This week’s episode seems to have vanished, replaced – last night – with a jumble of unrelated, unexceptional programmes. Worse, next week the channel’s entire Monday night has been given over to… back-to-back Phoenix Nights!

There were only two episodes left in the series as well. I know More4 has always been loathe to treat the show with any respect, but this is, well, diabolical.

The same is true of the current series, currently being shown on More4, but I think there’s another problem now – what on Earth has happened to Cheryl? Previously, Cheryl played an important part in the show – she was as embarrassed and appalled at the worst excesses of Larry’s behaviour as everyone else, but the series always pointed out the pair had a great relationship and she would be smart and witty enough to help dig Larry out of most holes.

In this series, though, she seems to have become a humourless, rather unpleasant individual who seems to be in the show purely to start arguments and disapprove of Larry’s behaviour. In fact I don’t think she’s even smiled once, in between chastising Larry for buying forbidden toilet roll, banning Jeff from their house or shouting at Larry without even waiting to hear his side of the story.

At the moment I’m actually rather relieved when Cheryl isn’t on screen ready to show him up or cause problems. Does this carry on throughout the whole series?

Either way, for now, who’d have thought Susie would become the most appealing female character on this show?

To the last, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip messed things up. It should have been a farewell full of schlock and unashamed sentimentality. Half a dozen intense storylines were queuing up for resolution. The writer, Aaron Sorkin, was a past master at this, penning four triumphant finales for The West Wing.

And yet even here, at the last hurdle, with no distance left to run (the show already cancelled by its American network) and no time left for half-measures and screw-ups, even here Studio 60 got it wrong.

Plots were dispatched into oblivion with all the aplomb of someone ticking off their weekly shopping list. Characters spoke wholly in platitudes. Nothing built to a climax; everything melted into banality. And barely once, in this supposedly definitive take on the mechanics of the American TV industry, was television mentioned.

To those who made it this far, who had travelled with the show through its ludicrously convulsed existence, the relief was akin to it being the end of a school term. Free! Free at last! For it had become apparent, very quickly after the first episode, there was little reason to stick with Studio 60 other than out of duty, and the hope of the odd flash of genius. Then, as the weeks skulked by, there emerged a perverse pleasure in seeing what tawdry gimmick or (presumably) self-deprecating cliché Sorkin would deploy this time around.

“Let’s see”, you liked to imagine him thinking, “we’ve had the drug addiction episode, the getting-locked-on-the-roof episode, the let’s-hire-a-black-writer episode. What’s left? How about … pregnancy?”.

The moment when president of fictional TV network NBS Jordan McDeere suddenly announced, completely out of nowhere, she was having a baby was one of the foulest pieces of TV possible. Utterly cynical if intended to be genuine, completely smug if conceived to be ironic, this was real jump-the-shark time: horrifying, yet also strangely fascinating, to watch right before your eyes.

After that there was no chance of redemption. This was a ship going down with all hands. Each episode became less and less about a TV show and more about ghastly relationships between ghastly people, punctuated with endless contradictory political diatribes. Every 30 seconds came the sound of someone clearing their throat to air another of Sorkin’s obsessions. Except these perorations were a world away from the informed, uplifting chatter of The West Wing. At times there was so much hatred on screen you could imagine viewers switching off in their thousands, asking, “What have we done to offend this man?”.

And while there was no concessions were made for people arriving halfway through the series, or who might have missed an episode, there was equally precious little reward meted out to those who stayed the course. We were treated like dunces, happy to overlook 180-degree personality changes and storylines conjured up and hastened away all in a matter of seconds.

Being generous you could argue this was partly to do with the way the series materialised during its one and only American transmission. While it unfolded in an uninterrupted 22-week run over here, over there it emerged in fits and starts, the first 10 episodes followed by a seven-week gap followed by five more episodes followed by a whopping three-month gap followed by a final six episodes.

Yet this only came to pass because the show was flawed in the first place. Its fascination with clever-clever plotting precluded the emergence of plausible, attractive characters and a likeable, intriguing setting. Sorkin and his regular cohort, director Thomas Schlamme, had nobody to blame but themselves. They knew how the TV industry worked (heavens, they were producing an entire series about the very thing!), and they knew their show would be threatened with cancellation if it flopped and temporarily taken off air.

Which it duly was, hence the hiatus in transmission, hence the air of panic, and hence the compounding of an already noxious brew with evermore hysterical ingredients.

Along came the war, in the guise of one of the cast’s brothers who was suddenly serving in Afghanistan. Along came, ho ho, “trouble with falling ratings”. Along came industrial action and religious fundamentalism and dangerous animals loose under the stage and weddings and people learning to pray (learning to pray?!?!) and premature babies and an utterly demented episode which didn’t feature any of the main characters and instead had Alison Janney from The West Wing appearing as herself alongside a person her character used to date in The West Wing but who now played someone who had a crush on Alison Janney overlooking the fact that previous episodes referred to The West Wing as if it were real and that Alison Janney didn’t actually exist.

