Ann Widdecombe Versus Girl Gangs (ITV1)

The idea was to get Ann Widdecombe to solve, in her pantomime way, a social problem. Good old right-wing Ann. She’ll knock some sense into those girls, drinking and fighting on the streets. Just one waggle of the Doris Karloff finger should do it. So she heads off to the streets of Birmingham and finds three teenage girls, who drink, fight and are just generally the kind of nasty, scary young person you would cross the road to avoid.

Widdecombe chirpily goes into one of their households and professes herself amazed that the girls would want to spend their time doing this. But there’s no finger wagging. Widdecombe asks every question and observes every act of antisocial behaviour with empathy, and a kind of crazy smile that says “teenagers do the funniest things”. Taken on its own, the Widdecombe smile is a complicit smirk quite at odds with her tough law’n’order image.

The girls aren’t the most shocking thing, it’s Widdecombe herself: she’s gone soft, understanding. Perhaps it’s the blonde bob, perhaps that whole severe shtick was an act. She watches her chosen trio – Monna, Lorna and Zara – with kind, saddened eyes. If you tuned in hoping to see Widdecombe kick some scum-bag teenager ass, you would have been disappointed. She was judicious, soothing – was she scared or cowed, or just changed? Certainly, instead of right-wing braying stricture, she talked, nodded and learnt.

Widdecombe met a woman who’d been kicked, punched and stamped upon and instead of inflaming her feelings, she talked to her about how horrendous the experience was. Widdecombe, like most of us, seemed flummoxed at why there was such a rise in young female violence and girl gangs in general.

Sometimes simply shaking your head and shivering at how awful something is is the right reaction. She met a young woman who had stabbed a man in the neck. Did she care about the harm she had done, Widdecombe asked. No. She met members of a gang tribally opposed to another because they were from another area, and the questions you wanted answering – why be in a gang? why enjoy inflicting pain? – weren’t fully explored. But maybe Widdecombe was as depressed as us by their litany of unthinking violence.

In fact, she was a lot more polite and nicer than her subjects perhaps merited. When Widdecombe tried to make some easy capital out of girls behaving as badly as boys as a “downside of women’s lib”, she was corrected by an expert saying it was a “downside of how people behave”.

Experiencing a prison and meeting inmates had no effect on the three girls from Birmingham and Widdecombe left them, drinking and shouting, hoping it was all just a phase. Her conclusion underlined her unexpected conversion: “punishment alone” would not solve their problems, “they need pretty active intervention”.

Frustratingly, what this “pretty active intervention” would involve – beyond a theatre group she visited – went uncovered, but I must be getting old. The only “active intervention” that seemed fitting after this grim hour involved a cell presided over by the old-school Ann Widdecombe.

No Heroics (ITV2)

ITV2’s new comedy No Heroics is fast, funny and a little ingenious:a collection of very British superheroes gather in a pub to compare war wounds and see who is most famous after a day of fighting crime. Like Heroes, then, but with cheese and onion crisps. Their superhero suits are a bit rubbish.

Patrick Baladi’s Excelsor is the smarmy frontrunner, but Drew Pearce, the creator/writer, established an engaging collection of pretenders to the throne: The Hotness, a sexually inadequate “cape” with a penchant for heat; Electro-clash, who let a shop owner get shot and suffer from his injuries because he was sexist; Timebomb is Spanish, depressed, unhinged; She Force is a superhero with the twittering insecurities of Carrie Bradshaw.

Hollyoaks (Channel 4)

Hollyoaks fans (Reject shame! Stand tall!) know the only question that matters is: will John-Paul and Craig finally be together? The supercouple are on the brink of being reunited, but their dream ending is imperilled by Niall, the psychopath who is also (unbeknownst to all) John-Paul’s secret half-brother.

For nearly a year he has been trying to destroy John-Paul’s family, without anyone noticing. After murdering John-Paul’s boyfriend, ex-priest Kieron, he is drugging JP to prevent his final rendezvous with Craig. Craig’s family can’t wait for him to go: they’ve hidden his presumed-to-be-dead stepfather in the loft. You gotta love the ’ Oaks.

Many critics don’t, of course. Hollyoaks attracts sneers not bouquets – unfairly. It’s a prince among soaps, a once ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful, if crazed, feather-ruffling swan. The other soaps, on the hunt for younger viewers, are apeing its tone and irreverence.

The John-Paul/Craig storyline, as presided over by executive producer Bryan Kirkwood and actors James Sutton and Guy Burnet, has set a new standard for gay characters and relationships on a primetime soap. The Hollyoaks method? Put them through the same deranged mangler as everyone else.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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