TV Review: The Bill used to be fine procedural police drama, with cases wrapped up neatly in half-an-hour. You could watch any episode from any series and it never felt out of sync.
There was something comforting about its deliberate lack of character development, how the plod of the feet at the beginning told you all you needed to know about what would follow. Having stretched itself to several time slots a week, it is just another soap, only with the novelty of its setting. The characters are the usual Petri dish sort, pushed to the limits of plot until they can take no more. It is awash with people who became famous in other soaps. None of them seem to have learned anything.
To mark 20 years on the air, it broadcast live on Thursday night. Following a couple of examples in the US, most famously that of ER, going out live has become something of a challenge for British soaps. Coronation Street aired a live 40th birthday episode on Hallowe'en three years ago. It pays homage to the early days of television drama, when live broadcasts were the norm, and which bequeathed upon the industry a wealth of anecdotes about stage actors freezing in front of cameras, of improvisation and of panic.
To the modern programme maker and viewer there is something tempting in the possibility of disaster - actors forgetting lines or walking into the camera, set walls falling down when someone closes a door, a cameraman unable to control a sneeze.
Yet, these days a live episode is preceded by endless hours of rehearsal. Animals and babies are prohibited, which narrows the odds of disaster. You wonder do they have a recorded episode available at the press of a panic button. On Thursday night, all went well. Someone pointed a torch that wasn't turned on, but that will hardly fuel a lifetime of after dinner speeches. Ultimately, it was just another episode of The Bill, with its accomplishment there for the crew to enjoy, but the audience not to notice.
On Tuesday night's ITV National Television Awards, Trevor McDonald presented the ceremony in the same manner in which he reads the news. He even held on to some redundant paper, like it is a security blanket with which he faces the world.
As a newsreader, McDonald's face is a comforting blank upon which can be read tragedy, joy, solemnity and amusement at light stories about rollerblading dogs. As a compère, though, he is a leak through which the atmosphere drains. His mouth is a place where jokes go to die. If you listened carefully you could just make out the groan of his scriptwriter within the overbearing silence each time another McDonald punchline withered. The intimacy of the occasion seemed to make him uncomfortable. When Jessie Wallace, who plays Kat Slater in EastEnders, took to the podium and began sobbing a grateful acceptance speech, he suddenly appeared beside her and for a moment you thought he was about to give her an even bigger surprise.
He did. He told her to hurry along because we need to go to a break. He uttered a curt, impatient order to her - "Quickly!". She reacted like she'd been bitten by koala.
The National Television Awards reacted by ambushing him with a lifetime achievement award. He deserves it. As well as being the first black reporter on British television, he is the face of the news in that country. However, it was frustrating to see how he channelled his shock into unshakeable professionalism. He took to the microphone for what should have been a thank you speech but instead looked straight into the camera and read the autocue. Tune in after the break for the news, or turn to ITV2 for after-show reaction.
There wasn't a damp eye in the house. "He's half-man, half-desk," said Lenny Henry in the prize-giving tribute to McDonald, and while it was intended affectionately, it was awfully close to the truth.
What Gifted - Kay Mellor's tale of a drug-rapist footballer - lacked in drama it made up for in currency. This was not a rush job in response to the recent spate of players behaving badly, but it is hard to believe that when those real stories broke there weren't a couple of commissioning editors whose hearts skipped as everyone else's sank.
It centred on three women, lap-dancing single mother Sharon (Christine Tremore), her friend and fellow student Maxine (Claire Goose) and Maxine's aunt, solicitor Linda (Mellor). Sharon goes home one night with up-and-coming star Jamie Gilliam (Kenny Doughty) only to wake up in his bed the next morning with no memory of how she got there. Unable to convince the police of what's happened, she takes the money offered by his football club, while the other two women try to find out what really happened. In the current climate, of course, it is less a case of drama catching up with reality and more of reality trying to catch up with Footballers Wives.
Mellor played a little pre-publicity game with the media by claiming that her footballer was based on a real case that never made it to court. There may have been some fun to be had in deciphering the clues if the football sequences hadn't been coated in predictable cliché. There was a tough Scottish manager. The action scenes were choreographed and ridiculous. The match commentary was never less than inflated and epic. It was unable to offer any insight into the state of the game other than those Mellor picked up from the tabloid headlines, and which were then deposited into the script.
"Footballers are the new rock stars," said Linda, early on, just so we understood.
The drama was a little better balanced, tipping along nicely until it had to resolve itself, at which point it seemed to run into a goalpost and give itself a nasty concussion. Its final half-hour was dizzy with twists until the credits interrupted and told it to go take a bath. All through, it stuck fast to Mellor's simple maxim, which is that girls should stick together. As in Band of Gold, Fat Friends and Playing the Field, those who turn their back on their mates for a man can expect karmic retribution. But she writes only for women. Maybe there is a drama to be written which will be astute enough to take football beyond the hyped melodrama of Footballers Wives or the comic soap of Dream Team, but it will need to be written by someone who uses men as more than mere foils for morally superior female characters. After all, football is a masculine issue.
Being a Philip King production, The Raw Bar knows when a programme about music should play music. In this potted history of Irish trad, the performances are revered, caressed. The camera moves about them as if admiring a piece of sculpture. As with the quite outstanding Freedom Highway, the previous film from his Hummingbird Productions, there is a steady drip-drip of epiphany. Every now and again, I return to Tom Waits's performance in that programme, his voice digging into the crust of the vocal range, scooping out rich, dirty beauty. On dull days it helps remind your heart to beat.
Traditional music does not sit comfortably on television. It so often seems to feature old men sitting at the centre of a circle, while the colour peels from the screen. They may contain a mix of new and archive material, but it all looks like it's from the archives.
The Raw Bar, with presenter Dermot McLaughlin, sets out with a fiddle and quiet evangelism, to rescue the music from "that terrible phrase, diddly aye". The montages to the music featured mountains and lakes, but also DARTS and cables and city streets, suggesting an effort to reclaim the music for all of us.
The first programme was subtitled It All Sounds The Same, and it passed a single reel, The Star of Munster, through several instruments and players to prove that it really doesn't. The tune was heard through banjo, pipes, fiddle, string quartet. The talking heads - among them Máire Breathnach, Mick Kinsella and Ciaran Carson - talked of how a tune infuses and manipulates the player, not the other way around. The originality comes not in the tune but in the interpretation. "Everything has already been written,"said musician Eoin Duignan. Perhaps, but there are a lot of us who have yet to hear it all.