There was twisted appeal in the savage lunacy of it all. As scene after scene fixated on America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, you sat agape at something you’d never expect to see in a mainstream American television drama – and also at something you’d never expect to see being done so crassly by such noted Hollywood luminaries.

The last five episodes depicted the events of one single night: an audacious stunt Sorkin never dared try in The West Wing, and perpetrated here as much – you felt – for the sake of it as anything else. There certainly wasn’t the momentum to sustain interest in the same events over a quintet of shows, and as the plot entertained crisis upon crisis it was a bit like watching somebody’s artistic reputation self-combust in slow motion.

Studio 60 ended its life as one massive fuck you to us, to America, to television, to anyone and everyone. With every final crude dramatic revelation or hackneyed turn of dialogue another chunk of Sorkin’s legacy came tumbling to the ground. Except each sound you heard wasn’t that of falling masonry, it was of another TV fan’s heart breaking.

For all its legendary status, The Tube seems to have been distilled in recent years into just a handful of “greatest hits” – performances from The Jam or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Paula talking about Sting’s underpants and the story about Jools saying “fuck”. That’s why it was great to get a rare chance to see a whole 100 minutes of an episode, especially as when the show was actually running my idea of great music TV was Shakin’ Stevens on Saturday SuperStore. It’s kudos to More4 that they selected the final episode of the first series, first broadcast on 18 March 1983, which despite featuring a slowly-becoming-very-famous U2 as guests was in all other regards a completely bog-standard normal episode rather than an atypical special.

The biggest surprise, perhaps, was how little Paula Yates actually contributed to the programme – she can’t have spent more than about five minutes on screen in the whole thing. Indeed, some of the items, including a brief interview with Bono, were instead presented by a man called Mike Everett, who was apparently supposed to have been a regular host but was unable to do so as he was in prison when it started. Meanwhile Muriel Gray’s only role on the show was to introduce the hosts of Switch, the show that was replacing The Tube the following week (“Straight after The Addams Family!”).

Oddest of all, though, was a very long film – 25 minutes, in fact – on the music scene in Northern Ireland, linked by a DJ from Downtown Radio and featuring performances from four or five local bands. You’d never see anything like that, in terms of length or style, on music TV these days, but it was clearly worth doing, as all the interviewees pointed out that Northern Ireland, at the time, basically didn’t have a music industry, with one or two tiny record labels operating out of bedrooms and one radio show. It’s hard to imagine in these days of MySpace that bands could make their first ever national TV appearance and be completely unknown to all but about a dozen people in Belfast.

Of course the show itself turned out to be as shambolic as its legend suggests, with Paul Young just turning up for no reason and Jools trying to be as rude as possible (pronouncing “balcony” as “bollock-ony”, which particularly amused Paula). Jeremy Isaacs said one of the things he liked most about The Tube was that Tyne Tees didn’t just devote a studio to it but its entire building, and indeed there was a genuine sense of an event about proceedings that can only happen when it’s the biggest thing in town.

The repeat was certainly an eye-opening watch and illustrates how fascinating it is to see a live show in its entirety many years on without all the contemporary stuff (“Straight after The Addams Family!”) being edited out. Well done to More4 for some smart archive rummaging. Can we have a complete Saturday Live next, please?

STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP
Thursday 26/07/07, More 4
reviewed by Steve Williams

It’s obvious why people would want to work in television. You get to enter famous buildings that the general public can’t. You get to casually mention technical terms and can talk about having new projects “in development” to amaze people at parties. You might get to go to a glitzy awards ceremony, and you can turn on the telly and say, “I made that!”.

Of course, you can do similar things in more or less every other job in the world. If you were a pest controller, for example, you too could enter famous buildings – albeit when they’re infested with cockroaches. Again, you could casually mention technical terms and might have a new piece of hardware “in development”. The pest control industry might host a glitzy award ceremony and you can drive past offices and houses and go, “I fumigated that!”.

Clearly, though, one of these is more glamorous than the other, which is why some of us can’t get enough of watching television shows about television programmes. It’s not a hugely successful genre – you’ve got The Larry Sanders Showand then a couple of rip-offs of The Larry Sanders Show - but for anyone who always watches out for BBC Television Centre when they travel past it on the London Underground, it’s always going to be appealing. Hence why Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip promised to be a real treat, as it comes from the pen of Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing. Who could resist some classy West Wing-style dialogue and intelligent plotting applied to the world of television?

