A bold new interpretation of The Passion

Jesus is a salt-of-the-earth northerner, Mary Magdalene is not a prostitute – oh, and we got the crucifixion all wrong. Welcome to the BBC’s new interpretation of the Passion says Garry Jenkins...

Mid-afternoon in the suffocating heat of the Moroccan desert, and a day that began long before dawn is at last building to its climax. On a ridge, overlooking a rugged, rock-strewn valley, a swarm of make-up artists, costume-fitters and prosthetics experts are applying the finishing touches to the loincloth-clad figure of the actor Joseph Mawle. Nearby, in-between swigs from small bottles of mineral water, a quartet of red-robed Roman centurions is rehearsing hauling upright the crude, T-shaped gibbet to which the young Englishman is about to be attached.

Until now the day has been bedevilled by small technical hitches that have put back filming. Mawle, facing the biggest challenge of his young acting career, portraying Jesus’s crucifixion at Golgotha, has been up since 3am. So when, a few moments later, the last-minute adjustments are complete and the call for quiet and then action finally goes out, the sense of excitement is mixed with a palpable sense of relief. Hundreds of hours of preparation and planning, both here in Morocco and back in the UK, are about to come to fruition. Or so it seems.

Seconds after the cameras turn over for the first time, a sudden gust of desert wind throws thick, red dust up into the eyes of Mawle and the centurions. Within moments tripods, chairs and other bits of equipment are being picked up and thrown over by stinging blasts of air. As all eyes turn heavenwards, a bank of dense, livid, purple and grey clouds is settling above the scene, obscuring even the vast Atlas Mountains in the distance. Soon fat gobbets of rain are turning the dusty landscape a dark, muddy brown, sending everyone running for cover. Minutes later, with the storm growing in intensity, filming is postponed.

At least producer Nigel Stafford-Clark hasn’t lost his desert-dry sense of humour. "There are times when I wonder whether I’ve walked into the Book of Job. This definitely feels more like it belongs in the Old Testament rather than the New one," he says, huddled under a makeshift tent, looking up at the unruly heavens with a world-weary smile. "I do feel like having a conversation with God and saying, ‘Come on, we’re trying to tell this story, give us a break.’"

Stafford-Clark and his team are here in southern Morocco, near the town of Ouarzazate, to film an ambitious new, three-hour version of the Passion, the story of Jesus’s last week on Earth. Despite the fact that it is summer, this is the second time in a week that the production has been thrown by the capricious Moroccan weather. Last week, plans to film Jesus’s arrest by the Romans in the Garden of Gethsemane were wrecked by a sudden and unexpected flash flood. "It was extraordinary. One day this place looked like it hadn’t seen rain for centuries, the next it was submerged in water that was roaring down from the mountains," says Stafford-Clark.

Stoicism is the television producer’s stock in trade, but rarely can it have been required in such quantities. Encounters with biblical storms are far from the first tests Stafford-Clark and his production team have faced. Given the bold, brave and potentially controversial approach they are taking to retelling the story of Jesus’s final days, they are also unlikely to be the last.

The BBC conceived a new version of the Passion, to be broadcast episodically at prime time on BBC1 over four nights through Easter Week, more than a year and a half ago. The appetite for Biblical stories had been proved by the enormous box office success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. Stafford-Clark, who had just brought the acclaimed Bleak House to television in a similar format, sensed an opportunity to breathe new life into the subject.

"I had just watched Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew, which I’d loved when I’d seen it in the Sixties," he says, by now safely installed in his office at the nearby Atlas film studios, which have become his base. "It is the only successful version I’ve seen of this story. The big American epics in the Fifties, and even the Zeffirelli version with Robert Powell back in the Seventies, were all very reverential. They all made you feel as if you were looking at it through a plate glass window, as if there was a distance between you and what was going on," he says. "It always felt like King Arthur or Lord of the Rings, as if these events took place in a vacuum."

Stafford-Clark wanted to ground the story in reality for the first time. "It’s billed as the greatest story ever told and in many ways it is. But in terms of storytelling it never seemed to make a lot of sense. Watching all these other versions, I didn’t understand what Palm Sunday was all about, for instance. He was just a humble preacher from Galilee. Why all this excitement? Why did the high priest react the way he did in condemning Jesus to death? Why did Pilate do what he did? When you are given the story normally, all these things have to be taken for granted. They are part of what you are told. I felt there was a chance to remedy that."

