Under pressure | 28 April 2012

Rest easy on your deckchair, Delingpole, for I come in peace. Your column is safe — from me, at least — because this week I have made an unpleasant discovery: your job is really hard, and I don’t know how to do it.

It’s not the watching that’s so hellish, it’s deciding what to watch. It took me two days just to plough through the listings, for Pete’s sake, with a sense of panic rising in my bosom. What sort of locum would I be if I missed the week’s televisual pearl? What if the hours, days and nights I spent in front of the box were wasted on the wrong programmes?

The responsibility that comes with this position is fearsome and, what’s worse, unending. As long as the sun never sets on television — as long as that particular factory whistle never blows — the television critic’s work is never done. Square-eyed, waxy-faced and sleepless, I am going to need a sabbatical as soon as this page is written.

You might think that a documentary called The Plot to Bring Down Britain’s Planes (Thursday, Channel 4) could convey a sense of threat and seriousness with factual content alone; that a not-so-distant reality (i.e., the liquid bomb plot of June 2006) would not need to be souped up to hold our interest, but here was a programme in which fact had been restyled until it looked and felt like fiction — a sort of reverse of the making of Spooks. Actual interviews, voice recordings and snatched CCTV footage were, when they came, chilling and fascinating, but the parts that had been reconstructed as mini-dramas — complete with edge-of-the-seat music and jumpy camerawork — gave the whole film the feel of a made-up drama.