On the box: The Execution of Gary Glitter | Brought Up By Booze | Miranda

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 13:56

THE EXECUTION OF GARY GLITTER

Channel 4 Monday 9pm

BROUGHT UP BY BOOZE

BBC1 Wednesday 10.45pm

MIRANDA

BBC2 Monday 8.30pm

IN THE office the other day a colleague and I were talking about The Execution Of Gary Glitter, only neither of us had seen it and were unsure if we would, so we ended up discussing stuff which probably makes us sound quite frivolous. "I wonder what all those Gary Glitter impersonators are doing now," said my workmate. "Their careers must have died overnight."

This got me thinking about the Glitter Band who backed Gary, had glam-rock hits of their own and, thrillingly, employed two drummers. I've always loved the songs of Britpop renegade Luke Haines, not least because he loved glam, and one of them goes: "Gary Glitter, he's a bad, bad man/Ruined the reputation of the Glitter Band." But then I thought: I can't put this off any longer; I'm going to have to watch the programme…

In an arduous week on TV – lots about war and death; car-crash drama, literally, every night in Collision or, for most of us, The Greatest Scot courtesy of the egg-sucking grannies at STV – this was the toughest watch. A fantasy docudrama, it imagined that the government had granted the wish of 54 per cent of the British people (according to the most recent opinion poll) and brought back the death penalty for sex offenders, with Paul Francis Gadd being the first to face the gallows.

Face the gallows? I tapped that out so easily. The language of the execution hasn't really been needed in this country for 45 years. Writer-director Rob Coldstream reckoned that hangmen nowadays would prefer to be called "hanging technicians". An actor played one and demonstrated how the gruesome mechanics worked. "Watch it, that floor's live," he cautioned a cameraman straying near the sealed trapdoor.

Some parts of The Execution Of Gary Glitter were quite effective. Calmly, they showed us what we'll have to, as it were, get our heads round if we're serious about bringing back hanging, such as when the operative pointed to a blocked-up hole in the wall: "Behind there, the prisoner thinks he's looking at a bookshelf. It's not, it's a sliding door leading straight out from his cell."

But considered moments were rare. Too often the film was opportunistic, creepy and shockingly thin on legal rigour. Was it necessary to use a real person, still alive and serving his punishment, as the subject and to play out his death (the jury voted for it) with a dull thud? And I can see how Garry Bushell got mixed up in this, but what on earth persuaded Miranda Sawyer to jump from reporting for The Culture Show to the kind of talking-head guff ("We just thought he was the king!") you get on those witless list shows?

But I must praise Hilton McRae, the Scottish actor who portrayed the fallen teen idol. He didn't have much to work with – a bald head, a Catweazle beard, a chess set, a bundle of fan letters addressed to "The Leader" and a radio which played the chart-topping mash-up of old stompers and the "I am not a monster" speech Glitter delivered from the dock – but he did a terrific job.

The first series of Celebrity Love Island featuring Calum Best – you must remember it: Abi Titmuss, Paul Danan and Lady Isabella Hervey featured too – fell just short of being an apotheosis of televisual entertainment and, indeed, post-millennial culture. Then came a show for MTV following his attempts to remain celibate for 50 days, which had the noted aesthete Kenneth Clark breathing a sigh of relief from beyond the grave: "So that's Totally Calum Best! For an awful moment I thought he'd remade Civilisation and done it better." Suffice to say that George Best's laddie hasn't really known what to do with his life.

But Brought Up By Booze was a revelation. The concerns of the documentary – the one in ten British children who have a parent who abuses alcohol – were uncomfortably familiar to him. "Your dad was drunk every single day for 30 years," said his mum Angie right at the start, as she painted a picture of a sad father-son non-relationship: George communing with his adoring public; Calum in the bottom left-hand corner tugging at his trouser leg.

Calum met kids left to fend for themselves by bevvied parents, including a girl whose only line in the school's nativity play was "Baa", but still her father missed it.

Revisiting the Chelsea pub (now under reconstruction) where he tried to bond with the old man, he made for a warmly sensitive presenter. Ironic that he should finally find his voice with such a sad subject.

After all that, I needed some laughs. Modern Family on Sky1 is still the funniest show around, but Miranda began with promise. Miranda Hart, who also writes, plays the eponymous heroine: a joke-shop owner and a big lass, she's Queen Kong to her old schoolmates, all of whom are getting engaged. She fancies Gary from the restaurant next door but last week couldn't find an outfit in Big & Long for her sort-of date. "And I don't suppose Lanky & Sweaty or Swallowers & Amazonians will have anything either," she wailed.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 15/11/09