The key, for him, was to create a drama that allows the audience to feel as if they were in the thick of the action 2,000 years ago. "If you had been in Jerusalem in AD32 you would have witnessed this. You would have seen the crowds, the excitement of his arrival, you’d have got wind of what was going on in the temple. And then you’d have heard rumours that he’d been arrested,” he says. “It’s something that actually happened. This is the thing we are trying to get across."

The first challenge was to find a writer capable of evoking the turbulent, chaotic political melting pot that was first-century Judaea. He appeared in the unlikely form of the Emmy-winning, Irish-born writer Frank Deasy, best-known for hard-hitting contemporary dramas like Real Men, about child abuse, and Looking After Jo Jo, set in the world of Scottish drug gangs. Deasy’s fast-moving, episodic script shows the tumultuous events of Passover week in Jerusalem from the perspective of all those who took part in it, not just Jesus and his disciples, but Pontius Pilate, the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities too. "As a dramatist, the big challenge was to evoke a world in which this story has not taken place, a world without Jesus or any Christian churches or any of the Christian concepts that are so familiar to us," he explains.

As well as reading the Gospels and conducting his own research, Deasy spoke to Professor Mark Goodacre, a leading New Testament scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, who was engaged as a historical consultant to the series. It allowed him to add dramatic depth – and potentially controversy – to the orthodox version of the story. Deasy was determined that every character had a story of his or her own. "By the end I hope people feel they have been on a very deep journey with these characters, that they feel they have shared the most powerful week of their life. So everyone had to have a motive that we could understand, a logical psychology to the things that they do," he explains.

As a result, for instance, Mary Magdalene, played by Paloma Baeza, is portrayed not as a prostitute but as a woman who is, effectively, one of Jesus’s sponsors. "There is increasing evidence that she was a wealthy widow who supported Jesus’s campaign. As he emerged from Galilee, he needed backing," says Deasy.

Pontius Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is also revealed in a new light, as a career soldier posted to one of the most troublesome outposts of the Roman Empire. "We see him as a man with a wife and a career and a villa in Rome to worry about," says Deasy. "Again I wanted his decisions to be plausible. He’s a guy managing a career and a volatile political situation. I think Pilate is an interesting contemporary figure. You can almost view the current situation with the Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan in the things Pilate says. He is someone who is dealing with people with huge convictions about things that mean very little to him and he is trying to impose order," he says.

The character who emerges from the shadows of history most strongly in this version of the story is the high priest of Jerusalem’s temple, Caiaphas. In most versions of the story the man who condemns Jesus to death at the hands of the Romans is a one-dimensional figure, the most identifiable bad guy. Through his research, however, Deasy began to see a man who was part priest, part politician, a leader who was faced with keeping a lid on the cauldron of intrigue and insurrection that was Jerusalem during the biggest festival of the year, Passover. So when Jesus appears in Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient prophesy that the Messiah will arrive on a donkey through the city’s eastern gate, Deasy’s Caiaphas, played by Ben Daniels, is motivated not by bloodlust, but by the need to protect his people from the violence the Romans routinely meted out when tensions rose within the city. "I became more and more fascinated by Caiaphas," Deasy says. "He is usually a cartoon villain. But he is trying to protect his world for noble reasons. He loves his people and his family. By going down a very human route with Caiaphas it led me into really interesting dramatic territory."

At the heart of the drama, of course, is Jesus himself. Like Stafford-Clark, Deasy wanted to move away from the image of an otherwordly figure. "In so many other treatments Jesus is pure, floating on a cloud 2ft above the ground," he says. "He has to emerge as a person to other living people."

