On the box: Framed | Ben Dover Straightens | The Real Housewives Of New Jersey

Published on Friday 4 September 2009 16:24

FRAMED BBC1 Monday, 8.30pm BEN DOVER STRAIGHTENS BBC4 Tuesday, 9pm THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW JERSEY Channel 4 Tuesday, 10.35pm

TREVOR Eve is one of my favourite television actors, as skilled at playing seemingly celibate men (Waking The Dead's Boyd) as rampantly oversexed ones (all those serials about adultery among the stripped-pine set from the quivering pen of Andrea Newman which don't get shown any more – boo).

In Framed he was pitched somewhere in between: Quentin Lester was a man who loved his work but was at least prepared to acknowledge there might be something else; who was pretty much entranced by the teacher of all the gap-toothed kids (herself gap-toothed) from their first encounter but took one hour, 11 minutes to snog her. Eve struggled in the role but can do no wrong in my book, so I blame the BBC. He shouldn't have to smile (Boyd hasn't, ever) and he certainly shouldn't be required to fall down a hole in pursuit of Bank Holiday one-off family-drama laughter.

An aesthete in horrible shirts, Lester was overseeing the temporary relocation of all the National Gallery's Monets and Van Goghs to a Welsh slate-mine. (This happened during the Second World War; the problem this time was a leaky roof.) Wales is officially the cuddliest corner of Britain right now and Framed exploited its scenery, the gaps in Snowdonia's peaks as well as the gaps in the teeth.

Old bats from Gavin And Stacey were prodded into position, presumably with the help of giant leeks. I half expected to see Cerys Matthews or even Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers as the pub entertainment, but that's just me being bitter because Scotland is no longer the favourite setting for cosy entertainment like this on account of Gordon Brown and our bungling banks.

Framed, though, was a bit cheesy for my tastes – like Welsh rarebit. The stuff about art being for everyone probably read better in Frank Cottrell Boyce's book, so that only really left a version of those creaky Cointreau commercials, this time with the woman – much younger than Lester, echoing old Eve roles – working her strange allure on the man. "And gradually, boyo, the cheese melts…"

Lindsay Honey probably idolises Trevor Eve, an actor at the top of his game, highly respected. You may know Honey better as porn star Ben Dover. He's big in his field (a five-times winner of the Golden Genitals gong) and at fan conventions we saw lots of devotees shake his hand with their faces fuzzed out. But Honey yearns for the credibility that comes with serious acting, and Ben Dover Straightens in the Rich Man, Poor Man series followed his attempts to get to grips with "that Shakespeare nonsense, Brechtian bollocks and Proust or whatever he's called".

It took me time to warm to Honey, just as he struggled with the concept of acting, which was more than the wham-bam he was used to in films such as Sex And The Settee and Rutting Season 3. There was a lot of lounging around in his gated wages-of-sin palace before the security pole in the middle of the drive went flaccid and he sped off in his penis extension to his final porn shoot – a remake of St Trinian's which ignominiously did not require him to drop his trousers, as he was playing the Alastair Sim role of headmistress.

But he turned out to be an endearing soul who was forced to admit to his drama tutor, Paul Clayton: "As Ben Dover, I've never exposed myself emotionally." These workshop scenes were the best bits of the doc. A director who'd also appeared in soaps, the old hand Clayton told Honey: "Real acting is finding out what's inside you and letting it come out."

I was worried about what was going to come out after Honey conceded that his large talent was pretty one-dimensional. But there was relief all round when, with some bravado, he declared: "Is this a dagger I see before me?"

So who's your favourite among The Real Housewives Of New Jersey? Early on in the opener to this reality import, I was torn between Teresa, a curious mix of lewd and prude, whose dream home under construction is a curious mix of marble and onyx, and Dina, who wanted to assure us that the only reason she wasn't a great tennis player was because her cleavage was so magnificent (Sulky daughter, the other side of the net: "So why don't you wear two bras?").

But I moved towards Danielle when just about everyone else – all the other "homemakers" in this community without a centre, or a heart in any sense, where sisters marry brothers and where those of Italian extraction bore on about "da family" – seemed to gang up on her. In their eyes, she's probably a bit dangerous. Nineteen times engaged before No 20 ("I kept that ring because, well… hello!"), she's single again. And there was a moment of genuine poignancy, as tangible as Dina's onyx, even her marble, when Danielle waited an hour and a half at the rendezvous in this dreadful pub-less land for an online date from wealthymen.com who never showed. He called himself "Gucci Model" but via phone-message Danielle sneered: "You're probably some fat banker."