The show-within-a-show in this case is Studio 60, a live topical comedy sketch show which after 20 years is showing signs of decline. The existing producer is so pissed off by the network’s interference he decides he’s had enough, and interrupts the broadcast to tell everyone this programme is a mess, and that telly has gone to the dogs. He’s immediately fired, and new network president Jordan McDeere, on her first day in the job, decides she needs to headhunt former writers Matt and Danny – who worked on the series when it was at its peak before being sacked and becoming hugely acclaimed Hollywood big shots – to bring the programme back from the brink.

At the end of this first episode, Danny breaks it to Matt that, as he’s failed a drugs test, he can’t direct the film they were going to make, so they decide to come back to the show.

Throughout the rest of the series, we’ll root for Matt and Danny and their efforts to make the thing work. If they succeed, all will be right with the world, and maybe the network’s share price will rise a few dollars and they might supply some slightly better champagne for the after-show party. If they screw up, everyone dies!

Oh, hang on, no they don’t. The show might get axed and the cast might have to do some adverts or TV movies instead. And really, this is the problem I have with this series. At the end of the day, who cares? While the liberal grandstanding and cutting dialogue works in The West Wing, you can at least understand the people in it are doing an important and exciting job. It’s hard to buy into the drama if the worst that can happen is someone gets slightly embarrassed at an awards ceremony, or a sketch doesn’t get a laugh.

In addition, it’s a drama about a comedy show. You could perhaps understand the sense of importance if they were working on a news programme or documentaries, and having to face dilemmas over political balance, or how to deal with serious and upsetting issues. There’d be plenty of points to be made about how the media can represent and influence society, and how to engage the younger generation with world events. However, the production they’re making here appears to be something along the lines of Dead Ringers. Surely no comedy writer, on either side of the Atlantic, has such an inflated sense of their own self-importance to consider what they’re doing actually matters in the long run?

In fact, in this first episode we see very little of the titular Studio 60 to actually understand why we should care about the state of the programme. The only items we see that represent the bad old pre-Matt and Danny days are five seconds of a White House-set sketch which seems fairly inane but doesn’t progress long enough to allow us to hear any of the “jokes”, a performance by a (real?) hip-hop act and the titles to a sketch called Peripheral Vision Man, which we’re told is not funny but we don’t see why.

Presumably the idea is that the name is enough, and it’s sad a topical show has been reduced to such pointless fillers, but to be honest it just sounds like a piece of unpretentious whimsy.

Indeed, it’s a bit of a wasted opportunity. Had we seen any of the programme itself then there could have been the chance to make points about the general low quality of topical comedy that exists these days – rubbish like The Trail Of Tony Blair and other useless satire that thinks just saying George Bush is a bit thick and that Tony Blair sucked up to him a bit is enough – but no. In fact, one of the main flaws of this series so far has been the fabled Sorkin dialogue. Surely the first rule of drama is to show rather than tell? We’re told plenty about the old show being crap, and about how Matt and Danny are going to save it, but there’s precious little evidence to support this apart from people saying it over and over again.

Indeed, in this first episode Matt and Danny didn’t have a funny line between them and if all comedy writers are this miserable, it’s no wonder the genre appears to be in such dire straits.

To be honest, Studio 60 isn’t really telling us anything we don’t already know. It’s summed up by the huge rant Judd Hirsch’s outgoing producer character comes out with that leads to his dismissal. We don’t get to hear this in full, but from the bits we do catch there are endless references to pornography, reality TV, the religious right, the networks … all the usual bogeymen when people are discussing why telly is doomed. Not only is this an argument that’s been trotted out a million times, it’s also mostly rubbish. 20 years ago, the American networks were screening the likes of Manimaland Falcon Crest in prime time. Now the US networks are showing Lost, Heroes and, well, this show, and broadsheet critics are forever questioning why British telly can’t be as challenging or as original as the classy and intelligent American productions. In addition, it can’t help make Sorkin, a man who has made his career and reputation from network television, sound rather ungrateful.

Well, maybe the points they’re making are quite novel for an American audience. Really, I wonder if it was even worth Channel 4′s while buying Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, because vast swathes of it are frankly irrelevant for a British audience.

This self-importance is one thing. In the US, the television industry is a big business, with the fall schedule greeted with as much wonder and discussion as a new translation of The Bible. In the UK, nobody really cares that much. Hence, while the fate of Studio 60 seems to take on as much importance as the war in Iraq, you can’t imagine Kevin Lygo and Andy Duncan running around shouting if The Friday Night Project starts running out of steam, demanding their PAs locate Jimmy Carr this instant, to avoid the disaster of having a few jokes made at their expense in the diary column at the back of Broadcast magazine. British viewers – and, more than likely, most American viewers – will simply fail to understand why these things are being taken so seriously.