The key to this was giving him a voice that was rooted in the world, something Deasy found in an unexpected place. "I was struggling, so I talked to a friend of mine who is a priest. Every day he makes these concepts fresh to a contemporary audience so I asked him how he did it. He gave me a really simple piece of advice," he explains. "He said to think of Jesus as coming from Newcastle, as a working-class man from the north of Palestine who speaks Aramaic to fishermen and peasants, who comes to London where people speak Hebrew and are more educated. And he starts to preach the Gospel. He has got to use words that are quite simple, clear and rough at times. He has to explain concepts like redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, in plain, everyday language. This idea of Jesus coming from a real place worked. After that I found a voice for him that was easy and conversational, simple, without being patronising."

Perhaps the boldest decision Deasy made was the last one. The final episode of the six-part drama depicts the resurrection of Jesus in a way that is open to individual interpretation. In keeping with the Gospels, he reappears to his former friends in different ways, leaving them to decide what it is they have seen.

"A lot of accounts skip the resurrection," Deasy says. "We have followed the different gospel accounts faithfully. There are lengthy discussions among the disciples about what it means. They are the conversations we would have today in the light of an event like that. It resolves itself in that there is a resurrection of hope among the disciples. There’s a sense of new life, that suffering has been transformed into something meaningful. The extent of what that means as a viewer is up to you."

While Deasy was completing his script, Stafford-Clark was turning his attention to filming. When he decided to shoot in Morocco during summer, director Michael Offer thought he was crazy. "The old phrase about mad dogs and Englishmen sprang to mind," laughs the Australian director. "The heat has been challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes."

The Atlas film studios have been a favourite location for film-makers from David Lean to Ridley Scott, who filmed sequences for Gladiator here. Every aspect of The Passion’s look was carefully researched. For instance, production designer Simon Elliott and his team went to great lengths to ensure that the last supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the time. "The Passover lamb eaten during the festival would be part of the meal, along with herbs and green vegetables," says Elliott. "There were dates and raisins and unleavened bread and a sausage made of honey and dates."

In a similar vein, Elliott and his team tried to recreate the crucifixion as realistically as possible. Historical evidence suggests that Jesus would have been nailed to the cross in a way that is at odds with the image that has dominated Christian iconography for 2,000 years. "There has only ever been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, in Palestine in the Sixties," explains Elliott. "The body was in a slightly different position to the classic one, with the legs tucked up and under. Historians think it shows the crucifixion was fiendishly designed. If you could bear the pain of having the nails driven through your ankles you could take the weight and lift up your chest. But if you were put in a position where you couldn’t lift yourself up you died of asphyxia – you were basically suffocated. That’s the reason they broke your legs, so you would very quickly suffocate."

If the burden of retelling the greatest story ever told was heavy for the production team, however, it was greater still for the man chosen to portray Jesus. A relatively little known actor, acclaimed for his work in the BBC2 drama Soundproof and most recently seen in the gay drama Clapham Junction, Joseph Mawle was Stafford-Clark and Offer’s first choice for the role. He admits he has found it hard and lonely work. "It is incredibly daunting," he says. "It is in some ways the biggest role you can take on. There were times I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared, to be quite honest with you. If we don’t like Jesus, then we are in trouble."

The key, he says, has been to play him as flesh and blood. "He was a man. No two ways about it. The only way I could approach him was not as a god, but as a man," he says. He has, he admits, been particularly wary of the crucifixion scene. "I am pretty scared about it. I want to get it as right as possible, to play the reality as much as possible and to tell the story as best as possible."

Frustratingly, however, he will not be doing it today. As word comes through that filming has been abandoned for the day, Mawle heads off to begin preparing to film an interior scene at the studios.

Nigel Stafford-Clark, meanwhile, is in his office, anticipating battles much further down the line. Aware of the scrutiny that the film will get, both here and in the US where the BBC’s co-financier, HBO, will show the drama, he has already begun dialogue with the Christian community. "We have told them what we are doing," he says. "It’s very important that it doesn’t come as a shock to people, particularly to those for whom it is the most important story in their lives. The reaction has been very positive."

He is too old and wise a hand to expect it to avoid controversy completely. When he made Bleak House he had to field complaints from the Dickens Society and, faced with a rather broader constituency this time, he is braced for criticism again. He is unapologetic about the approach he and his team have taken, however. "My job is telling stories. The fact that it is the backbone of one of the world’s great religions is what, for me, has stopped it being told properly as a story before because people back away from it. It’s not just a story that is told in churches. It really happened," he says.

