Fantastical joke

KM is a joint enterprise between the BBC and Comedy Central, the American cable channel, and it did well in the States. It does have some faults from each country, such as British knicker jokes and a stereotyped gay of a type that would have embarrassed the late John Inman. What it doesn’t have is a team of writers. The reason why Frasier and Friends and The Simpsons have worked so well is that the writers are, if necessary, prepared to argue for a day about one line. Our tradition is to have a single writer (Simon Nye, John Sullivan) or just a pair (Perry and Croft, Galton and Simpson), and while that means you rarely get the laugh-out-loud at every word quality of the American shows, you also have a freshness and eccentricity which the US scripts sometimes lack. KM is created and written by a single chap, Peter A. Knight, and I think he needed the toughness and discipline a team, or even a partner, would have provided.

Arena’s 90-minute documentary about T.S. Eliot (BBC2, Saturday) was a hagio-graphy which depicted someone less than a saint. It faced squarely up to the issue of his anti-semitism (though some of his best friends were Jews). There was plenty of the poetry too, though they had some difficulty illustrating it. The line from ‘Prufrock’: ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table’ was — pointlessly — illustrated by a patient etherised upon a table. Thank goodness, there was no young man carbuncular.