In addition, the problems of the media in the US have little impact here in the UK. The rant mentions that broadcasting in America is being killed by the FCC and religious lobby groups. In the UK, it blatantly isn’t. The FCC may be fining the US networks the annual GDP of an African nation for screening a one second shot of Janet Jackson’s nipple, but over here the series has debuted in the same week as BBC3 are screening an hour long documentary about the word “cunt”, and nobody’s bothered about it. Meanwhile while the religious right may exert huge power in the States, in the UK they consist of a couple of easily-ignorable websites, so much so that the forthcoming episode of Star Stories on Tom Cruise seems to consist in its entirety of jokes about scientology being a load of bollocks.

It looks like religion is likely to play a major role in this series. It transpires that the producer’s rant was brought on by the network demanding a religious sketch was removed. Of course, we don’t see this sketch, but invariably we’re told it was very funny. Later too, we’re told the sketch was called “Crazy Christians”. However, this tells us nothing. Maybe it was a challenging look at how religion plays a role in 21st Century America, making some serious points along the way. Alternatively, maybe it was just some unpleasant sneers at evangelical Christians for being thick enough to believe the Bible. It could have been like The Vicar Of Dibley for all we know. The point seems to be that just the idea of mentioning religion is an incredible thing. Again, there’s a sense of “been there, done that” in Britain – see Jerry Springer: The Opera, but also see Simon Amstell doing jokes about Judaism on Popworld on Saturday mornings.

So far, then, all we’re getting is a bunch of self-important people treating the business of irreverence with ludicrous reverence, while ladling on some Dummies’ Guide To Liberal Politics-style points – so the men in suits who run networks are bad, reality TV is bad, organised religion is bad, and so endlessly on. Of course, we know now that American audiences failed to be spellbound by the series and this no-holds-barred look at how the telly industry is sidelining intelligent programming was ironically booted around the schedules and finally axed. It’s hard to see how British viewers will be any more impressed.

If you’re looking for a new project, then, Aaron, how about a drama about pest controllers? If they mess up, people could actually die!

A show about TV, made by some of TV’s most celebrated talents, but which says TV is rubbish, and that everyone who works in TV including its most celebrated talents is rubbish, yet wants to celebrate TV and all who work in it for being rubbish, all at the same time?

No wonder it got cancelled. In fact, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, probably relished its demise as some kind of abstract, self-referential tribute. A tribute, that is, to his own genius for telling it like it is, and in no way to do with the show being a jumbled, incoherent mess of mixed messages. Oh no.

Granted, The West Wing was always going to be a hard act to follow. And the hype surrounding the US premiere of Studio 60 – almost a whole 12 months ago, such has been Channel 4′s dithering – implied the world was about to gaze upon a new jewel in television’s crown. But Sorkin and his West Wing cohort Thomas Schlamme didn’t make things any easier for themselves, or their millions of expectant fans, by bequeathing Studio 60 unto the planet in a manner suggestive of having forgotten how to produce a decent opening episode.

Both this and The West Wing came bearing self-evident gifts: a ringside seat in the most powerful office in the world and a berth in the engine room of one of the most watched programmes on television. The premise alone was almost enough to make you tune in.

But while The West Wing‘s premiere unfolded with the minimum of exposition, Studio 60‘s debut was choked with set-ups and plot points and back-stories.

By the end of the first episode of the former we knew virtually nothing about the private lives of the principal characters: we only knew them through their work, which had been shown to be dazzling, perilous and utterly compelling. Conversely by the end of the first episode of Studio 60 we’d had to wade through a slurry of obtuse details involving drug habits, back surgery, gospel albums and ball games, only to reach a point that we knew was going to happen all along: the two leads, Matt (Matthew Perry) and Danny (Bradley Whitford) would take charge of the eponymous late-night entertainment revue.

As such there was no sense of anything being proved or accomplished, and no feeling of having just spent an hour being entertainingly enlightened. Rather it was 60 minutes, or 40 to be precise, eavesdropping on clever-clever dialogue, pointlessly circular arguments and clunky non-sequiturs (“Stop talking now? You bet”).

Think of how The West Wing pilot was so stunningly crafted, carrying you up and up through a tower of mini-crises and misunderstandings, methodically etching aspects of the protagonists’ responsibilities, ever-expanding its depiction of life in the White House until – bang! – two-thirds of the way through, the President burst into view, becalming colleagues and blasting critics and generally righting the world’s wrongs. By way of a debut, it was the classiest way of saying if you like this, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

With Studio 60 there was no such invitation. The viewer’s interest was taken utterly for granted, as was our inclination to tune in again. We were given no reason to stick around. The primary assumption on behalf of the producers seemed to be, simply: look! Here’s Chandler from Friends and Josh off The West Wing – together! And if you want, you can see them together again next week! Isn’t that great?!

