“He was one of those mysterious people who seemed to do both everything and nothing.” This key line of dialogue was spoken, with tremulous awe, by Maggie Smith halfway through Stephen Poliakoff’s prestige drama Capturing Mary (BBC Two). It was used to describe a mysterious Mephistophelian schmoozer called Greville (David Walliams). And it made, on closer inspection, absolutely no sense whatsoever and was typical of the drama’s penchant for portentous yet ultimately hollow declamations. But still, somehow, against all odds, it worked. Which is, perhaps, the best way to describe the entire production, and even Poliakoff’s diverse yet slightly pretentious oeuvre to date, for at a distance, Capturing Mary ticked the right boxes. It had a startlingly powerful Smith as the eponymous former newspaper columnist who arrives at a large but empty London house and proceeds to tell the guileless caretaker Joe (Danny Lee Wynter) about the calamity that once befell her there.

Drifting from room to room, and sipping on a hipflask, she recounts with increasing urgency a tale of high falutin’ postwar soirées that culminates in the wine cellar where the eerie Greville revealed to Mary the sordid secrets of the upper-class elite – a sadomasochistic bishop here, an antiSemitic politician there and so on.

Mary, however, refuses to be drawn into Greville’s web, despite his repeated solicitations, and thus lives a life of relative exclusion thereafter. That is, until the present day when she meets Greville, untouched by age, in Kensington Gardens and we realise that he is actually the Devil, Dorian Gray or Faust, or that she is an insane alcoholic or a rampant mythomaniac, or both.

Either way, it made for weirdly compelling drama – here even the populist clown Walliams made a credibly serious protagonist, with his pursed cupid’s bow lips and sly epicene eyes perfect for the role of a slightly effete and otherworldly presence. However, and typically for Poliakoff, the seemingly prevalent themes of class hypocrisy and social and sexual exclusion all but vanished under intimate inspection – this was neither ghost story, satire nor polemic. Instead, what we were left with was an entire drama that was fundamentally a self-reflexive MacGuffin and a showcase for the alleged genius of its creator. It was, in other words, all about capturing Poliakoff – Mary hardly seemed to matter.

Another comic stalwart getting the straight-faced treatment was Rob Brydon, who popped up last night as the revolutionary martinet Stanislaus Freron in the drama-documentary Heroes & Villains: Napoleon (BBC One). The programme, the first of six profiles of past military giants, was a kind of moron’s guide to history that served no other purpose than to turn viewers even farther away from books and to reinscribe historical narratives within hoary visual clichés and movie idiom. Thus Napoleon (Tom Burke) was duly put through the Gladiator/ Braveheart mill and emerged as a mythic hero with an unlikely sense of his own destiny and a grating taste for snappy self-reflexive one-liners, such as: “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity lasts forever!”

The BBC claim that Heroes & Villainsis meticulously well-researched, and indeed last night’s show boasted plenty of tedious guff about the siege of Toulon and Napoleon’s plan to attack the counter-revolutionary fleet from the surrounding headland. But screen entertainment relies on the shorthand of spectacle and not the firm hand of truth. And thus Heroes & Villains, with its CGI battle sequences, digital cannon balls and stylised combat was nothing less than Boy’s Own infotainment orgasm masquerading as historical analysis.

Finally, unintentional comedy, exploitation telly and disquieting documentary somehow collided to produce The Cannibal That Walked Free (Five). Here the subject was Issei Sagawa, a 4’ 9” Japanese cannibal who, in 1981, while studying at the Sorbonne, invited classmate Renée Hartevelt back to his room, then shot her,raped her and ate her. Unsurprisingly, he was declared insane, but released from prison after only 34 months. The documentary was thus suffused with moral indignation, but was actually just an excuse to trawl through Sagawa’s life today, to check out his collection of creepy teen posters and to posit the shock theory that this terrifying munchkin Lecter might strike again, at any minute!

Out of the box

— Lorraine Kelly has been banned by her GMTVbosses from taking part in an ASDA commercial. Kelly was set to join the estimable ranks of Ian Wright and Liza Tarbuck when she was asked to head the company’s Christmas TV campaign. GMTVhead honcho Clive Crouch, however, apparently intervened and banned the wee high-pitched minx from participating. And the reason? There might be a conflict of interests because GMTV is primarily a, get this, “news programme”. Right. Of course. Meanwhile Paxo and Jon Snow are no doubt lining up to take Kelly’s place.

— In an effort to boost ratings, producers have announced that the cast of Neighbours will soon be joined by the Australian model Erin McNaught and Australian Idol contestant Dean Geyer. Like, I’m sooo going to watch it now.

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