"Our version is not remotely controversial. There is no attempt to twist anything – you don’t see Jesus sleeping with Mary Magdalene or anything like that. We have tried to make it feel like it is really happening. And because you understand why people are behaving the way they are, what Jesus is doing becomes even more extraordinary."

"With the world the way it is at the moment," he continues, "anything that is about something that goes beyond your everyday existence is of value. People are looking for something beyond their new car. Telling a story like this quenches that thirst. It makes you feel there is something beyond your own limited existence."

And with that he leaves his office to head back out towards the set – checking nervously for the arrival of another Biblical storm.

The Passion begins on BBC1 on Sunday, March 16, and continues throughout Easter week

Further reading: A new passion;

Men behaving badly

Set in 1960s New York, the golden age of advertising, Mad Men portrays a world of wealth and clashing egos. Can it live up to its billing as the new Sopranos? Jonathan Bernstein thinks so...

As writer and executive producer on the last three seasons of The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner has the blood of Bobby Bacala and Christopher Moltisanti on his hands. His new series, the critically worshipped, Golden Globe-winning Mad Men, is another close study of a secret fraternity where egos clash, tempers flare and bloody vendettas are launched. Mad Men takes place in the Madison Avenue of 1960, when advertising was seen as a sexy, aspirational profession rather than one that needs to be prefaced by an apologetic explanation.

Don Draper, the series' lead character (played by the previously little-known but soon to be big-known Jon Hamm), embodies every attribute that once made advertising guys the envy of the nine-to-five world. He's suave, he's prosperous, he looks good in a suit, he has a bottomless repository of cynical quips, he glides through life in a haze of cigarette smoke, fuelled by martinis and the ministrations of a chic, discrete boho mistress who soothes away the pain of the day before he swans back to the suburbs and his perfect model-pretty wife and high-spirited, unblemished kids.

But Don Draper is an unknowable empty shell, hiding a secret past and utterly detached from his equally at-sea model-pretty wife. And, just as Don has made himself a sexy success by presenting a glossy, smoky facade, so his Manhattan-based agency Sterling Cooper, which made its millions by playing on America's insecurities about all the things they don't have and didn't know they needed, is a barely-hidden house of pain. Women are seen but rarely heard beyond the squeals of pleasure accompanying the regular, friendly slaps on the butt. The mousey girl who shows an aptitude with copy and makes the rare transition from the secretarial pool to the copywriter's desk is regarded with pity and suspicion by all the other females in the office. The only visible black faces are the cleaners who leave in the morning moments before the staff roll in. When a Jewish client comes in for a meeting, a frantic search culls the agency's lone Jew from the mailroom. Sterling Cooper's sole gay employee works overtime presenting himself as a ladies' man and comes close to unravelling when a male client makes a pass at him. The agency boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery, the only nominally recognisable cast member) can't control his raging appetites even after he's felled by a series of heart attacks. And, on the eve of the Kennedy- Nixon election, the pulse-takers of the agency are, almost to a man, convinced of a Nixon victory and confused by the prospect that times may be changing.

For all the secrets and the affairs and the personality clashes and even the physical confrontations, Mad Men unspools at an almost hallucinatory pace. Characters listen and consider what others have said. There are long leisurely moments devoted to people thinking about what has just happened to them. By TV standards - by life standards - Mad Men requires a considerable amount of attention. "Someone was joking with me," says Matthew Weiner. "They said 'you know what your show is? It's the phone's ringing and someone walks into the room but they don't answer it.' I can honestly say that the directorial style and the pace of the show is determined by how I like things. There's so much subterfuge, so much lying and dishonesty when people are together socially, that a lot of what you're seeing when it gets slow is the honesty. Some people have described it as dreamlike but there's always a story being told. I hope that when people watch it they're not doing their chequebooks and talking on the phone because they're going to miss something."

