A graphic designer on last night’s Imagine (BBC One) owned up to his nerdishness. While others got their aesthetic kicks from wine bottles or girls’ bottoms, he lusted after type. Erik Spiekermann was my kind of nerd. As schoolboys, my best friend, who went on to design national papers, and I, who went on to write for them, used to swap Letraset catalogues at the back of the class. Our first love among the sansserif fonts was Univers but we soon discovered the real thing: Helvetica, born in Switzerland in 1957, a year after Univers, the perfectly formed child of Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman.

It became the most-used sans serif face in the world, on everything from the Smoking Kills labels on cigarette packets to signs on the New York Subway, from the American Airways logo (unchanged for 40 years) to Lufthansa’s, from JC Penney shop fronts to Muji’s, from Nestlé to Oral B. Contributors to Gary Hustwit’s playful film (condensed for the slot) compared it to air or gravity. It fully deserved this 50th birthday celebration.

In the 1960s, Helvetica sorted out the design chaos of the 1950s, replacing graphic artists’ “witty” hand-drawn lettering with a clear, elegant no-frills font that was not only beautiful but authoritative. Its effect are to most subliminal but I knew very well that one reason I preferred ITN to BBC News was that it used Helvetica for its captions. (It never recovered its authority when it abandoned it.) Soon it was everywhere. So then the dissenters piped up. An argument raged between those who believed type was a “crystal goblet to hold and display information” and others who thought a face should not only spell out, say, the word “dog” but somehow bark, too.

Spiekermann was one of the detractors. A designer whose own teeth even had serifs, he hated Helvetica for its regularity. Its designers had invented an army of letters that looked the same. More hysterical critics called it the face of capitalism and the Vietnam War. One said it reminded her of having to clear up her room. But, as you watched the film, you could only marvel at how this “global monster” in its various weights and permutations still creates so many moods from authoritarian to ironic. It’s the best face ever, apart, of course, from Times.

The programme was right to stress the humanity of good typography. Maybe that is why printers talk of “faces” and “types” and “characters”. But a designer would need to work overtime to design a font that would do justice to two other characters on the box last night: Gunther von Hagens and John Cleese. Autopsy: Emergency Room (Channel 4) was the latest demented anatomy lesson presented by the fedora-topped German who periodically visits Britain to show off the dead people he has “plastinated”. Von Hagens has a Bond villain’s love of circular saws and Damien Hirst’s fascination for the resulting dissections. If you like seeing bodies divided before your eyes, this is the show for you.

It is also your show if you want to see a well-proportioned young man called Dennis stand starkers as fake blood is pumped out of an adjacent corpse or if you want to see a fit-looking Red Cross rep perform “abdominal thrusts on him”. But maybe you tuned in for the first aid lessons, like the German in the audience who, with fake innocence, asked what “mouth to mouth” was and was rewarded by Red Cross Emma applying the very same to a very naked lady.

Emma appeared to have trouble keeping a straight face during these manoeuvres. Her difficulty added credence to John Cleese’s theory that we laugh at what we are scared by: hence those humorous birthday cards scoffing at the fact the recipient is one year nearer his death. Cleese’s interview on Dawn French’s More Boys Who Do: Comedy (BBC Four) was the best I have seen from this haunted genius. It included the revelation that he never thought the Ministry of Silly Walks was “a good piece of material” and that its authors, Jones and Palin, were not as good writers as Chapman and himself.

The interview was high on insight, short on laughs but you had to smile when he said: “I am not very bothered by what other people think.” Four years ago he sued the Evening Standard for an article headed “So, has John Cleese lost his funny bone?”

Out of the box

— LA’s TV writers are on strike but that doesn’t stop them writing. One takesto the BBC News website to say: “I have been writing these worthless scripts for years. I am actually pleased there will be a strike. Not necessarily for better royalties. I think it will give people a chance to reflect upon the mind-numbing quality of what we are churning out.” He’ll certainly be musing on the news that NBC is retooling Knight Rider, David Hasselhoff’s infamous show about a talking car. “It’s the Shakespeare of our generation,” enthuses the executive producer Doug Liman, “a primal story that can be told over and over.”

— The strike’s first victims are the chat shows whose hosts are left jokeless. If he were on air, David Letterman would surely make something of the irony that his head writers, Justin and Eric Stangel, are presenting a panel on writing for him this Friday in New York.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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