Well, not if you weren’t much enamoured of them in the first place. Likeable alternatives were in short supply as well. It was unsettling that someone with a track record like Sorkin should choose to stack the shop window for his latest ensemble full of distinctly unappealing creations. The female characters in particular were really badly written, network boss Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet) coming over as utterly without gravitas and credibility while Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), one of the supposed “Big Three” show stars, was like a walking open sore, forever bleeding one-note contempt and weird expressions.

The only agreeable and, in fact, dimensional character of them all was the show’s veteran creator Wes Mendell, superbly played by Judd Hirsch, and he got fired 15 minutes in.

Mendell’s live, on-air outburst (“… There’s a struggle between art and commerce … a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience … I’m telling you, art is getting its ass kicked …”) was the only exciting thing in the whole episode. But even this was a pastiche, by dint of constituting an unsubtle homage to the film Network – a homage hammered into the ground by Sorkin via a scene showing rival TV stations all chuntering on hysterically about the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

If you rip something off then make great play of referencing what it is you’re ripping off, does that make it all okay? Not, perhaps, if the homage (“This is what happened in the movie!”) goes on to never quite emerge from the shadows of the original.

Maybe all TV studio executives are unlikeable types. Maybe they are all self-obsessed and egotistical and appallingly arrogant. Maybe all American TV networks are “prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouses”. It doesn’t follow, though, that saying as much, and in as bludgeoning a manner possible, is itself good television.

There are surely other ways to satirise the TV industry than having characters lazily refer to right-wing religious programmes as “a Klan rally” and their hosts as “bigots”. Other, more imaginative, more original ways. Ways less predicated on schoolboy humour and the kind of generalisations that confirm rather than challenge stereotypes.

If, however, television is founded upon laziness and generalisation – as Sorkin appears to want us to believe – embracing them in the name of commerce is no substitute for eviscerating them in the name of art.

Then the man from More4 delivered his warning: “And you can enjoy those layers of thought right now on More4 as Michael Gambon amongst many others delivers a very thought-provoking and at times challenging script. Expect strong language from the start and throughout for …” In other words, there’s some swearing and stuff. Has commercial broadcasting now reached the point that when something more substantial than the norm is dropped into primetime, it has to effectively warn the viewer that they’re going to need to use their intelligence?

The play took place in a single setting, a restaurant, and for much of its duration cut back and forth between the inhabitants of two tables. In the first Lambert (Michael Gambon) and Julie (Penelope Wilton) were celebrating their wedding anniversary with his brother Matt (James Bolam) and her sister Prue (Julia McKenzie) who were also married to each other. At the second table, Russell (Colin Firth) is discussing his future with his wife Suki (Janie Dee).

Periodically they were interrupted by the staff of the restaurant, the owner Richard (James Fox), his assistant (Sophie Okonedo) and a waiter (Stephen Rea) who appeared to be afflicted with a false memory syndrome which meant that depending upon their topic of conversation, be it TS Elliot or the Hollywood Studio system, he would describe to the patrons the various random famous people grandfather was apparently acquainted with.

The subtext highlighted by Gambon was evident throughout, as for all their airs and graces, the three couples lacked some fundamentals of civilization and used their words sharply as weapons to cut each other to shreds. Though Suki was obviously trying to boost her husband’s confidence, she still found time to tell him he lacked a clear personality. Meanwhile, just as Julie remembered how she and Lambert met on the top of deck of a bus, he undercut her reminiscence by describing a walk he took with a very pretty girl by a stream. Unctuous characters all – the old men were apparently gangsters and Russell was a banker who at one point describes himself as a psychopath.

But even though the dialogue was often very funny, it needed a genial cast to keep the audience interested – and that’s exactly what it got here. Presenting the work with such a stellar line-up gave it a real sense of occasion with Gambon and particularly Firth clearly enjoying the chance to speak lines a cut above the fare they will have become used to recently in film. Rea was touchingly humble, but the best turn was probably from Janie Dee who conveyed a life spent fighting to become something more than a secretary with just a few looks.

The entire production was a perfect demonstration of how well theatre plays can work on television. Filmed on location in the ravishing atmosphere of The Aster Bar & Grill in London, it still retained a certain theatricality in its staging but, possibly because this production originated for television, displayed a rare intimacy. It was somewhat like BBC3′s strange early reality TV experiment Diners, in which the viewer eavesdropped on the chat of the likes of Roland Rivron and Paul Ross while they were having their dinner; here the viewer could almost be sitting at each table possibly getting pissed on the wine.

One of the reasons sometimes given by commercial broadcasters when discussing the appearance of theatre on television is that it’s difficult to know were to put the ad-breaks. Shakespeare is fine because there are acts – but what of the likes of Pinter who generally, as with Celebration, sets everything in one space in a single scene? Potentially the biggest pleasure of this piece was that More4 decided to broadcast it without any interruption, allowing Pinter’s writing to breath. More please, 4.

