Television: Cloudy outlook

Published on Thursday 2 October 2008 15:24

Sunshine Tuesday, BBC1, 9pm Sanctuary Monday, ITV4, 9pm Imagine: The Story of the Guitar Sunday, BBC1, 10:50pm

BEWARE OF A STRANGE BURNING sensation on Tuesday night. You may find the cockles of your heart being warmed to an uncomfortable degree by Sunshine, a comedy drama that is so desperate to be loveable and life-affirming it would turn anyone into a grumpy cynic.

Directed and co-written by Craig Cash of The Royle Family, it's clearly aiming to tap into the same vein of working class northern life. Steve Coogan stars as Bob "Bing" Crosby, a binman with a gambling problem and a penchant for dopey jokes, whose family suffer the consequences of his irresponsibility. But it's a corny and sentimental affair, so old-fashioned that it feels at times like a throwback to the 1970s – Jim Dale or Richard O'Sullivan could appear at any moment. In fact, the time setting is oddly dated: nothing about it says 2008 until someone surprisingly mentions a PlayStation.

There's even a sickening "cute" voiceover from a little boy, Bing's son, who narrates mawkishly. The script is full of hokey lines – people are always ruefully muttering, "What are we going to do with you, eh?" – and stereotypes. Bing's girlfriend is longsuffering, saintly and boring, while Bernard Hill is wasted as his kindly dad.

We're clearly meant to be as charmed by Bing (the name isn't even used for a joke, it's just meant to be funny in itself) as the other characters are, but he's just an irritating berk.

Actually, Coogan is not bad in the role; there's no trace of Partridge or Saxondale in this eager-to-please but easily-led loser, making silly faces and pratfalls to cover up his addiction. But his effort seems wasted on a poor script and with his current success in the US, surely he can do better. Paling in comparison to something like Jimmy McGovern's The Street – or even Coronation Street – it's just trying too hard.

Bang up to date is ITV4's biggest series to date, Sanctuary … well, sort of. It's touted as the first TV show to use live action actors against mostly virtual sets, which is common enough in the movies but harder on the lower budgets and shorter production times of the small screen. Originally designed to be an internet series, half a million people downloaded the pilot, but it didn't make enough money to keep going there.

But despite all that new-fangled dressing, Sanctuary is a fairly traditional fantasy show, with monsters lurking in shadows and girls who are able to fight like ninjas, despite being slight wee things dressed in tight leather trousers. The star is Amanda Tapping, the sensible lady from many, many series of Stargate SG-1, who plays 157-year-old Helen Magnus – and they say there are no roles for older actresses.

Magnus has a strange, vaguely English accent, but she's had a hard life, including an encounter with Jack the Ripper. These days, she wanders around in a big hat, looking out for mutants, freaks and monsters which her team captures for her zoo/prison/hospital.

The programme has some deliberately funny lines, but also some unintentional ones. The police psychiatrist who stumbles on this underground world is dubbed Sherlock Holmes by his colleagues for his ability to "read" situations. Studying a room where a crime has taken place, he's able to make startling observations like: "They're religious people" – while looking at a holy picture, then a set of matryoshka dolls – "Ukrainian maybe, or Russian". Gee, what insight!

No wonder Dr Magnus wants him for her staff. "Who are you?" he asks, to which she replies, as people do in this sort of thing, "Let's just say I am someone who's chosen to embrace the full spectrum of our reality."

A three-part series about the guitar sounds both overdue and not, perhaps, the most entertaining thing you could watch. But Alan Yentob's Imagine does an excellent job of covering masses of material, from the earliest incarnations of the instrument to its current, almost ubiquitous status, in highly watchable, engaging fashion.

There are lots of fascinating facts: the origin of the word "slut" and its connection to guitars, the distaste for it shared by Aristotle and Samuel Pepys, how they are made and played. Sometimes the anecdotes are acted out in silly little playlets, like the tale of how a London pianoforte seller managed to make the guitar unfashionable to save his business; there is also some brilliantly chosen archive footage. There are lots of famous guitarists talking about how and why they play, but the first programme also finds room for the eccentric Michael Tyack, leader of the medieval band Circulus, who leads a bemused Yentob through his candlelit house where the only non-Elizabethan trappings are some Jimi Hendrix records.