Despite the treatment meted out to anyone who isn't white, male and the right kind of rich - Sterling Cooper's ambitious, privileged twenty-something is an almost universal object of contempt - Weiner is an ardent admirer of the era whose foibles he chronicles: "1960 was just such a fruitful, interesting time in the United States. There was so much intellectual activity going on. There's amazing musical things, amazing books were coming out. Because of the prosperity of the time, people were starting to pay attention to materialism. And also, it really was the apex of New York City. It was the centre of production, publishing, fashion, playwriting, television. It was the biggest port, and then the pill came out in 1960, which was one of the greatest challenges to ever happen to humanity. And at the bottom of all that, advertising was on the verge of a revolution." But when we think of that time in America, our first impressions are the white picket fence and the happy family. "There's such a dichotomy in the culture between the way it's been presented to the world versus the way people were actually living. A lot of the cliched depictions of the 50s - and I picked 1960 as the height of the 50s' [popular US sitcom] Leave It To Beaver and the ideal family with the dad in the hat driving the car - people were laughing at these things back then. We have a perception of the way it was and it's not even close to the way it was."

While fictional advertising men and women are as plentiful now as they were in the days when Rock Hudson and Tony Randall strode the corridors of cinematic agencies, the current incarnation of the copywriter is permanently repenting for the shallowness of their career choice.

Don Draper may be a shadowy figure, unable to fully open himself up to anyone in his life, but he's at his best when he's unashamedly selling, whether it be a product, his agency or his version of himself. "I've always thought that the reason advertising has this appeal is that there's great stock given in jobs that are creative but also make money," says Weiner. "I find that salesmanship is an American religion. It's not about conscience. His conscience should be focused on his life. Business is not about conscience - business is about selling products, which is what he's best at. If you set it now, he would have to be apologising, he would have to be feeling sick about what he does."

As the man behind the suffocation of Christopher Moltisanti and the execution of Bacala in a model train shop, Weiner does not discount the role played by The Sopranos in the ultimate evolution of his subsequent show. "The Mad Men pilot script was how I got my job on The Sopranos. When I got there the show was already a billion dollar success. David (Chase)'s attitude was basically 'serve the story, make sure you're saying something, make everything a little movie'. You start to really think about the audience and surprising them and not giving them what they're expecting. I was there for three seasons, I'd already seen it as a fan for four. It made me raise my game, it made me pay more attention and it made me trust myself."

Mad Men, Sun, 10pm, BBC4

Mad Men- fine advertisement for American TV drama

A series set in a New York ad agency is a brilliant evocation of 1960s America suggests Benji Wilson.

It does Mad Men - a new US drama set in the world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s - a disservice to begin by talking about the amount of smoking it contains. But given that these days cigarettes are considered almost as pestiferous as the pox, it's impossible to ignore: every single character, without exception, is continually chugging away. The fictional advertising agency Stirling Cooper is a hazy, tar-stained place, and if the world Mad Men creates wasn't so completely convincing, it might look as if the writers were trying to make a point. But, instead, it reminds us that in New York in 1960 this is just what people did.

The same goes for the drinking, the misogyny, the anti-Semitism and the racial gibes. They are all so completely of-a-piece with the surrounding milieu that, after an episode or two, they become part of the socio-cultural furniture. It makes for some uneasy viewing, in a weird place between abhorrence and nostalgia.

Playing ping-pong with our memories of things past in this way is a trick that's become fashionable on television recently, most notably in the BBC's Life on Mars and its follow-up Ashes to Ashes. But where those two series play it for laughs, and sugar the pill with plenty of wham-bam action scenes, Mad Men is a much more subtle piece. It centres around Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Stirling Cooper. A war hero with a 1950s movie-star mien, Draper has one foot firmly in the past, but as a brilliant ad man and a survivor, he also has one eye on adapting for the future.

The team that he assembles around him, from his fledgeling secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss, aka President Bartlet's daughter Zoey in The West Wing) to the unctuous tyro Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) all have their own secrets and fears. In the first few episodes very little happens. Instead, Mad Men takes exquisite care to ground the viewer in the sights, aesthetic and mores of a particular moment in time. When it launched in America last year, Mad Men was the single stand-out critical hit, hailed as being an entirely original immersion in America's not-so-distant past. It won Best Drama at this year's Golden Globes, with Hamm taking the Best Actor award.