Here’s Ian’s review. Next time, I’ll try and be quicker off the mark so people don’t double-up inadvertently …

THE TRIAL OF TONY BLAIR
Thursday 18/01/07, Channel 4
reviewed by Ian Jones

Who’d have thought Michael Murray would end up running the country?

For that is pretty much what was on offer here: the combustive, twitching, dystopian hero of GBH reborn as Prime Minister of the nation, packing just as much fury and folly as when he was first brought low all those years ago in an unnamed northern city by a gaggle of political capers.

For anyone at all familiar with Alan Bleasdale’s seismically significant Channel 4 drama, it was nigh on impossible to not believe Robert Lindsay was, unconsciously or otherwise, distilling the potent essences of his earlier creation into his depiction of Tony Blair. In fact, the similarities were almost too obvious to be believed.

The sudden switching between moods of blistering wit and blustering self-pity; the waves of unimpeachable arrogance subsiding, literally in a second, into whimpers of overwhelming guilt; above all the armoury of tics and affectations and bizarre gestures growing ever more preposterous in the face of mounting crisis – they were all here, and all served to load this wholly unrelated, story with incorrigible baggage.

Which, as it turned out, was no bad thing. There was precious little else by way of substance residing within either the script or direction of The Trial of Tony Blair. Subtract Lindsay and his legacy from the proceedings and you would have been faced with slim pickings indeed.

No other big names populated the cast; none of the dozens of small names delivered anything approaching a memorable performance. The writing veered between essays into lumpen symbolism (look, there’s Tony repeatedly washing his hands in a basin!) and seminars from the Clive Dunn academy of farce (oh no, Tony’s fallen out of bed – again!).

The direction, to an extent beholden to such an imbalanced narrative, see-sawed between episodes of subtle sentimentality and crude operatics. The viewer, faced with all of this, just about struggled to keep up with Lindsay’s seemingly infinite catalogue of contorted facial expressions.

The points the writer Alistair Beaton appeared to be making about the life and work of Tony Blair were many in number and all contradictory. This wouldn’t have been an issue were the points in and of themselves sufficiently persuasive or robust; instead Beaton’s scattergun tactics amounted to an assault high on quantity but low in quality.

There simply wasn’t the time or space for the viewer to find a coherent way to respond to all the pot shots. Not that there might have been much within Beaton’s script that passed for coherence; perhaps wisely for his sake the pace didn’t let up long enough for the audience to really find out.

There was also a nagging feeling here that everyone involved in the production was treating its premise as justification enough. In other words, that the mere notion of doing a drama called The Trial of Tony Blair would somehow see them through 90 minutes of airtime. After all, with as incendiary a title as that, an audience would be bound to want to see how it ends – wouldn’t they?

Well, the fact we didn’t actually get to see any of the titular prosecution can’t have left many thinking it was worth sticking with all the way through. In this sense the title was a complete bluff, somewhat akin to making a drama called The Assassination Of JFK then failing to include anything about Kennedy’s shooting. A hypothetical staging of Blair being cross-examined in a war crimes tribunal would’ve made for far more absorbing viewing, besides offering the chance for a bit more sustained and lucid polemic.

The absence of any trace of the eponymous trial was the last, and greatest, miscalculation. It left you feeling desperately short-changed, even duped. At a push you could have been so inclined to tolerate all the cheap gags and pratfalls and poor impersonations of Gordon Brown and David Cameron and bludgeoning metaphors (oops, there goes another war child running through Tony’s kitchen) for the chance of a glimpse of Blair in the dock. Then again, such an eventuality would have needed a production team of another level of aspiration altogether.

Instead we were left with the sight of Michael Murray being escorted into the back of a prison van to the strains of “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers (one of David Cameron’s Desert Island Discs), still wondering why he couldn’t ever be a good man. And thanks to this simplistic, clunking piece of television, we, the viewers, still had no idea either.

Here is another true story. Alistair Beaton’s The Trial of Tony Blair is one of the most dizzyingly brilliant TV dramas of the last decade. Not just a story – it’s fact. This was superb, as clinical and precise as Arthur Schnabel playing Beethoven or Phil Taylor throwing darts.

The tasty storylines that made up Beaton’s work were purely imaginary. It’s 2010 and Hillary Clinton’s in the Oval Office; Gordon Brown’s in No 10, and wins a hairsbreadth majority over a hastily-sketched, Footlights-revue caricature of David Cameron (too much bikes, hip hop etc). Circumstances conspire, with the slow-march rat-tat-tat of a military funeral, to send Tony to The Hague and judgement (Blair’s conversion to Catholicism plays a heavy role throughout). Brown (Peter Mullan, brilliant voicing but in terms of looks might as well be Janet rather than Gordon Brown) is maneouvred into sending Blair (Robert Lindsay) for trail concerning war crimes in Iraq. Actually, no trial proceedings are shown, merely the prisoner Blair’s flight leaving Heathrow for The Hague, after which credits roll.

