socially incompetent, Jeremy still jobless, both still single, both still stewing in their respective petty bitternesses. But aged 40. What kind of soul-squashing catastrophes will they be inflicting on themselves, and each other, in middle-age? It possibly shouldn't go on for very much longer.

Ad turns Olympic torch into shock baton

Amnesty International is launching a hard-hitting ad campaign, featuring an animated character being given electric shocks, to highlight human rights abuses in China in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The 40-second ad, one of four that will be released online ahead of this summer's Olympiad, shows an animated character receiving shocks from a Taser-like baton by Chinese security officials for holding a placard about human rights. The electro-baton is then passed on to another animated character who uses it to light the Olympic flame. The baton is then returned to an interrogation for use for torture.

Amnesty is trying to highlight the risks of peacefully protesting in China, citing the case of Ye Guozhu who protested after his house and restaurant were bulldozed to make way for Olympics construction. The ad closes with the line: "Torturing peaceful protestors does not uphold the Olympic values. Speak up now if you want human rights for China."



"Amnesty is not against the Games but we want people to know what else is happening in China - including the silencing of critics and peaceful protesters - and to join our campaign for urgent human rights reform," said Tim Hancock, UK campaigns director.

Amnesty has set up a website which enables people to send campaigning letters and emails, share content and start their own blog. The organisation is also releasing a booklet to accompany the film called "The two faces of the Beijing Olympics".

The ads have been made by animation collective Sweetworld TV and have been influenced by characters such as Hello Kitty. "The characters in the Amnesty China campaign are quite innocent and cuddly," said Yasmeen Ismail of Sweetworld TV. "When something horrific happens the impact is greater because you have built up a bond with them."

How Morgan Spurlock went from burgers to Bin Laden

Morgan Spurlock made his name by gorging himself. He tells James Mottram why he's now looking for al-Qa'ida's leader...

With a title such as Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, you could be forgiven for expecting a hard-hitting documentary. With the premise that a man goes it alone in the Middle East to find the world's most wanted terrorist, it conjures images of a painstaking investigative report, the sort that Donal MacIntyre might take on. Until, that is, you see the poster. The moustachioed Morgan Spurlock, the man behind the McDonald's-baiting Super Size Me, is sitting atop a camel, holding on for dear life as the beast races towards us. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was a new Carry On film.

It doesn't stop there. The film's opening sequences see Spurlock, 37, get in shape for his trip. He does what every sensible traveller does – be it learning those all-important Arabic phrases or undergoing anti-terrorism training and learning kidnap-evasion tactics. After all, there's a $25m reward at stake. Meanwhile, smart computer graphics show Morgan and Osama battling like it was an al-Qa'ida version of Street Fighter. "I love video games," Spurlock later tells me. He has just bought God of War for his new PSP.

Holed up in the office of his New York-based production company Warrior Poets, Spurlock makes no apologies for this comic approach to what is ostensibly a gravely serious subject. "I think we could've made a real investigative journalistic film, which says, 'Where is he? Why haven't we found him? What are the pieces that have gone into the puzzle? What's happened on the ground in these countries? What are they doing to find him?' But, for me, especially coming off of Super Size Me, using humour is a better way to get an audience interested in topics, especially something that's really heavy."

Needless to say, Spurlock does not capture Bin Laden. Estimating that he came within 50 miles of him, in the finale he heads home rather than enter Peshawar, the region of Pakistan many believe currently houses the mastermind behind September 11. I was rather disappointed by this. This is, don't forget, the man who spent 30 days eating three McDonald's meals a day. In his subsequent spin-off television show, 30 Days, he went a month living in prison, and in the forthcoming new series he goes coal-mining in his native West Virginia. This is Spurlock all over: man of the people.

If his methods suggest showmanship, you can't doubt the results. The burger behemoth retired the "super size" fries and beverage options from their menus, replacing them with healthier foods – a move McDonald's denied was a reaction to the film. Nevertheless, Spurlock – who was nominated for an Oscar for his stomach-bloating efforts – evidently got under their sesame-seed baps. "In the UK, they took out full-page ads in The Independent the day the movie premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival," he recalls. "They spent more on newspaper ads trying to counter the movie the day it opened than I spent on the whole film."

For the latest film, says Spurlock, he really did start out to succeed where the US military and its allies had failed. "You know the deck is incredibly stacked against you, but anybody who buys a lottery ticket doesn't think, 'I'm not going to win'. Even though it's a billion to one, you think, 'maybe I'll be that one'. So we thought, 'Why not?' But, as we went around the world, we realised it was about so many other things. For me, that's what great about the movie – how things unfold over the course of this journey."

It's hard to take Spurlock seriously on this point. While this travelogue takes him from Egypt through Morocco, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later the more dangerous areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, there's no doubt that setting out to find Bin Laden is as much of a gimmick as eating a bellyful of Big Macs. Is it not possible that many could think he's being glib about the subject? "I think that when you go in with good intentions, good things come out of it," he replies. "While some reviewers have said that, that's not been the overwhelming response from the audiences. And that's who ultimately I want to go see the film – the regular people."

He cites various attendees at recent US screenings, and tells me that they've thanked him for breaking down Middle Eastern politics into easily digestible chunks. "That's what it's about – trying to make things accessible to everyone," he says. "There's a big giant gorilla in the corner we don't understand when it comes to global politics. But what the film does in a real easy way is to break things down in very simple terms of what's happening in each of these countries. It paints a picture of what people face in their daily lives."