"I placed it very specifically," says the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, who worked as a producer and writer on The Sopranos. He cites the idiom of Salinger and John Cheever as well as movies such as The Apartment and Cash McCall as influences. Of course, 1960 was the year that John F. Kennedy was elected. But Weiner is trying to show how America remained as divided as ever. "There's always a counter-culture in the United States. The election of John F.Kennedy has been historically metabolised as this assertion of youth and hope - the truth is that election was decided by a very small percentage of the country; half the country did not vote for him."

Also, 1960 was a very important year for advertising. In the third episode Don and his masters-of-the-universe discuss Doyle Dane Bernbach's famous campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which used headlines such as “Think Small” and “Lemon” to sell Americans a little car that couldn't have been more different from the cocksure gilded beauty of a 1960 Cadillac.

"Advertising had just begun to change," says Weiner. "The Volkswagen ad is really revolutionary. It has a subversive quality that's based on honesty, humour, and it's talking to the consumer." That went entirely against the prevailing postwar mood, where people had implicit trust in the genius of American manufacturing, and had come to believe what they were told about each great new advance. Because Mad Men uses advertising as a metaphor for identity - are you how you present yourself to other people, or is the hard-sell just there to cover up your faults as a product? - watching Draper and co struggling to come to terms with a new type of advertising goes hand in hand with watching them face up to the climactic change that the 1960s was to bring.

"Dramatically speaking I liken it to the Titanic," says Weiner. "Why do people watch that movie? Everybody knows how it ends. But there is some pleasure in seeing people struggling to survive when the catastrophe happens, and there's also some intrinsic drama in people walking around talking about how safe the ship is. That's really what I'm doing."

With the current American presidential election candidates talking of 'change' to the point where it's become a blah-blah bromide, Mad Men has very cleverly stationed itself at another cultural crossroads. Everyone is teetering on the brink; they just don't quite know it yet.

Mad Men, Sunday, BBC Four, 10pm; Tues, BBC Two, 11.20pm

Jacques Cousteau in a box

The pioneering work of undersea explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, newly available on DVD, is as fascinating as ever to modern viewers, says Simon Reeve.

Jacques Cousteau was the towering figure of marine exploration, a man whose adventures - circling the globe at least 15 times - make my own trips, most recently travelling around the Tropic of Capricorn and the Equator, feel positively mundane by comparison. More than anyone else in history, he introduced us to the beautiful and mysterious world beneath the surface of our oceans, co-inventing the Aqualung during the Second World War and then making award-winning films and scores of underwater documentaries for American and global television.

During his long career Cousteau, who died in 1997, was rightly recognised as a pioneer. After his friend and patron Thomas Loel Guinness gave him a former Royal Navy minesweeper in 1951, Cousteau spent nearly five decades sailing the oceans, making Calypso the most famous small boat in the world. Cousteau turned Calypso into a floating laboratory, complete with a film-editing suite, and aboard it made the first full-length underwater film, the 1956 Oscar-winning epic The Silent World. He published more than 40 books, including a 20-volume encyclopaedia called The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau, and became one of the first global environmental stars, warning that humans were poisoning the planet.

So it is a fascinating treat, and a professional education, to watch the great man's later adventures on a new DVD box set featuring his documentaries on New Zealand, Tahiti, Haiti, Cuba and Cape Horn. He easily holds his own among the best television travellers, but even against the modern brilliance of Planet Earth the films stand up well. Inevitably there are wobbly shots and dodgy angles. Cousteau had to make do without the full enhancing and grading capabilities of modern editing suites, and as a result much of the underwater footage appears visually dull and lacking in colour. Nevertheless, many of the images are still breathtaking, and rank alongside the finest modern natural history camerawork. The films feel real, genuine, like polished vinyl next to the CD-quality of recent wildlife films.

It is hard to imagine a major US network commissioning these programmes today - and more's the pity. The films have only the briefest of nods to dramatic tension, ponderous scripts, and a small, stooped Frenchman with bad teeth as the central presenter. Cousteau is also old and wise, both traits considered unattractive in our youth-obsessed world. But Cousteau understood his medium and recognised the need for gimmickry. He used all manner of gadgets in his films, kept a red woollen hat on his head at a jaunty angle, and forced his crew to wear eye-catching silvery diving outfits underwater. They look like a cross between Flash Gordon and Woody Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Since Cousteau's death in 1997, his legacy has taken a few knocks. Allegations of anti-Semitism and mistreatment of wildlife during his early films have dented his reputation. But claims by bitter relatives that he was overly ambitious and arrogant, repeated in endless press profiles, cannot obscure the man's extraordinary achievements or the value of his timeless films.

