On the Box: Occupation | The Secret Life of the Airport | The Supersizes Eat.... The Eighties

Published on Friday 19 June 2009 16:56

OCCUPATION BBC1 Tuesday-Thursday, 9pm THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AIRPORT BBC Four Monday, 9pm THE SUPERSIZERS EAT ... THE EIGHTIES BBC2 Monday, 9pm

THIS is becoming boring. I spend an entire year being cruel about James Nesbitt – devoting myself to the vital task – only to have to spend all of the next year praising him. He was tediously good in Occupation, a big, important drama about Iraq, something of a taboo subject for the BBC, and which only made it to our screens the week the government finally announced an inquiry into the war. Nesbitt is now officially my favourite actor; I reckon there's nothing he cannot do. He could recite the phonebook and we would call it a hard-hitting, heart-rending saga of our times. Well, the Yellow Pages anyway.

Occupation was both hard-hitting and heart-rending: the look of terror on the face of the just-signed-up son of Nesbitt's sergeant when he came adrift from his unit in Basra and hid in an Iraqi boy's bedroom – a boy himself, who shouldn't have been fighting in the most stupid of wars – will stay with me for a long time. Same with the scene where Sgt Mike Swift found him dead and placed a hand on his bloodied head. Just a couple of hours before, back at base, Swift had cut short his son's cry for help over a wrong choice of career to be with his Iraqi girlfriend.

At first I didn't get the romance; it got in the way, seemed to be over-humanising the conflict and threatened to tip this three-parter over consecutive nights into the realm of the mushily generic, as if it had been made by ITV or Hollywood. Also, why would anyone go back to that hellhole, for anything? But all the main protagonists ended up going back: Swift for love, Cpl Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) for greed, L/Cpl Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) for conscience. Peter Bowker's brilliant script convinced you all this could happen (probably has) and so did the performances, uniformly excellent.

The last big, important Iraq drama was Generation Kill, from America, and, of course, Occupation didn't have its epic sweep or the budget for as many tanks. Generation Kill, I seem to remember, featured lots of show-offy camera pans of the full compliment of grunts and their hardware. I say "seem" because, despite a blistering start, I'm afraid I gave up on it. Occupation did pretty well to put over the horrors of Basra's back closes with claustrophobic camerawork and possibly just the one copter buzzing overhead. And next to it, Generation Kill now seems boastful, like America often can be about war.

Ultimately, the stronger narrative is what should win Occupation an award for writer Peter Bowker: he showed us what it is to attempt to be human in the most inhuman of conditions. Best actor prize? Sorry Jimmy, you know you're my new best acting friend, but I'd have to give it Graham who played the squaddie-turned-mercenary like Joe Pesci might have done, although he also reminded me of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. Duvall's Kilgore loved the smell of napalm in the morning. Graham's Peterson sniffed at all times of the day on account of his predilection for coke, which he liked to consume hanging off balconies, to a booming rave accompaniment. Of Iraq, he soliloquised: "I dunno, I just... I get it, know what I mean?"

Last year's The Secret Life Of The Motorway may have seemed, by its title alone, like the kind of programme idea an increasingly desperate Alan Partridge would have fired at a telly-commissioning department, after Monkey Tennis and Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank had been rejected. But, surprise surprise, it turned out to be as gripping as hot tar.

The Secret Life Of The Airport is the follow-up and a theme is developing. In the first programme we learned how Germany sped ahead with the m-way concept while Britain dithered. Now we discover that the first 20th-century politician to understand and exploit the power of flight was one A Hitler, who approved designs of stunning modernity for airports, while for a long time we made do with some tents and duckboard down Croydon way.

It seems we discovered half the planet then just sat back. Britain was slow to build decent terminals, slow to anticipate mass air travel, slow to provide signs in different languages. I didn't realise signage could be so interesting, and the only thing this fascinating opener lacked was Norman Tebbit.

Maggie Thatcher's "Chingford Skinhead" (rtd) is popping up on TV when you least expect it and he's currently my favourite impromptu comedy turn. In the documentary My Strike earlier this year the union basher revealed his revolting past as a picket-line organiser for BOAC pilots. All pilots were posh in his day; all air passengers were posh in the beginning. On the very first Croydon-Paris flight, one was sick into his bowler. Tebbit, I'm sure, could have amused us with similar tales of upper-class, in-flight discomfiture.

No fear, though, Norm turned up in The Supersizers Eat... The Eighties. For the first of a new run re-heating food down the ages, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins returned to the era of the power lunch, when conversely "lunch was for wimps", and when the F-Plan Diet battled against tiramisu, Pot Noodles and other excesses. If the booming consumption of coffee and champagne didn't get you then the game of squash did. Heart attacks shot up in the 80s and that's where our present obesity has its origins.

Thatch and her cronies dined at a restaurant called Shepherd's, and Coren and Perkins invited Tebbit and Jeffrey Archer back there to recall how the PM could never have been described as a foodie (another 80s invention) and was unable to remember what she'd eaten five minutes after the meal was over.

Pretending to forget how he chewed up and spat out the miners, Norm said: "I think I was a probably a bit too soft back then." What a wag. Give this man his own show, now!