Certainly Spurlock's ability to communicate to the common man is beyond question. Yet the popularity of his work – not unlike that of Michael Moore – says as much about the intelligence of his fans than it does about his skills as a documentary film-maker. Spurlock argues that he's trying to combat the US media-fuelled negative stereotypes that all those in the Middle East are fanatics. "We get fed one dominant version of what exists overseas – somebody who is burning a flag, or burning an effigy of Tony Blair or George Bush, or they're screaming about how they want death to the West and America, and that's the sum of the whole. What the film does a great job of doing is putting a face on this overwhelming majority out there, which is not those people, and giving them a voice. I don't get to see these people that are in this movie on television here. I don't even read about them in newspapers most of the time."

If this point has some validity, what grates about Spurlock's film is its inherent sentimentality. Two months into pre-production, he discovered that his wife, the vegan chef Alexandra Jamieson, was going to give birth. Thus, in what could arguably be seen as another gimmick, it becomes a race against time for Spurlock to find Bin Laden before he must return to his Brooklyn home for the momentous day when his son, Laken – now 16 months old – comes into the world. Spurlock argues that his quest changed dramatically when he discovered that he was going to be a father. "That was the moment when the film really was born – no pun intended. It shifted away from being, 'where is Osama and why haven't we found him?' to, 'what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into?"

To be fair, there's no doubt that Spurlock's mission is laced with danger. As the film unfolds, and Spurlock moves closer to where Bin Laden might be, there is a very real sense that he's playing with his own life. "It was frightening," he admits. "As you start getting closer and closer, your heart starts beating further and further up in your neck!" Though he ultimately visits Tora Bora, the cave-riddled region where Bin Laden once lived, "the scariest moment" is the scene where he is embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. "These guys are targets every day," he says.

At one point, Spurlock is pulled away by his army guides as the nearby village falls under attack from the Taliban and a man is killed in the ensuing scuffle. "The Afghan national army ultimately killed that guy – a guy called Throatcutter," says Spurlock. "He got the name Throatcutter for slitting his brother's throat to gain advancement in the Taliban." While Spurlock's bravery is evident, his naivety – notably when he asks permission to shoot a rocket into the mountains, which he describes as "awesome" – is as apparent.

The best moments come when Spurlock is interacting with different cultures. One scene, set in a mall, sees him approaching women in burkas, asking them to speak to him. When he does manage to quiz two students in a school about their thoughts on America, their answers feel disturbingly stage-managed. Just as telling are the conditions this informal chat is held under. Closely monitored by the pupils' teachers, Spurlock sees the interview shut down when his questions get too contentious. The film becomes an exploration of the feelings held by everyday Middle Eastern people-on-the-street towards America. As one Egyptian says, "We've grown to expect a lot less from the United States."

"There was a time when the United States was really put up on a pedestal as this beacon of hope and democracy and that's gone now," says Spurlock. "The United States is now seen as an aggressor, a country that wants to dominate others, that wants to use all of the natural resources of other countries, to eradicate the religion of Islam. But that's really not the vision of the States that should be out in the world, in my opinion."

Sci Fi hits the road to push Tin Man

The Sci Fi Channel is to launch its biggest campaign of the year to promote Tin Man, the Wizard of Oz-inspired series that has outgunned shows such as Battlestar Galactica in the US. The show, which stars Alan Cumming and delivered Sci-Fi its biggest ever audience in the US, launches in the UK on May 11.

Sci Fi UK, which is launching a national campaign from this weekend, is making the first hour of the three-part mini series available to watch online from Sunday, May 4. The campaign, which uses the famous image of the yellow brick road, includes a nationwide poster campaign, ads on the London Underground and national press ads targeting Sunday newspapers.



"It is a beautiful, ambitious and bold re-imagining of an all time classic," said Maya Bhose, the marketing director at Sci Fi Channel. "We wanted to embrace comparisons with the Wizard of Oz which is why we chose such an iconic image to lead the campaign."

Marketing activity also includes an innovative, surreal virtual "fly through" of the land of Oz that will be accessible at www.scifi.co.uk/tinman from today. The ad campaign has been created by agency Karmarama with media planning and buying by Rocket-PHD.

The £10m fantasy production has proved to be Sci-Fi US's biggest ever ratings winner with 6.3 million viewers. This is more than the audience for shows such as Battlestar Galactica and Dune and Steven Spielberg's Taken, which all debuted on Sci-Fi in the US.

Tin Man will run on the Sci Fi Channel at 8pm on May 11, 18 and 25.

The father of British electronic music remembered

The composer Tristram Cary, who has died aged 82, was widely regarded as the father of British electronic music. While he also produced conventional works, he realised early on that a new form of music could be constructed out of "pure" sound, of natural or electronic origin, and that the ideal device for honing it was the tape recorder, developed in Germany during the second world war. Though he did not know it at first, similar experiments were taking place at radio and television studios in Paris and Cologne, creating a distinctively postwar sound world.

Tristram's first electronic commission came in 1955, to accompany the radio play The Japanese Fishermen, about a fishing boat caught up in the Pacific hydrogen bomb tests of 1954. His first conventional piece to be performed was the Partita for Piano in 1947, and it was in 1955 again that he made his breakthough into films, with the score for the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers.