As a documentary-maker, I particularly admire the fact that Cousteau does not commit the grave sin of focusing exclusively on glossy wildlife footage without giving the surrounding context. For decades, even the finest natural history filmmakers have made wonderful films about concentrated groups of creatures living in small patches of wilderness, while ignoring surrounding deforestation and framing their shots to exclude the tourist coach party on safari. So we have watched in awe, but without learning of threats to the creature or the reality of their sanctuary.

Cousteau was approaching the end of his career when he made the films featured in this box set, and his formula had evolved. Less than half of the episode about Haiti is set underwater; the rest of the programme is an exploration of Haiti and an explanation of how precious land and marine resources have been systematically devastated. In Cuba, Cousteau chats with Fidel Castro in various locations, and the footage is woven through the film. The US base at Guantanamo Bay even makes an appearance, with Cousteau questioning the base commander about whether a US presence on the island "whoo-milliates Cuba". Viewers young and old who would never normally watch anything on Caribbean politics are gently introduced to issues that still resonate today, more than 20 years later.

In some small way, this is what the BBC and I have tried to do with our series Tropic of Capricorn. My latest adventure, following the southern border of the tropics, is an attempt to introduce television viewers to the delights and tragedies of obscure parts of the world. Cousteau remains the master of the craft. His enthusiasm is contagious. I have long been happy on the ocean surface, sinking no further than the limitations of snorkelling allow. But after several hours watching Cousteau and his crew exploring the great blue depths, I will now be swapping my snorkel for a scuba tank, and learning how to dive.

Jacques Cousteau: New Zealand, Tahiti, Cuba & Cape Horn, the DVD box set, is released on March 10

In Treatment on the couch

Dr. Paul Weston looks normal. He lives in a nice house, where his patients come for therapy. He listens, he zeros in on their problem, he walks them to the door. But underneath, as viewers of HBO's In Treatment know by now, he might have as many -- or more -- problems than his patients.

Presented as a nightly soap opera, the show has become a guilty habit for those familiar with the subtext of therapy, argues Lynn Smith. Among the most addicted are therapists themselves who admit to some intense feelings, pro and con, about the drama. "It's like liver and onions," said Encino psychoanalyst Phillip A. Ringstrom. "People either love it or hate it." Some love it and hate it. Some started out hating it and now love it -- and vice versa.

Already some analysts have scheduled an In Treatment panel for March 9, with show runner Rodrigo Garcia and others, on "Responding to Erotic Transference" at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. Another New York group held a "psychoanalytic salon" last week to discuss issues raised by the television show, which presents a fly-on-the-wall look at a troubled therapist's sessions with his troubled patients. One real-life patient said he relates to the show's patients and compared his emotional growth favourably, said Beverly Hills therapist Cara Gardenswartz. "He is able to see objectively . . . what they are unable to see," she said. Others have introduced a personal issue indirectly by referring to one of the patients' issues.

On the other hand, some therapists worry that Weston (played to repressed perfection by Gabriel Byrne) behaves unethically and fear the nightly soap-style drama could hurt business by reinforcing stereotypes that therapists have as many, if not more, problems than their patients. "If managed care didn't wreck us, then In Treatment will do the trick," said Rosalind S. Dorlen, a Summit, N.J., psychologist. They say Weston discloses too much and crosses boundaries with his patients: Laura, a doctor who's mad about him; Sophie, a suicidal gymnast; Alex, a narcissistic Navy pilot; and Amy and Jake, a jealous couple caught in a cycle of rage and remorse. These patients are unusually aggressive and resistant, slamming doors, arguing, bringing in their own coffee makers.

And when at the end of the week, a visibly less compassionate Weston unburdens himself to Gina, a fellow therapist, she responds harshly. "She's far too intrusive and critical to be a helpful therapist or supervisor," said Dr. Glen Gabbard, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and author of "Psychiatry and the Cinema." He said therapists in his clinic told him, "I'd never go to someone who's so critical of me."

