I finally know why I find travel series generally resistible – but it took the coincidence of Michael Palin’s latest, Michael Palin’s New Europe, being shown by BBC One opposite BBC Two’s The Real Godfather to make it clear to me. Travelogues don’t have a plot. Or, rather, they have a plot but it is only about the presenter getting from A to B, or, in Palin’s case, since he has been just about everywhere, from A to Z. Last night the nicest man on television tramped over the Julian Alps in Slovenia, chewed over the drawbacks of communism in a restaurant in Split, met the “Basil Fawlty of slow food” on the paradisiacal Adriatic island of Hvar, politely chatted up a Bosnian woman who sees the Virgin Mary every March 18, and took the slow boat to Albania. On the back of a wobbly bike, he found Tirana dilapidated but brightly painted, prompting him to repeat the old saw about the pointlessness of polishing a turd.

It seemed to me that Palin covered a lot of ground but didn’t get very far. A moderately inquisitive student with a rail pass and some Rough Guides would have gleaned as many insights into Eastern Europe. As yet the ex-Python’s six-parter does not begin to compete with BBC Four’s Meet the Stans (as in Kazak, etc) a couple of years back.

In contrast, The Real Godfather took you to the Sicily you just don’t see as a tourist. The success of the director Benito Montorio’s film was due largely to its having a plot: the capture of the Sicilian Mafia’s capo di tutti capi, Bernardo Provenzano, after 43 years on the run from a distinctly dodgy police force. That it was beautifully shot and edited turned a gift of a subject into a treat.

The programme was also a triumph of the microcosmic approach. While Palin travelled widely, Montorio rooted his documentary firmly in Provenzano’s home town, a romantically ramshackle community called Corleone whose Mafia connections were clearly not confined to Mario Puzo’s imagination. Had he wanted to be tricksier, the director could have tightened the programme’s focus even further, right down to a street named “Via 11 Arpile 2006 Arresto di B. Provenzano, mafioso”. Yes, arresting Provenzano was such a big deal they named a street after the day it happened. The naming ceremony, however, contained its own ambiguity in the shape of the President of Sicily who had turned up to chorus some platitudes about the new, improved Mafia-free Sicily. President Cuffaro is currently himself on trial for his alleged Mafia links, a looming embarrassment that did not stop Sicilians reelecting him in May.

Provenzano was known as “The Tractor” for his ability to mow people down and, later as “The Accountant” when he belatedly decided violence was bad for business. In the 1950s he was the most promising of all the cosa nostra’s young assassins. His boss at that time remarked that he might have the brains of a chicken but he shot “like an angel”. By 1963, he was officially wanted for murder. In 1969 he murdered Michele Cavatio, aka “The Cobra”,godfather of the rival Palermo branch. The Cobra’s son, sitting forlornly by a swimming pool in a pinstripe suit, bemoaned the wiping out of the Palermo Mafia who were “men of honour” next to the delinquents from Corleone. It was like hearing Tony Soprano talking about the good old days.

Mind you, it depended whom you listened to. Provenzano’s sons were interviewed on a hill above Corleone and you couldn’t have met a more plausible pair. They spoke of the lessons passed down by their father: get up early in the morning; don’t do to others that which you would not want done to yourself. And if you thought you had heard that line somewhere before, the Palermo prosecutor, Michele Prestipino, confirmed that Provenzano was a big Bible reader, although his favourite passages tended to contain the words “vendetta”, “revenge” and “betrayal” and be used in the coded messages by which he ran his empire. Told with original surveillance videos and low-key reconstructions, the story of how Prestipino and his stylish detective Renato Cortese (a cop who lay, sartorially, somewhere between Trevor Eve and Alan Sugar) finally tracked the godfather down was fascinating. The Tractor was arrested early one morning in the barn of a ricotta farm in the mountains. Well, where else would such a big cheese be lurking?

Out of the box

— Chris Langham is currently in jail for downloading child pornography. We can assume his career is over but it’s sad that he is also being airbrushed out of television history. Plans for a DVD of Help, his brilliant 2005 therapy sitcom series with Paul Whitehouse, have been abandoned; I wish I had recorded it at the time. I notice too that a book of the scripts of The Thick of It does not feature its erstwhile star on its cover and that his portrait is relegated to the back. What did the Bard say about the evil that men do living on and the good being interred with their bones?

— Nearly two thirds of Americans think TV programmes are getting worse, according to a poll by the Associated Press and AOL Television. Only 22 per cent say they are getting better. Nice positive start to the autumn season then.

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