From then on, he produced work in both conventional and electronic disciplines, often combining the two, for concert hall, cinema, television and radio. His films included Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1970), while on television his electronic sounds pushed Doctor Who's daleks on to the screen for the first time (1963), alongside conventional scores for Jane Eyre (1963) and Madame Bovary (1964).

For the British pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Tristram created a sound environment that included music for 16 film loops running concurrently. In the same year, he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, London, and built a similar facility for himself at the new family home in Fressingfield, Suffolk.

Keen to create an instrument capable of producing controlled electronic sound for his compositions, Tristram then formed, along with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell, EMS (Electronic Music Studios) in 1969, and set about co-designing what was to become the VCS3 (Putney) synthesiser. The instrument was equipped with scientific vernier dials for the precise selection of frequency. It was soon joined by a small keyboard add-on, which infuriated some, bringing electronic music back to the 12-tone chromatic scale from which it had been trying to escape. Nevertheless, the VCS3 (and its 1971 derivative, the Synthi A - built, James Bond-style, into an attache case) became the must-have tool for a generation of musicians, including Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, White Noise, Jean Michel Jarre and, of course, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The third son of the novelist Joyce Cary and his wife Gertrude, Tristram was born in Oxford. He left Westminster school early to study science as an exhibitioner at Christ Church, Oxford - his father, whose earnings as a writer were modest, was anxious for his son to enter a profession that offered financial security. But Tristram's studies were interrupted when he joined the Royal Navy as a radar specialist from 1943 to 1946.

The Cary household had always been full of music, with Tristram learning to play the piano from an early age, a hobby that ran parallel with a keen interest in radio. In the navy, supported by the required training in electronics, he found his interest in music, connecting with the world of science. He returned to Oxford, swapped courses to philosophy, politics and economics, and graduated with a BA, before moving to London and enrolling at Trinity College of Music. In the evenings, he taught to top up his funds, and started to build his home studio.

In July 1951, Tristram married Doris (Dorse) Jukes. They had two sons, John and Robert, and a daughter, Charlotte. Much of the family home in London was let to provide income for the struggling young composer's family, while the corner of the living room in their own bohemian flat (always full of artists and musicians, especially after closing time) was given over to "the machine", a choice collection of electronic equipment, much of it army surplus or home-built, including a disc-cutting lathe (on which Tristram had spent his £50 demob pay from the navy), mixing equipment, oscillators and (from 1952) an early tape recorder.

By 1974, Tristram was frustrated by having to write commercial music over the more experimental works on which he wished to concentrate, and moved to Australia, taking up a teaching post at Adelaide University, where he was later appointed honorary visiting research fellow, and awarded a doctorate of music. Dorse and Charlotte joined him briefly before returning to England, and the couple soon divorced. In 1986, Tristram resumed self-employment, operating as Tristram Cary Creative Music Services, continuing to work on new commissions up until the time of his death. In 2003, he married Jane Delin, his "wonderful companion" for some 20 years.

Tristram underwent heart bypass surgery in 2001, after which he and I worked, across the continents, on a double CD of his Doctor Who music. His re-recording of a suite from The Ladykillers won Gramophone magazine's best film music CD award in 1998. He also produced Soundings, a collection of his electronic and electro-acoustic works also a double CD. He was, however, disappointed never to have had a hit record.

Those of us to whom his work was an inspiration would disagree - he was a true pioneer, and for his services to Australian music received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1991. He is survived by Dorse, Jane, and his three children.

Tristram Cary, musician, born May 14 1925; died April 24 2008

Age is no laughing matter

Last night's TV reviewed: The Invisibles; (The) Taggart; The Bill; The Baron; The Inbetweeners

Last night, it was decision time: Ken v Boris, Tories v Labour, and, before the swingometer took centre stage, age versus youth: The Invisibles (BBC One) v The Inbetweeners (E4). At least in this election – despite the spookily similar names – there was one clear winner and no need for a recount, or staying up till all hours in the vain hope that Robert Peston might appear and start squawking about Nick Clegg’s budget plans. (A boy’s gotta find his pleasures where he can.)

The loser, the shambolic, hopeless, where-are-the-matchsticks-to-keep-my-eyelids-from-closing-FOREVER loser, was The Invisibles, which finally appeared after weeks of trailers featuring spidery, abseiling figures, implying a drama with the stylistic dash of The Thomas Crown Affair. That, like the drama itself, was a con. Anthony Head and Warren Clarke played Morris and Sid, a pair of past-it cat burglars – legends, we were told, called “The Invisibles” – who apparently were so marvellous in their day that they robbed from royalty. But now, older and slightly rickety, they were trying to go straight in a quiet seaside town. Fatefully, this was also a drama with something to say – something obvious and clunking – about ageing. Over and over again. 'The Invisibles', you see, also refers to the elderly within society. So, Morris (Head) hated the new block of flats that he and his wife (Jenny Agutter) moved into because they were for old people and had smoke alarms; and under the door drifted leaflets for coffee mornings and bridge-for-beginners’ courses.