In Treatment has averaged only 320,000 viewers, not a large number even by cable standards. Yet in a time when pharmacology has gained ground in treating problems, what happens behind the closed doors of therapy still has the power to fascinate. "Not since The Sopranos have I seen so many therapists talking to each other about a show," Gabbard said. "If I walk down the hall, I'm stopped by four or five therapists asking, 'What did you think of last night's session?' 'What is going on with Dianne Wiest [who plays Weston's therapist]?' 'Is this therapy? Is this consultation? Is this supervision?' 'Is it chitchat between two people who hate each other and try to make up?' "

At first, therapist Gardenswartz found the show both depressingly realistic and annoyingly unrealistic. By the end of the third week, however, she had noticed "parallel process" in Weston's mimicking Laura's complaints in his sessions with Gina. "Now, we have something," Gardenswartz said. Some therapists said they plan to use clips of the show in postdoctoral courses to illustrate professional issues that arise in real-life sessions: Should therapists make coffee? Or start a couple's session when only one person has arrived?

Because real therapeutic sessions are private, media portrayals inordinately impress the public, patients and therapists themselves, Gabbard said. "We tend to internalize the media portrayals and carry them within as internal templates," he said. The profession has complained about simplistic, clownish or evil therapist characters for years. To find an unquestionably positive media portrayal, therapists had to go back to 1980's Ordinary People where Judd Hirsch's character helped Timothy Hutton's Conrad recover lost memories. "One young resident told me that he had used an exact line from the therapist in Ordinary People and it seemed to work well with his patient," Gabbard said.

In movie and television psychotherapy, conventions call for the therapist to dramatically recover repressed emotionally cathartic memories, he said. "The therapist always has as many problems as the patients. And a woman therapist always sleeps with the male patient, with The Sopranos being a big exception," he said. Also, something has to happen besides two people sitting in a room, talking. "More people get up and use the bathroom in the middle of a session in one week of Dr. Weston's practice than in 30 years of my own practice," he said.

The Sopranos' open-minded and serious Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) represented a pivotal turning point for therapists on television. "I heard that after The Sopranos was running for a couple of seasons, more men started going into psychotherapy," said Ringstrom, who wrote a running commentary on Slate as one of the "Four Shrinks." Until In Treatment, however, many therapists didn't like the wave of television therapists who followed Melfi. According to Gabbard, "Huff didn't get into the actual therapy or the patients' inner lives. State of Mind was the same. The main focus was the wacky zoo that inhabited the house where a bunch of really screwed-up people with no boundaries did strange things played for laughs." And HBO's Tell Me You Love Me "made the terrible mistake of showing explicit sex scenes in a highly clinical way," he said. "One of the good things of In Treatment is that it shows how much more erotic it can be to talk about it."

Some of the show's flaws can be chalked up to the Israeli series from which In Treatment was largely translated. "When they translated the show into English, they left the words, but some of it comes across differently here," said Lewis Aron, director of the New York University post-doctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. "They kept talking about the wall, and the violation of boundaries," that played out in Israel as a literary metaphor, he said. "The wall in Israel is the wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis. That's a country that's all about the violation of boundaries," he said.

What's more, part of Weston's struggle comes from the sort of therapy he's shown to practice -- what Ringstrom called a "method of suspicion" popular over the last 50 years. "He comes out of an old tradition in psychotherapy where 'the customer is always wrong.' Basically it's whatever the patient is saying is suspect. So on the one hand, he is very caringly getting them to open themselves up to him, and then he's playing gotcha." Now, Ringstrom said, many therapists practice hermeneutics, in which what a patient says is understood as the best they can do at the time. "You're helping them deepen their understanding but not necessarily always suspecting they're trying to con themselves, or you," he said.

Aron, who sponsored the New York salon, said one reason he likes In Treatment is that it at least shows "seriousness and depth of thinking about life and relationships." But that's not all.

"The main reason I like it is that I'm so relieved every night that those patients are his and not mine."

Here is psychologist, author and theoretician Robert W. Firestone's opinion about the psychotherapy deployed In treatment style.