Improbable? No less so than the deranged cats-cradle of narratives polluting the now ex-PM’s head, a helter-skelter of the spin-doctor platitudes, moral delusion and cant that, in the end, tragically make up the man himself, something unforgivingly exposed by Beaton. “I think you’re beginning to lose touch with reality.” Blair tells his wife (played with just a little too much sympathy by the glacially efficient Phoebe Nicholls). From which point on one knows Blair will self-destruct, and he duly does, in royally entertaining fashion.

From the get-go, Robert Lindsay’s Blair (Lindsay is still visibly Wolfie Smith, but at least he has the voice and the tics, including the shiver-inducing psychotic’s trick of smiles in all the wrong places and the suggestion of what may be bipolarity in our great teacher) is a man quite clearly bonkers even before reality surges in so lethally on mind and body. Like all self-regarding students who never grew up, Blair wanted to play Hamlet. Lindsay knows it. He plays Blair as the guitar-shop axeman dreaming of being Hendrix or Blackmore but doomed to be umpteenth-best; a sad and lonely comedown instead of a truly tragic one, the vision and the legacy gone, a nuance Beaton captures beautifully.

But Beaton doesn’t even give Blair the dignity of a Lear as his downfall inexorably unfolds. Mad, wronged Lear raged against the dying of the light on his hind legs; Blair isn’t even this, he’s made to skulk. There’s much gorgeously-sketched bullshit spoken about “the legacy” of which Blair’s paid yea-sayers and toadies can barely conceal their contempt. Yes, there’s stuff about God. Lots of it. In a scene worth viewing 50 years from now, Blair’s publisher tentatively says there’s too much about God, and he promptly `nixes his multimillion pound memoir advance with a mind-bogglingly bizarre tirade against atheists and liberals. There are rather-well-handled dream sequences of dead Iraqi kids and shot-up squaddies; the soundtrack makes ironic reference back to the Britpop of ’97′s Cool Britannia.

There are also undertones of leitmotifs yet to come – Gordon Brown’s baritone paranoia is a subtext for a new TV drama that you know is just waiting to happen when he gets No 10′s keys. The sequence where Blair is genetically fingerprinted upon his arrest prior to extradition is maybe one of the most excruciatingly ironic pieces of TV drama this writer has ever seen. Yeah, Mike Leigh included, since you ask.

Little, if anything is overdone or bludgeoned home. This grown-up, civilised drama doesn’t shout, save for the broadbrushed silliness when TB almost runs over a comedy Arab in his 4×4. The Messianic bent in Blair is maybe slightly overstretched – although when Lindsay says, “Britain? I’ve done Britain” it sounds spine-chillingly authentic. There is also a moment when Blair Learishly castigates the incompetents that surround him. This seems a little too close to Hitler’s table talk for comfort. Blair is not Hitler, but he increasingly resembles Herbert Lom’s tragi-comic portrayal of Dreyfus, the boss of the surété that Inspector Clouseau drives beyond reason.

Yes, there are loose ends – that Blair would end up in a cell is implausible (as Cherie tells him, with cruel irony, he can afford good lawyers). And yes, Nicholls’s Cherie and Mullan’s Brown are awkward. Because both are seen to inhabit a world of reason and Cherie’s friendship with Carole Caplin among others suggests that this is maybe wishful thinking. This, however, means Blair’s folly is so much more starkly repointed. Anyone who listens to any Blair speech cannot fail to doubt that now.

TV rarely does drama like this. Nothing of The Trial of Tony Blair, or very little, in terms of script or visual language, is reduced to soap opera convention, yet is nonetheless compelling. This is a feat in itself, and given its visual satisfactions, the drama sets 2007 a serious challenge for a better slice of TV. True story – truer than WMD, anyway.

Yes, true. No word of a lie. Remember that, Tony? Hello, Tony? Tony?

It’s always tempting, when a long-running TV show that’s not as good as it once was, lumbers into the finishing straight amidst a flurry of eulogies and reminiscences, to stop fighting and just give in. To overlook the faults and the flaws. To selflessly forgive and hastily forget. To submerge yourself in a warm reverential bath of: remember this? Remember that? And what on earth – ho ho – was that all about? Then switch off as the final credits roll and sigh to yourself: well, it was never really that bad.