There's a rather shocking interview with the scriptwriter William Ivory in this week's Radio Times, in which he describes the genesis of The Invisibles. "The starting premise," he says, "was that it would be about people on the wrong side of 50 trying to get back into the mainstream. And then I thought, 'What if the mainstream isn't mainstream? What if you're trying to get back into the underworld?'" Just take a mouthful of that and swill it around, if you've got a moment. He thinks that crooks coming out of retirement is a twist, a new idea. (Terry Nation, said once, that he called his wife and said, "I've had this brilliant idea for some baddies. I'm going to call them Daleks." She said, "Drink your tea while it's hot." Every writer needs a Mrs Nation, now and then, to pour hot tea on their bright ideas.) Whatever next? How about a drama involving a policeman who solves crimes – but he's a maverick who doesn't go by the book. Or no, hang on, this one's even better: a successful City type moves to a seemingly idyllic village – but it's populated by lovable eccentrics. That's going to make the viewers sit up and take notice, isn't it?

I'd mind The Invisibles less if there weren't so much talent involved in it. Ivory himself is an interesting, if inconsistent, writer, with a CV that includes the dustbin-men drama Common As Muck and The Sins, a decidedly odd serial about an ex-thief-turned-undertaker, played by Pete Postlethwaite. The retired clichés, beg pardon, crooks are played by Warren Clarke and Anthony Head, with Jenny Agutter as Head's wife. I don't think any of them can have felt unduly taxed by the complexities of this one. Where was Mrs Ivory when we needed her? Did no one in the seasoned cast have a queasy feeling about the script? Or notice the absence of jokes in a comedy caper? Next time you are in a pub, try to get a laugh with: "Port and brandy - nature's amoxicillin!" Try even to say it.

So the premise is simple: Syd and Maurice used to be Britain's top burglars, committing glamorous thefts and never getting caught. After 18 years living it up on the Costa del Crime, they have returned to Britain – largely, you gather, because Barbara wants proper tea and Marks & Spencer – to live in luxury retirement apartments in a seaside town in Devon. But Syd's ne'er-do-well son is desperate for money, owing to a contrived and unfunny accident involving some expensive koi carp, and Maurice, while he can't stand the boy, is chafing at the bonds of age. Early on, he was shocked to realise that their new flat comes equipped with an emergency phone of a type advertised by Thora Hird. So, naturally, they decided to try one last job to see the boy clear. Thus, the two old blaggers don their boiler suits and balaclavas again – only to discover that crime, like everything else, had got a whole lot tougher than they remembered it.

“We were the best, we’re not any more,” Morris banged on every five minutes. Head’s accent drifted all over the place, from South Ken to East Ham, and eventually settled for a rocky outcrop in the Thames Estuary. Clarke looked like a baffled toad. Agutter was so fragrant she should have been attended by a cartoon chorus of woodland nymphs. Lame drama chafed against lamer comedy. The duo first tried to burgle a friend’s place (they banged their knees, leading to more grumbling about ageing). The tone went absurdly Mission: Impossible as they prepared to rob a gangland chief’s place (expensive bits of kit, slinky music). But they were caught, beaten up and eventually saved by the pub landlord- played by Dean Lennox Kelly- who arrived late and cheered things up considerably ("I was the man behind the Rotherham 7. You've probably heard of us. Well, anyway ..."). There were spectral overtones of Minder and suddenly he mutated exhilaratingly into Terry McCann and flattened the baddies. "I'm the hardest man you've ever met in your life. I'll be back and I'll be angry. You don't wanna see that."

Ivory did pull off a couple of minor reversals of expectation along the way. Their first job, which went disastrously wrong, turned out to have been a practice: the bloke they were burgling knew who they were, and was only shouting at them to make it seem authentic! And the seedy, over-friendly landlord of the local pub turned out to be the son of their long-deceased partner, eager to take over Dad's business. But the gags about the effects of age are even more arthritic than our heroes, and no sentient being could have been remotely surprised by the ending, which had the trio toasting the rebirth of their criminal careers. Plausibility hasn't been a high priority, either. Returning from a night's breaking and entering, Maurice insisted to his wife (who wants to stay respectable) that they'd been making a night of it at a curry house, and she, despite being self-evidently close enough to smell his non-curry breath, swallowed this.

In a recent interview to promote The Invisibles co-star Warren Clarke described the show as “mad enough to strike a nerve”. I suspect he meant strike a chord. Not only because nerve-striking is never pleasant, but because at the time he was saying how this show’s gentle humour made a nice change from the grisliness of other crime series. It wasn’t entirely inapt, though, because the character he plays, retired crook Syd Woolsey, is just the sort who’s always striking a nerve when a chord is what’s needed. It wasn’t just the fact that Maurice the master safecracker had gone rusty and Syd the alarm systems maestro hadn’t been keeping his techie knowledge up to date. Nor that they needed to double up on glucosamine to get their joints lubed before a job. More than anything, it was that the world had moved on. Theirs, we are told, was a golden age of crime when skill was more important than thuggery. They didn’t approve of how standards had slipped.

And yet to match Morris’s grouchiness, I’ll say that burglary is unpleasant, burglars are not to be celebrated, especially ones such as Morris and Sid, so totally lacking in comedic value. Surely we live in an age in which the myth of the gentleman criminal is tarnished: the subtext of The Invisibles is that crime was once a stylish business, with swaggering sophisticates robbing for the hell of it rather than the next crack fix, which is tosh. More dispiriting still is the way the programme sanitises crime: they never hurt anyone but their own, and you didn't have to lock your doors and yadda yadda. Even the modern thuggishness we're exposed to seems peculiarly harmless. Having been punched in the face by a younger thug and their heads slammed on a concrete floor, Syd and Maurice didn't have a mark on them. After The Sopranos, which showed you what violence really does, that portrayal of it as cost-free seemed mildly obscene. Anyway, Morris and Sid are dislikeable, inept, poorly characterised crooks. I hope they get collared or someone nicks their free bus passes. And looking on the bright side, Portaferry, standing in for Devon, is particularly pretty if, quite obviously, perishing. Presumably they were filming out of season.

