Aidan Smith's TV week: A Man in Full (Netflix), Shardlake (Disney+), The Piano (Channel 4)

Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker and Sarah Jones as Serena Croker in A Man in Full. Picture: Netflix/Mark Hill

Jeff Daniels leans into the Trumpian qualities of Charlie Croker in A Man in Full, but the drama falls short of its source material

A Man in Full Netflix ***

Shardlake Disney+ ****

The Piano Channel 4 ****

Arthur Hughes as Matthew Shardlake and Anthony Boyle as Jack Barak in Shardlake. Picture: Disney+/Adrienn Szabo

Shortly after Donald Trump became US President and right at the moment when he started to behave in a - no other term will do - Trumpian fashion, devotees of a thumping 742-page novel were nodding knowingly and nudging each other in online book groups.

He’s so vain, they were saying, he probably thinks A Man in Full is about him. Now, Tom Wolfe published his doorstop back in 1998 when even the TV career was still some way off for Trump. Nevertheless that was the year an interviewer asked him about White House ambitions and was told: “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about [Bill Clinton] with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?”

Seven years ago, Wolfe fans - Wolfies in the current vernacular - had no trouble totting up the similarities between Trump and the book’s protagonist Charlie Croker: “Real estate, reactionary views, football, trophy wife … ” And if you don’t know A Man in Full - “Stuffing the whole of contemporary America into a single, great sprawling comic work of art,” went the New York Times review - I defy you to watch Jeff Daniels in the Netflix version and not think of The Donald.

Right from the start, in fact, when Atlanta big shot Croker says: “A person needs to live with vigour otherwise what’s the point? End of the day a man’s gotta shake his balls!” This looks, though, like the end of his life - he’s collapsed on the floor. So we flashback a week or so to the skyscraper HQ named after himself, just like Trump Tower, where Croker is greeting the men with aggressive backslaps, one of whom he nicknames “Peepee”, and being suggestive towards the women while the much younger, buxom blonde Mrs C follows a dutiful three paces behind. This is the 60th birthday bash and the man is in his element.

Claudia Winkleman hosts tear-fest, The Piano. Picture: Nic Serpell-Rand/Channel 4

The morning after the party, though, he’s summoned to a meeting at his bank to be told, in very unbanky language, that he’s a “s***head”. For why? “Flying around in your private jet, buying up big plantations so you can shoot quail. You think you can just go hog-wild and nobody can touch you.” The bank are touching him - for the $800 million he owes.

Croker isn’t having this, telling his lenders they “rose to glory on my back!”

He’s going to shake his balls. But so is the bank’s Harry Zale who declares: “Part of being a man - not the main part, but a part - is the ability to kick another man’s ass.” Zale is pretty objectionable and with the snivelling Peewee as his assistant you may find yourself siding with Trump, sorry, Croker.

So far, so macho. What about the women? Sarah Jones is the second wife, Diane Lane the first and Lucy Liu her step aerobics buddy although destined for a bigger involvement with a nasty political scandal brewing and eventually threatening to cause Atlanta to convulse over race.

The novel was state-of-nation. With only six instalments this isn’t, despite David E. Kelley as the showrunner and Daniels demonstrating yet again how far he’s travelled as an actor since he drove the furry, floppy-eared dog van in Dumb and Dumber. Like Martin Amis, Wolfe produced firework displays on the page. In common with every Amis adaptation, much of the original dazzle of A Man in Full is missing on the screen. And of course regarding Trump, truth has proved stranger and more outrageous than fiction.

It’s so dark at the start of Shardlake that I’m instinctively reaching for the contrast and brightness buttons which of course are no longer on my TV. By accident I press the volume one and suddenly everything’s way too loud. “Whoomph!” That’s the sound of a man merely putting on his heavy flaxen shirt.

It’s so dark because the year is 1536, a candlelit world. When my eyes adjust a familiar tombstone face appears - Sean Bean, last seen doing the washing up and mooching around B&Q in the superb anti-drama Marriage. Here he’s Thomas Cromwell and Shardlake might seem brave, or foolish, of Disney, taking on a period in history for which the Wolf Hall trilogy has become the go-to text.

But Hilary Mantel didn’t have a monopoly on Cromwellian affairs. CJ Sansom stuck his disabled sleuth bang in the middle of them and this is a fitting tribute to the author who died just before the series premiere.

Disney have thrown everything at Shardlake except lighting. It’s like Cecil B. DeMille is directing as enormous dining tables groan with suckling pig and mead slooshes in pewter tankards while outside a hundred horses thunder past. Then … “Whoomph!” This time it’s the sound of an emissary of Henry VIII being decapitated at a monastery.

Cromwell dispatches Matthew Shardlake to investigate. The Tudor tec had been blocked from entering the priesthood because he “was not made in God’s image”. Arthur Hughes, himself disabled, is terrific in the role. Even the business of putting on a shirt is an ordeal, flaxen or otherwise. Alas, shirt innovation - Bri-Nylon, drip-dry, available from Ye Olde C&A - is many centuries away.

The best line this week, maybe of the year so far, is: “Sir, there’s a distracting codpiece at the door.” This is Shardlake’s housekeeper Joan (Kimberley Nixon) announcing the arrival of Cromwell’s henchman Jack Barak (Anthony Boyle), forced on our hero for the mission. Later Shardlake ponders his “crookback” some more: “Although I cannot wear a codpiece that would catch the eye as others can, I am … noted for my gait. It’s my disguise.”

He dreams, maybe forlornly, of meeting and marrying a comely wench but cannot mope for long. To the monastery! To interrogate the “papists, thieves and sodomites” therein! Inspection of the headless corpse reveals the poor sod was “executed as if he was royalty, like Queen Anne Boleyn”.

I didn’t watch the first series of The Piano but am all in now. Claudia Winkleman, so heavy of fringe, would surely be at home in 1536, peering through the gloom. Back then, of course her show would have to be called The Harpsichord or maybe The Spinet. But I’m pretty sure these amateur plinkers - among them boxer Ellis and nine-year-old Ethan - would be just as accomplished on either.

Then there’s Duncan, 80 and suffering from dementia. “I would have him in any situation rather than not have him,” says his wife Fran. He plays beautifully, a self-composed melody celebrating their 42 years together, and Winkleman’s fringe must come in useful, concealing the tears as the rest of us blub.