On the box - TV review

Published on Friday 17 October 2008 16:25

WIRED STV Monday, 9pm STEPHEN FRY IN AMERICA BBC1 Sunday, 9pm PETER KAY'S BRITAIN'S GOT THE POP FACTOR Channel 4 Sunday, 8pm and 10.15pm

ARE we ready for a drama about City greed and nasty moneymen who'll stop at nothing to get even richer? I rather think we might be. But Wired was made before we all suddenly had to become experts in sub-prime, stagflation, black swans, naked shorts and the dead cat bounce, and so if you were expecting a series about the kind of sums that can bring great Scottish financial institutions to their knees, ruining our reputation for canniness for ever more, then you might be disappointed.

Written by Katie Brooke, this is the tale (in three parts) of a middle-manager in a bank who's blackmailed by a posh villain into siphoning off money from a tycoon's account. For this she's getting a mere 10,000. The big shot stands to lose a whole lot more than that, although as yet we haven't been told how much. This man has built his empire from scratch, and making him Scottish must have seemed very obvious. Until last week, that is.

Louise, the middle-manager, is played by Jodie Whittaker, and Laurence Fox is the crook who was previously sacked from the bank for being "the son of the son of… he wanted to get rich quick without putting in the hours". He's the son of James Fox, of course, and Robert Stephens' laddie Toby is the gentlemanly type fast becoming Louise's only ally, but he's in fact a fraud squad detective. Our heroine was drawn into the deception by the father of her daughter and her best friend. She might well ask – as we are all doing in the wake of the current meltdown – who's there left to trust?

Wired may not be the cleverest drama around, but scenes like the one where Louise enters an ornate, high-ceilinged nightclub and asks "Didn't this used to be a bank?" now take on a harder edge. The show portrays the City as not only corrupt but sexist, with women achieving promotion only to find out they're to be used for decoration to woo super-wealthy clients. Could this really be true in 2008? I wasn't sure. But then my wife, who used to work on a trading desk, told me: "I was once offered 100 by my employers to sit on this rich bloke's knee and sing him 'Happy Birthday'." She still refuses to tell me what 200 bought you.

As institutions go, Stephen Fry is invariably more reliable than any bank. Invest with him – that is, watch one of his programmes – and you're nearly always rewarded with a good time and some witty asides. In Stephen Fry In America he's visiting every US state; it's a country that has fascinated him from the moment he learned he was almost born an American, nearly becoming "Steve".

In the first dispatch he knocked off all of New England and half a dozen other states. I didn't really understand why he chose to do the trek by London cab, but no matter, he met some interesting people along the way, including the Goodfellas of a Queens social club whose card games seem to rely on the Joe Pesci method for settling differences of opinion ("Who's going to tell me about this bullet hole?" inquired our corduroy-jacketed guide, tentatively). Much more Fry's kinda guy was the black, gay, Republican, Baptist professor of theology at Harvard University.

I didn't expect Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to be his kinda guy, but the brainy host of QI declared himself a fan of the much-mocked online encyclopaedia. In Connecticut Fry tried to squeeze into a submarine ("This is not me at my best"). In Rhode Island he plied a funny old bat with gin for her memories of JFK's marriage to Jackie Onassis ("It was too funny," she said of the parade of overdressed Kennedys). Then, in New Hampshire, he called in at the Mount Washington Hotel, venue for the big 1944 pow-wow which established the International Monetary Fund, the gold standard and most of the financial systems the world uses today (ha ha).

But some states got short shrift: for instance, Maryland only received the briefest of namechecks. I felt a bit sorry for the place and so did some research. Maryland, it turns out, isn't famous for much. There was a tea party once, but it was completely overshadowed by the one in Boston. I should have trusted our host, and even though this six-part series isn't shaping up to be classic Fry, it's perfectly watchable. And since this info came from Wikipedia, maybe I should start to trust it as well.

Earlier this year I got irritated by ITV's self-congratulatory referencing of The X Factor in its other shows, culminating in the dire, full-blown Rock Rivals homage, so I wasn't really in the mood for Peter Kay's Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice. It seemed too obvious a target, even for a comedian as talented as its writer-producer-tunesmith-star.

It was very long: 75 minutes, plus another hour for the result. It looked exactly like the grand final of the light-entertainment leviathan, right down to the carpet pattern in the exhibition-centre foyers where the hopefuls wait to audition. But this show was done with obvious affection, for TV itself and the showbiz dreaming of the provinces. And when the first-round flops included a unicycling chef tossing pancakes to U2's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', or when a judge was moved by a restricted-height double act to remark: "Two dwarves, two donkeys: it's like a Saturday night round at Simon Cowell's" – what wasn't there to like?

Kay played Geraldine, a sex-change part-time dinner lady and full-time diva from Belfast. The competition was tough – especially from the wheelchair-bound sisters who formed Two Up Two Down with their husbands after a tandem jet ski accident on Niagara Falls – but a seamless medley of 'Born To Run', 'Born Free', 'Free Nelson Mandela' and 'Umbrella' won him/her the prize.