“The story you are about to see really took place

…only with less swearing and more nudity.”

I’m being naughty, posting something that’s half way to expiring on iPlayer, but I only got a chance to watch this last night, and it’s a complete corker. So, run! run! to watch it in the next 3 days.

Mary Whitehouse. You wouldn’t think she’d be the most sympathetic central figure in a film; I certainly remember her as an anemone-hatted battle-axe, grumbling about trivialities in the early 80s. Amanda Coe‘s script shows a reasonable woman whose position ossified as she was ignored by the BBC and ridiculed by the new satirical comedy movement growing out of the Establishment club and TW3. There’s some proper private tragedy in there for good measure, too.

BBC Four also put out a supporting documentary about the censorship of entertainment at the BBC, Auntie’s War on Smut which gives a useful bit of historical background to the drama. It serves to highlight how knowledgeable and well made the film is by contextualising the ‘new morality’ of the 60s permissive society.

Having said that, it’s the little details in this one that give it life – it’s crammed with incidental jokes, and blimey, what a cast. As a one-off drama, it’s a very good one. As a biopic, it’s bloody amazing.

(Whilst the writing credit is to Amanda Coe, the film was based on an original idea by Patrick Reams. Credit where credit’s due, etc.)

If you can cope with an hour of Dan Cruickshank’s oooh-gosh-blimey-cripes presenting style – truly, he is what Molesworth would have grown up to be – this second programme in his culture and architecture series is a macabre little gem.

Ruin-bibbing at its best, Dan bounces round the globe looking at the architecture of death – from the temple of Hatshepsut (who, despite being a queen was always shown as a bloke with a beard… you can add your own joke here) to cremation sites on the banks of the Ganges.

The jaw dropping bit is a visit to the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Fourty thousand skeletons, arranged by a mad genius of a woodcarver in to coats of arms, chandeliers and… oh, just watch it for the bit where the bloke hoovers a skull.

As Dan would say, golly! Amazing!

Masterpieces of Vienna is an arts documentary series of the old school. Don’t expect expensive looking camerawork, CGI reconstructions or Andrew Graham-Dixon buzzing around in a mini; you’ll be getting some nice solid rostrum work, talking heads, a smattering of archive footage and a good dose of learning really cool stuff. Each episode takes one object – a sofa, for instance – then explores it in the context of fin-de-siècle Vienna and quietly, almost modestly, carries on to relate that setting to… pfff, pretty much the whole of modern culture, really.

Admittedly, when the sofa in question is Freud’s examining couch, there’s no shortage of upholstery related material with which to stuff your thirty minutes. You’ll get a history of the foundations of psychoanalysis, thumbnail sketches of (oh, and by) Freuds’ early cases, biography, history, politics, sex, death, nazis, and then a little meditation on the significance of the role of the couch in modern therapy, too.

The stand out moment is the settee-undressing: the beautiful qashqai rug is removed to show the stained, battered hulk of furniture underneath. It sounds like a laboured metaphor for the patients’ experience on the couch but the weird, pathetic fleshiness of the couch somehow connects the theory back to the stories of people desperately looking for a talking cure.

Good stuff.