Admittedly most shows make it easy. Whatever dross and nonsense has gone before, more often than not things somehow tend to come together for a last, definitive hurrah; one that rustles up wisps and traces of everything that was damn great about a show, as if to reassure you: look, we’ve still got it! We never completely lost it! Such a theory holds good for everything from One Foot in the Grave to Frasier to Upstairs, Downstairs to Press Gang, while for others a snap resolution of an epic, unwinding back story musters enough closure by force alone – see any number of “Didn’t you know, the war’s over?!” endeavours from Colditz and M*A*S*H to ‘Allo, ‘Allo.

But there are some shows that wilfully, frustratingly, despairingly, seem to go out of their way to remind you, even in their last dying moments, that yes, it really was that bad. In fact, it was dreadful. And as for all the stuff that was so utterly joyously thrilling about when the show first started? No, we won’t be bothering with any of that. Well OK, we’ll get a much-loved character from those halcyon early days to make a brief cameo, but then give him only one line of any note, and make it a really crap throwaway one at that.

“Home sweet home,” murmured Rob Lowe, stepping over the threshold of the White House for the first time in four years. No it wasn’t. This was a totally different home to the one from which his character, Sam Seaborn, once fled in haste and precognitive panic. Everything was different. The mood, the chatter, the personalities, even the once-famous, once-ubiquitous camera tracking shots: all long gone. And didn’t this final episode of The West Wing go out of its way to remind you as much.

For this, sadly, was no heroes’ send off, more a kind of poorly-attended garden party-cum-church fete. Nothing shocking or dramatic happened. Not even everyone bothered to show up. And a jaded air of simply going through the motions ran right from the opening moments (President Bartlet being counselled by his wife that he had, indeed, done a good job) through the endless sequences of people exchanging mawkish goodbyes, all the way to the closing moments with the President gazing out of an aeroplane window and being asked by his wife what he was thinking about. His baked-bean-of-an-ending reply: “Tomorrow”.

If The West Wing were still the show it used to be, Bartlet would have muttered something incorrigibly enigmatic (“I’m thinking of what they’ll be thinking of me”), or pithy (“I’m thinking of how much time I’m now gonna have for thinking”), or acutely confessional (“I’m thinking … I could have done more”). Instead his epilogue was as hollow and contrived as, funnily enough, much of the entire last series turned out to be. Even at its moment of demise The West Wing couldn’t help but be tiresomely predictable.

For a show that had once not merely conceived of but made a thrilling virtue out of the idea of treating a suite of offices as a de facto racetrack, both dialogue and visuals careering round corridors, up and down staircases, even – for a time – in and out of boiler cupboards, it was depressingly astonishing to realise how little of such genius invention survived through to the final episode.

In fact, this might well have been the most boring installment of The West Wing ever. For much of the time the experience was akin to watching a politely-staged, everso-earnest documentary on the procedures behind the appointment of a new US President, such was the absence of, well, anything much in the way of pace, imagination, and even a decent plot.

It might have been a use of dramatic cliché to see Bartlet’s last day in office derailed by some last minute revelation or startling denouement, but that’s surely missing the point. Decent drama should, by definition and duty, amplify the ordinary into the extraordinary, decorate the mundane with the magisterial, and enhance our appreciation of the everyday through carefully stylised touches of the preposterous.

And this was what The West Wing used to do, and do with unashamed aplomb, when it first began. Yet all such methodology evaporated, as already catalogued on OTT, somewhere into the fifth year of the series, when creator Aaron Sorkin was fired and ER‘s John Wells turned proceedings into his own personal exhibition hall of recycled emotional hokum.

Wells penned this last episode himself, and it showed. Here was all his trademark clunking dialogue, the inane expressions of belief dressed up to pass off as historic soundbites, the ponderous heavy-handed attempts at character nuance, the terrible feeling of the whole thing being obsessed with itself and its own supposed brilliance. Wells also deserves special mention for, over time, so mercilessly stripping bare all layers of credibility in which the cast were once cloaked that, as they stepped out of the White House for good, it was almost impossible not to care about a single one of them.

Once, it was all so different. Once The West Wing crackled with a unique energy and compassion. Once it was a place you couldn’t wait to return to, week after week. Once it was peopled with exhaustively-shaped, plausibly-flawed characters you couldn’t wait to learn more about. Once it was something that pulled off the magic formula of being able to both educate and entertain simultaneously, with neither subtracting integrity from the other.

But that was long ago. It was another country, and they did things different there. Less than 24 hours after airing the finale, More4 broadcast The West Wing pilot. The gulf between both episodes in vitality, exhilaration, wit and fun was as wide as the Atlantic. Still, as with the ocean itself, there are and always will be a choice of two sides upon which to fix your flag. And for as long as those early, exemplary, breathtaking episodes of The West Wing are in existence, the choice, fortunately, should be obvious.