The ageing Taggart (ITV1), which has been kept alive with vitamin B injections into the buttocks, bucked up with a shivery tale about lifts. (Stuart Hepburn, being the writer, also got to play the corpse.) Taggart has always thrived on ingrained, superstitious, primitive terrors, deep rooted as neeps, and most people believe lifts are out to get us. A Study in Murder started with a college principal being crushed in a lift shaft ("Help! Hel ...") and ended with DC Stuart Fraser alone in a lift with the murderer at the controls, dropping and stopping it in torturing jerks. Fraser successfully appealed to his better nature. In my view, a risky strategy. While we are on the subject, there is a theory that you should jump up and down in a plummeting lift in the hope that you will be hovering in mid air when it hits bottom. This is, in every sense, a hit-or-miss affair. Current thinking is that it is better to lie down, ideally on top of your fattest fellow passenger. Let me know how you get on.

It was hard to get away from crime last night. The Bill (ITV1) staged one of its big set-pieces, with two bombs in a street market and an encouraging turn out of ambulances and fire engines. "Mayday! Mayday!" yelled the sergeant, all too appositely. TV crews and photographers got the customary hard time from the cops ("You'd think they'd have more respect!"), which is a bit steep since the police were shown clustering round supersized TV screens at every possible opportunity, to find out what was happening. A looter ("Is it because I's black?") was arrested. So was a sex pest masquerading as a doctor. Not, unfortunately, the bomber. PC Emma Keane (Melanie Gutteridge) seized centre stage and demonstrated an excellent pair of lungs ("Everybody out NOW!") before she was blown up by the third bomb. I was quite moved to see her lying there shrouded by a thickly drifting snowstorm of shredded paper. If this fine woman had a flaw, it was, arguably, a mistake to run in v.e.r.y s.l.o.w m.o.t.i.o.n towards the bomb.

Meanwhile quite the most bizarre series on television at the moment, The Baron, continued to kick up a late night storm on ITV1. The tiny fishing village of Gardenstown on the east coast of Banffshire is not the worldliest of places, to say the least. Six churches serve the devout population of 700 and there’s only one pub. So why its good citizens agreed to co-operate with an ITV reality show in which three celebrities competed for a vacant 300-year-old local lairdship called the Baron of Troup, simply passes all understanding. Innocence, one assumes.

Thus far we’d seen the contestants – the late actor Mike Reid, pop singer Suzanne Shaw and inveterate bad boy Malcolm McLaren – arrive on the island and begin their election campaigns, utterly ignorant of the local population and its values. While Reid and Shaw went the traditional route of charm and flattery to solicit votes, it soon became apparent that McLaren was out to provoke as much outrage and uproar as possible. By the end of last night’s show, he had created such a stir at a hustings – insulting the village (“the worst place I’ve ever been to”) and suggesting that days be set aside for locals to take drugs, have sex and drink themselves sodden – he was all but run out of town by what he described as a “lynch mob” of incandescent locals. Pathetic, bottom-of-the-barrel television that this was, I’ll probably tune in for next week’s concluding part. If only to see whether the villagers took up McLaren’s other suggestion, to “burn a Wicker Man on the beach”. Somehow, I’d fancy him for the Edward Woodward role in that particular pageant.

The rude, juvenile comedy in The Inbetweeners- the first such programme specially produced for the digital channel E4- proved a little sharper. Sixth-former Will (Simon Bird) has landed at a suburban comprehensive. He's a posh, swotty boy, walking the corridors to a hum of sneers at his clothes, his shoes, his hair, his prissy briefcase, the simple fact that he is an outsider. At first his classmates hate him, but he blithely ignores their insults and insinuates himself into a group of foul friends. He is a normal teenage mix: insouciant, confident, vicious, scared and offended when all the boys fantasise about having sex with his mother. “She’s so sexy she could be a prostitute,” one observes. The actors look so much older than 17.

When one dad gives his son £20 for the pub, he asks him, “Promise me you won’t spend it on the fruit machines”. “I can’t do that,” the son replies. Will, frustrated at not being served, tells the barman that the other drinkers are underage (“Look at that bum fluff – 16, look at that bra – it’s padded”), making him even more unpopular. The second episode began with a disabled girl getting hit in the face with a Frisbee and progressed through (somehow inoffensive) homophobia and Will terrifying a seven-year-old that his parents were about to be vaporised in a dirty bomb in London. The floppy hair and spoddy specs are a disguise. He is, as he said, “hard”, and pretty funny.

Again, this is not breaking new ground. It's about the trials of being 16, of wondering what sex is like, of hoping none of your friends spot that you don't know what sex is like, and of trying to get served in pubs. I don't know about you, but I was like Proust with the madeleines here, and therefore prepared to indulge Damon Beesley and Iain Morris's uneven dialogue. It would be interesting to know who E4 thinks the target audience is. Presumably not 16-year-olds, to whom the business of being 16 is deadly serious. Perhaps it is middle-aged types, for whom the pain and embarrassment is now distant enough to be laughable. Or almost.

