No sooner has presenter Francesco da Mosta finished touring Italy with his version of Shakespeare (for those of you who missed Da Mosta's BBC2 series, the bard was a secret visitor to Francesco's native land and its swoopingly romantic people taught him everything he knew about "the arrrrt of loffff". In return, he laid some of his scenes in Verona and gave a four-century boost to tourism), than up pops the almost-as-fruitily-voiced Felicity Kendal – she always sounds to me like oranges being agonisingly squeezed – to take us travelling round India to examine his influence there.
Felicity Kendal's Indian Shakespeare Quest (BBC2) traced the arrival of the plays in India – via East India shipping expats and their amdram societies in the 1780s, their spread through the English-style education imposed by colonial rule, and their absorption into the native culture when, post-partition, the people were free to play with and parse this enforced but ultimately precious gift as they saw fit.
Kendal was born in England but grew up in India where her parents had founded the theatre company Shakespeareana, dedicated to bringing his plays to the masses. Her own and her parents' stories were woven neatly into the larger narrative. For once, the celebrity presenter – without which under modern commissioning rules a programme cannot be greenlit – seemed sensible, even occasionally helpful and illuminating, rather than madly grafted on 20 minutes before delivery deadline.
The best thing on television last year returned last night – 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4). It is a miracle of form and content. The latter comes from King's College Hospital in London. Each episode looks at a selection of patients dealt with by the accident and emergency department staff in a single 24-hour period. The form is exquisite. As with the first series, small accidents mingle with great traumas, talking heads fill in the back story as flesh is stitched, scans are ordered, wounds are cleaned, tempers calmed, tears dried, and lives are lost and saved.
Octogenarian Bill comes in with dicky knees, accompanied by his friend John. Their friendship, it emerges as they joke about football and bicker gently over who is to pay the cab fare home, has kept John going since his wife died last year. Kevin, who has fallen eight feet from some scaffolding and Sarah, a cyclist who swerved to avoid a pedestrian, come in with terrible injuries and are not expected to survive. They do and, in all important respects it seems, intact.
The amount of editing and the skill involved to give it such perfect shape and pace – it confers a sense of the urgency infusing everything, but never leaves you breathless, or the participants without enough time or space to maintain their dignity – gives me the feeling of exhausted wonderment I used to get as a child when I thought of all the drawing making my favourite cartoons must have required. And the same gratitude that someone, somewhere had gone to all that trouble to make something really, really good.
But naturally karmic balance to the television schedules must be restored and Channel 4 stepped unhesitatingly into the breach with the festival of stupidity that was Secret Eaters. It was the first episode of a new series that tries to unravel to a different set of fat people each week the hitherto unknowable mystery of why they are fat.
The fat people allow their houses to be filled with cameras for a week and are covertly shadowed by private investigators whenever they go elsewhere so that clues may be gathered. In last night's opening effort, a brother and sister pairing – Gill and Stuart, both in their late 30s, were baffled by their weight gain over the last few years when she eats nothing but salad and fairy dust and he lives on asparagus tips and mountain dew. What, I think you will agree, a puzzlement.
At the end, the week's footage is played back to them. They gasp in amazement as it is revealed to be mostly of chips and mayonnaise disappearing down eager gullets, sausages being pushed into mouths like logs into a sawmill, of mountain dew cunningly turning into pints of lager and of the fairies replacing their dust with sambuca shots and cheese. The mystery is solved, though you could be forgiven for feeling that the whole thing raises slightly more questions than it answers. Like, is there any limit to the depths that human denial can plumb? Or to the lengths that television commissioners will go to find fodder for their exercises in schadenfreude? Or to the appetite we the audience have for it? It's all very unappetising indeed.
