Love in less than two hours

TVReview: Writer-director Stephen Poliakoff, who recently brought us the unendearingly obtuse Friends and Crocodiles, an examination of fin-de-siècle business and pleasure, this week continued his examination of the dying years of the last century with its companion piece, Gideon's Daughter, the second of two dramas linked by the character of chameleon-like writer and diarist William Sneath (Robert Lindsay).

In Gideon's Daughter, the exhaustingly elegant Bill Nighy played the equally elegant Gideon, supremely successful PR consultant to the then recently elected New Labour government. It is the summer of 1997, celebrity is the new celebrity, focus groups and spin doctors are popping up like thirsty hydrangeas, and Gideon, a widower increasingly distracted from his work by the sense that he is losing his sullen teenage daughter, is approached to mastermind the government's millennium celebrations in the London Dome.

Against real-life footage of a disconsolate Queen Elizabeth singing Auld Lang Syne in the chilly and colourless Dome, the fictional Gideon warns the organisers that without an imaginative theme, "you'll do more business in a pencil museum in the Lake District".

Poliakoff's subtle, beautiful and painterly film was full of his trademark memorable images: a vast, glittering suburban Indian restaurant, empty of diners; a red-carpeted film gala awash with torrential rain and wringing-wet starlets in halter-necks and diamante.

It was not always easy, however, to feel sympathy for the unerring Gideon, self-made man of the gangly west London variety that he has become, inhabiting a cut-glass, champagne-flute world. It was Gideon's unexpected love affair with Stella, a woman who had recently lost her young son in a cycling accident, brilliantly and heartrendingly played by Miranda Richardson, that gave the film its soul. And it was when their private grief was extravagantly mirrored by a nation mourning the death of the iconic Princess Diana that the personal began to reflect the polemical.

At the conclusion, Gideon, with the consent of his daughter, whom he has resolved to trust, simply disappears with Stella, the world he leaves behind continuing to spin, albeit a little less imaginatively, certainly on millennium night.

Poliakoff's laconic, privileged characters may be irritating to some people, but he has never claimed that his heroes or antiheroes are there to provide a map for the next millennium.

Maybe, as Gideon's daughter, Natasha (Emily Blunt), said, this is simply "a sad story about love" exquisitely rendered.

IF STEPHEN POLIAKOFF, love him or hate him, can ignite imaginations and stir memories in less than two hours, why did Love Lies Bleeding take up two whole nights to trip out its turgid, fatigued, mind-bogglingly awful claptrappery of a storyline?

For the record: Stuart (Hugo Speer) and Mark (Martin Kemp) were schoolfriends who decided to defecate on the bed of a bullying teacher, only the teacher caught them and was accidentally pushed down the stairs to his death - and Stuart got the blame. Thirty years later Stuart, now a crooked detective inspector, turns up on the doorstep of millionaire property dealer Mark. So far, so pedestrian, but wait for this: Stuart persuades Mark's surly wife to fake her own death - Stuart says he murdered her because Mark asked him to when drunk - Stuart tells Mark to kill a bloke in return - Mark screws it up - Mark gets arrested for murder - Mark's solicitor, Joanna (who is in the scratcher with Stuart), gets Mark's millions - Joanna double-crosses Stuart - Stuart strangles Joanna - Stuart gets arrested, bludgeons a couple of cops to death with a car torch, holds surly wife at knifepoint, has a little breakdown, and finally gets garrotted (sort of) by surly wife with a little help from her Kitchen Devil . . .

Okay? Two nights?! You could have tiled the bathroom, learned Urdu, phoned your mother. It was the motivations that got me: Joanna (the solicitor), mistress of avarice, with the opaque tights and the indignantly quivering lip line, was prepared to strip her boss of his assets and toss him a life sentence because "for all the years we worked together . . ." (quiver) ". . . you drove off to your mansion at the end of the day . . ." (quiver) ". . . and you never even offered me dinner". Now let that be a lesson to you.

RAY BURKE, ON the other hand, was by all accounts a generous fellow - "you'd never have to put your hand in your pocket when Ray was around" - or so it was said on Wise Guy: The Ray Burke Story which was deliverd into our livingrooms by the Scannal team. Scannal has the best opening graphics on television and can tell a mean story with clarity. Recounting the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s, when Conway's bar in Dublin town was allegedly rocking to the beat of the fat brown envelopes and the green fields of north Co Dublin were becoming acned with housing estates, Wise Guy was akin to a refresher course in corruption.

Burke's audacious public denial of James Gogarty's assertion that he, Burke, had received £80,000 from a building consortium, along with snippets from Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas's marvellously entertaining re-enactments of the Flood tribunal, made great watching.

Oh what heady days - glad they're behind us though. Or are they? Contributor Colm Mac Eochaidh raised the ugly possibility that the action may simply have moved on from Dublin to elsewhere in the country.

Another contributor, former councillor Frank Buckley, while asserting that residents of under-resourced west Dublin housing estates could justifiably point accusing fingers in Burke's direction when they went looking for a non-existent supermarket or youth club, also had an amusing, somewhat poignant story to tell about the once-feted politician. Apparently, the two men, on council business in London, were having an Italian meal together in Soho when Burke told Buckley that he was looking forward to retiring to Hampshire.

"But you're a republican, Ray," said Buckley. "That doesn't make sense." "Ahh yeah, but they're very civilised in Hampshire," Burke replied.

ONE WOULD IMAGINE, with The Apprentice and No Experience Required littering the TV schedules, that our appetite for contestant-led business shows would be sated. But no - hail The Fund, an entrepreneurial smorgasbord of nine eager men and women, complete with their "sharp" business ideas, competing to win a start-up prize of €25,000.

Each week the judging panel, which includes the mildly acerbic Maree Morrissey, eliminates one of the nine, until the two final contestants slug it out before the telephone-voting public.

Among the wannabe entrepreneurs peddling fire escapes and driving simulators is Angela Ferrara, who wants to provide beautiful lingerie for women sporting a D to double J cup.

Strangely, breasts featured more than once in the first programme, which showed highlights of the auditions for the series. At one of them, a rather subdued baker (who didn't make it into the final nine) was pitching an idea for personalised birthday cakes. "This one is popular," he revealed, showing a great big slice of confectionery with two circular mounds on top decorated with two red glace cherries.

I would have voted for the kooky contestant who had the notion of setting up a "doggy daycare". Bewilderingly positive, and looking a bit like Heidi, she told the rather serious judging panel that she wanted to call her business Shiny Happy Hounds, which, as one of the contestants said, "went down like a fart in Mass".

The weeping and wailing will get going properly over the next few weeks. My money is on the J cup.