Keeping a cool Head

Typecast as a coffee-drinking yuppie, Anthony Head left the UK for America, where a role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer revived his career. Then came that role as the PM in Little Britain and a newfound cult status in his native country. He talks to Patrick Barkham...

Not many dads work with Paris Hilton and then go home to muck out the donkeys, but these extremes are everyday experiences for Anthony Head. With a weakness for pouting in photographs but also for sturdy shoes, he seems one part 80s popstar and one part farmer - and has been both. But the part that everyone of a certain age still remembers is the aroma-loving yuppie he played in those Gold Blend ads 20 years ago.

To his daughters' generation, Head is better known as Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the prime minister and object of Sebastian's crush in Little Britain. His latest role is also paternal: in The Invisibles, a new BBC comedy drama, he plays an ageing criminal and father who struggles to come to terms with his "retirement" in a Devon fishing village.

It marks a new chapter in what is fast becoming a dynasty. The son of actor Helen Shingler, Head has two daughters with his "partner/girlfriend/wife" of 26 years, the animal behaviourist Sarah Fisher, and both children are making their first forays into acting. In The Invisibles, Head's eldest, Emily, 19, plays his on-screen daughter, who at first has no idea that her father was once the best safecracker in Britain.

Acting opposite his daughter was a pleasure, says Head, above the crackling and popping of an open fire in the Royal Crescent hotel in Bath. "For an actor it's a real joy for the emotions you are feeling to be real. You are not having to think. I've got these great scenes when Emily starts to twig who I am. I'd look into her eyes and I'd start to well up." He has played other characters with daughters, but "there's just that much more of a bond with Em", he says. "When I hold her hand or kiss her forehead, it's the most natural thing, there's nothing thought through about it."

Their father's career has obviously brought them a comfortable childhood, but Emily and Daisy, 17, have had to put up with a lot. When they were young, he spent seven years in America filming Buffy while Sarah agreed to stay in rural Somerset and be a "single mum". Then Head returned home to that role as a Blairish PM, opposite David Walliams' camp aide, Sebastian, in Little Britain. He appeared in one episode wearing a black posing pouch and wielding a feather duster. "I did feel sorry for my children because they had to go into school the next day," he says. Most of the time, though, having a dad in Buffy and Little Britain was a source of pride for them. "It's hard at school for any child of a parent with a high profile. They are going to get stick, but at least they've got the kudos of me doing something that - in the sight of their contemporaries - is cool. One of Daisy's friends said to her, 'Your dad's really cool, he kissed a black guy' [on Little Britain]. I'm really pleased he thought that was cool."

At first, Head did not encourage his daughters to pursue acting. He remembers being almost traumatised by performing auditions before the critical eye of his mother, who played the wife of the detective Maigret in the popular 1960s series. "I said, 'Why don't you do what I did - do as much drama as you can in school and if you still want to do it, maybe go to drama school?' Sarah said, 'Back in your box, why limit what they can do now? Who knows if they're going to want to do it when they are 21, but you can be sure if they get to 40 and haven't done it, you will be the person that stopped them'." Suitably chastened, Head contacted his agent, who took his daughters on.

Head has an unusually comprehensive website, suggesting a large, loyal fanbase (he also regularly attends the Collectormania autograph fairs beloved of Trekkies and Buffy obsessives) with its scribbled notes promising fans that the site won't announce new roles until they are confirmed, adding: "Sorry if this is frustrating for those of you who have caught a whiff of something going down."

The somethings going down include a film adaptation of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a bizarre rock opera brought to screen by the director of the gory Saw II, III and IV films. Set in a "Blade-Runneresque" future of mass organ failure, Head plays an organ "repo" man who rips out transplanted organs when their owners can't keep up the payments. "The idea is really cool. It's really fucked up. It's hugely sick. I get to eviscerate people and sing while I do it," Head giggles.

Repo! also stars Sarah Brightman and Paris Hilton. What was it like working with Hilton? "Oh, she's really sweet. She's odd, bless her, but I guess you'd have to be. I liked her, we got on fine. She just kind of curled up in her makeup chair and then occasionally fell asleep as her makeup was being put on, because all the time we were there she was out hosting parties. That's what she does for a career when she's not acting - she turns up to parties and they pay her. She was flying off all over the place so she was a bit knackered," he says. "She seemed a bit of a lost soul, a bit of a little girl in a strange world of somebody's making, I don't know whose."

Although Head thinks the distributors are puzzling over how to market the film - following the recent controversy over the trailer for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd (in which Head has a cameo), which failed to mention it was a musical - it sounds as if he's found himself in another cult project. Does he have a nose for these zeitgeisty things? "I think they might find me. Little Britain completely found me. I was going to turn it down," he admits. "I had absolutely no idea it was going to be that big."

With Buffy, he'd gone to the US because he had found himself "very typecast as this smooth, coffee-drinking yuppie" in this country. He says he knew he would have to leave Britain when a casting director told his agent: "This is a serious drama - we don't want people reaching for their coffee jars." When he returned to Los Angeles recently, he found Buffy's influence has endured. "The number of people who are high up in the industry out there who grew up with Buffy, you almost get that ..." He bows with his arms in mock worship.

Head is not worried about his daughters taking up acting, although he frets about them in a fatherly way. What if people assume that they have careers due to a helping hand from daddy? "They earned their place in the agency by getting gigs," he says firmly. "It's been so formative for them. They have grown so much through the experience. They may find it's a nonsense business. So far, they have done really well, touch wood, but you never know what is going to happen. They've seen me: every time I'm out of work, I don't think I'm ever going to work again. We're insecure by our very nature. Why else would you want to dress up in funny clothes unless you were not secure in yourself?".

The Invisibles starts on BBC1 tonight

Question Time, metropolitanism and the vagaries of tri-party debate

During last week's Question Time, David Dimbleby warned the speakers that they were getting a little bit stuck in the intricacies of London politics, which was perhaps unsurprising because the panel consisted of the three main candidates running to become Mayor of London today. We can presumably look forward to the Gardener's Question Time chair pleading with speakers to stop banging on about hollyhocks.

But the exchange was revealing of a tension in broadcasting about coverage of London issues in a TV culture in which almost all the production takes place in the capital, yet there is a terror of being accused of "metropolitanism", notes Mark Lawson.

The mayoral race is strictly a local story but, unusually, the 2008 contenders all have significant national profiles. So Question Time aimed for a sort of soap-opera show: a clash of personalities, with Dimbleby stepping quickly in if anyone mentioned congestion in the Blackwall Tunnel.

Yet, while the showdown of show-offs was entertaining, another consequence of this Question Time, I suspect, will be to increase the odds against a televised debate between the prime ministerial candidates; the long dream of British broadcasters. The problem, as the Ken-Boris-Brian punch-up confirmed, is that political fisticuffs of this kind are unsuited to a three-party system because two candidates will tend to gang up on the other one. This happened most famously in the 1992 US race, when Ross Perot helped to make Bill Clinton president by alternating punches against the first President Bush.

American elections usually have two candidates and so the classic one-on-one stand-off works. In Britain, though, a trio of leaders is the default and so what happened last week - with Paddick helping Livingstone to duff up Johnson - would occur in any PM threesome, making it unwise for the Labour or Tory contender to take the risk. But at least there'd be no risk of them being warned not to get bogged down in "national" issues.

Forget shoes and men - this show nailed our friendships

Beyond the Manhattan fantasy, Sex and the City gave a rare depiction of the complexity and value of women's relationships, argues the Guardian's Libby Brooks...

I have never really understood why so many people felt personally affronted by Sex and the City. The 90s TV hit that charted sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw's navigation of life, love and the latest shoe styles in New York never claimed to be a documentary about contemporary women's lives. Inevitably though, the fictional portrayal of four unfathomably glamorous, sexually experimental and effortlessly successful Manhattan females rendered the series hugely influential, mainly because it was unlike anything else. But just because women are seldom seen on the small screen being hopeful, hilarious and horny all at once is not a good reason to levy the weight of feminist expectation against a single franchise. Still, the much anticipated release of the Sex and the City movie later this month prods those discomfits yet again.

At the risk of collapsing one Bradshaw metaphor into another, I always found the series charming, funny, good-looking and intelligent, rather like the perfect first date. I enjoyed following Carrie and her achingly archetypical friends - Charlotte (Upper East Side princess forced to redefine her sense of perfect when marriage and fertility go wrong); Miranda (fiercely independent lawyer not softened by motherhood); and Samantha (unrepentant fuck machine, latterly breast cancer survivor). I'm almost afraid to admit it lest it show me up as shallow, but the show did make me ask pertinent questions about my own life and those of my friends - and not solely because we were swithering over Manolo Blahnik designs.

Sex and the City was always two parts fantasy shaken with one part delicately skewered reality. So - no - hot, smart women do not only talk about men and shoes, Manhattan isn't always sunny, and newspaper columns aren't generally written, unresearched, in slinky vest tops (though actually, reader, you should see me now).

But this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women's experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be clean-up etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?

Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they'd been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were discussed. For my money, the enduring appeal of Sex and the City has nothing to do with guys or footwear. It's about the uncomfortably accurate presentation of women's relationships with each other. However the critics receive the new film, they ought to bear in mind that, for all the brunch chatter, this show has never been a story about men. Sex and the City was always, baseline, about us girls; about how women's friendships can be complicated and bitchy, but also meaningful, supportive and lasting.

I'm a firm believer that all our subsequent interactions are dictated by original familial connections, so it has always fascinated me that Freud didn't bother to create an Oedipus-style template for women's relationships. It's an absence that Shere Hite notes in her latest report on women loving women, alongside the dearth of media representations of what are often the most important relationships in women's lives. Aside from the imported Desperate Housewives and the brilliant British-born Pulling, it's hard to think of popular art that takes women's friendships seriously.

Perhaps that's because we don't take them seriously ourselves. On the one hand we lionise relationships with other women - it's a given to crow about the super-fantasticness of one's friendships, and we're happy to admit how essential those relationships are in the scheme of our lives. Yet, day to day, we give those connections far less traction than they deserve. When was the last time you sat down with a female friend and asked: "Where is this relationship going?" Women analyse their interactions with men to the nth degree, while their profound connections with others of their gender go unexamined.

I'm sure it's partly to do with the way women's relationships are set up publicly. From an early age, girls are taught that they are in sexual competition with their peers. Nobody wants to be the loser in the race to couple up, and nobody wants to be deemed a lesbian. Later, women wind up being their own worst enemies, buying into a culture that sets them against one another: the singles versus the marrieds, the stay at homes versus the working mothers. We are told that we can only understand those who mimic our lifestyle choices. It's interesting that when Hite surveyed she found that, of all barriers to friendship, relationship status was the greatest. Single and partnered women were less likely to be close than those of a different class or race.

Sex and the City was seminal because it showed women's friendships according to a panoply of responses: anger, doubt, judgment and envy, as well as love. And it proposed basic needs - flu, a cricked neck, the plus one - as fulfilled by other women. It's not anti-men to acknowledge how females can sustain each other. But it is pro-women to suggest that we cease angsting at each other, especially about shoes.

Attenborough delivers warning to BBC

Broadcasting grandee Sir David Attenborough last night warned the BBC against squeezing out public service television by flooding the schedules with lifestyle shows and celebrity chefs.

In a heartfelt plea to regulators and the government to ignore proposals to "top slice" the BBC licence fee, he nevertheless admonished the broadcaster for chasing ratings and overloading the schedule with too many similar programmes. Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952 and was the founding controller of BBC2 before becoming synonymous with a long run of natural history shows including Planet Earth and The Living Planet.

He told an audience of broadcasters and industry figures in London: "There are times when BBC1 and BBC2, intoxicated by the sudden popularity of a programme genre, have allowed that genre to proliferate and run rampant through the schedules, with the result that other kinds of programmes are not placed - simply because of lack of space. Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes, or celebrity chefs? Is it not a scandal, in this day and age, that that there seems to be no place for continuing series of programmes about science or serious music or thoughtful in-depth interviews with people other than politicians."

Attenborough, delivering a speech on the future of public service broadcasting as part of a series of lectures organised by the corporation as a contribution to media regulator Ofcom's review of the sector, said it was a "very, very sad" that the science show Tomorrow's World no longer had a place in the schedule. "If you want an informed society there has to be a basic understanding of science," he said.

The presenter, who this year said he would no longer travel the world to make programmes on location, warned the BBC against further cutting its internal production base. He lamented the demise of specialist BBC departments to produce programmes on archaeology and history, on the arts, on music and science that had suffered as a result of the requirement for a certain proportion of programmes to come from independent suppliers. "As they dwindled, so the critical mass of their production expertise has diminished," he said. "The continuity of their archives has been broken, they have lost the close touch they once had worldwide with their subjects, and they are no longer regarded as the centres of innovation and expertise they once were."

The BBC's internal specialist factual departments bore the brunt of cuts introduced by director general Mark Thompson to plug a claimed £2bn black hole in the wake of a below inflation licence fee settlement. He axed up to 1,800 jobs, many in programme-making departments. Thompson will argue he has already swung the axe on makeover and lifestyle programmes, declaring three years ago that the BBC would no longer make "copycat" shows. Director of television Jana Bennett said the BBC had a new science show in development.

Despite his concerns, Attenborough maintained the BBC was by far the best way to bring public service programming to large audiences. He voiced his support for the licence fee, saying the public was prepared to continue paying it in the same way as they funded libraries and swimming pools for the greater good. He rejected proposals to "top slice" the licence fee in order to fund strands of public service programming on rival commercial networks, one of the ideas floated this month by Ofcom.

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.”

A public TV alternative to news from BBC

The New York public television stations WNET and WLIW plan to drop a BBC-produced nightly newscast in the fall and replace it with a new half-hour program focused on international issues that will be produced by WLIW, the station is expected to announce on Wednesday.

The weekday programme, with the working title “Your World Tonight,” is also expected to replace BBC World News on an undetermined number of the more than 200 public stations nationwide that carry the BBC program. WLIW has distributed the BBC show to public television since 1998.

In the past year the BBC has sunk considerable resources into a separate nightly newscast, BBC World News America, with Matt Frei as anchor, that is broadcast on BBC America, its own for-profit cable channel. In discussions with WLIW, the BBC had been proposing strictly limiting how many public stations could carry BBC World News and at what times, said Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive of Educational Broadcasting Corporation, parent of WNET and WLIW.

“It would have meant 60 to 70 percent of the public broadcasting audience would lose access to the show,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview, adding that other comments made by BBC executives had made it “pretty clear that the future of the BBC was not intertwined with public broadcasting.” Mr. Shapiro said WLIW had also been asking the BBC to add more context for American viewers. “I thought the show we had was not as good as it could have been,” he said.

Michele Grant, executive vice president for news and sport at BBC Worldwide America, said in an interview that the BBC wanted changes in what hours BBC World News could be shown in an effort to make the programme easier for viewers to find, and also to avoid having the public broadcasting and cable programmes compete head to head. She called the BBC’s cable and public broadcasting newscasts complementary.

Ms. Grant said the BBC wanted the public broadcasting version to be carried as widely as possible, noting, “We’ve got a large and loyal audience for BBC World News on public television, and we’re absolutely committed to continuing to provide a broadcast from an international perspective to that audience,” she said. Distribution will now be handled by the Los Angeles station KCET, she added, “and we want to have this broadcast available in every market.”

Mr. Shapiro said that it was too early to discuss details of the new programme but that the newscast, which will begin in October, would have an American anchor and rely on news-gathering partners from around the world. It will do its own enterprise reporting and draw on experts from public policy schools and the United Nations in looking at issues like climate change, food shortages and global health. The executive producer will be Marc Rosenwasser, a longtime network news producer and Mr. Shapiro’s former NBC News colleague. Before coming to Educational Broadcasting, Mr. Shapiro was president of NBC News.