What was all that about, Little Dorrit? What were they on? Who do they think of when they’re making it? You? Do you sit there hugging a cushion, muttering “Thank you, Andrew Davies, and lawks a mercy”? Well, Bramwell alone knows I’m not the greatest fan of the Sunday classic adaptation. I feel embarrassed that this gaudy, National Trust, music-hall, dressing-up box of alternately torrid and turgid, exhausted plots is still held up to the world as one of the bits of culture the British do better than anyone else. Of course we do them better than anyone else — who else would conceivably want to do them at all? This embarrassing necromancy, plundering the corpses of literary saints: why can’t we leave them interred in the volumes stacked in the classic crypt section of Waterstone’s? So now it’s the turn of Little Dorrit.

Following on from the great success of Bleak House, after the opening chunk, Dorrit will be shown in half-hour episodes, because they say this is closer to how Dickens published them. It’s not. It’s more like the way EastEnders tells them. I, like 99% of all the people who are alive today, have never read Little Dorrit. And what struck me, and what possibly struck everybody else who hadn’t read Little Dorrit, while watching the first episode, is that I had not the faintest idea what was going on or to what end. And why should I care?

It seems Davies and the classic-series divines just don’t care. It doesn’t matter what they show us, because the Sunday adaptation has finally jumped the leather-bound shark. It has uncuttled itself of the need to be coherent. Little Dorrit was the bonnet-and-mud equivalent of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. The words are simply mood noise . . . “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow . . .” It’s gone beyond simple earthbound coherence to become a mood poem, an atonal fugue, a distillation of all ye olde TV lit. We have seen so much of this stuff, we don’t need a story any more, just a few putty-faced classic actors doing their funny voices and twitches and limps — Alun Armstrong does a very convincing stiff neck — and we can fill in the rest ourselves. The stories are so silly and sentimental and mawkish anyway. If Davies can hum it, we’ll play along with it.

The abiding critical gold standard of the costume drama and literary adaptation is the question: if this were set in modern London in contemporary dress and were written by Dick Charles, would it get made and would you watch it if it were? The answers in this case are unquestionably, resoundingly no, and not on your life. It’s not my place to review books, but let me just mention that if you haven’t actually read any Dickens, you’re in for a really big surprise, because it isn’t anything like it looks on the telly. Really nothing like that at all.

This year’s Ann Widdecombe is John Prescott, now appearing at the end of the telly pier. I think it was Enoch Powell who said all political lives end in failure; and the failure they generally end in is on television. Having spent their lives with their gazes set firmly on distant horizons, new dawns, sunny uplands, better tomorrows etc, etc, politicians have never taken the trouble to look down at themselves. The defining characteristic of almost all of them is a vaunting self-regard without the merest glimmer of insight. Having despised the media for so long and derided its practitioners as small-minded, untalented, envious failures, and believing anything Graham Norton and Noel Edmonds can do can’t be any harder than falling asleep on a back bench for 20 years, they stride in front of the cameras utterly untroubled by the slightest doubt that they might be anything less than fluent, smooth, compelling and devilishly attractive. So it’s always a particularly piquant and poignant pleasure to watch the retired politician make a thorough prat of himself, and in Prescott — The Class System and Me, John Prescott delivered in spades. He is desperately crap at television.

There is the added joy of the realisation that while most politicians have skins like linoleum, Prescott’s is thinner than the finest damascene silk. Every cross word, sideways look and imagined put-down is felt and remembered like the lash of a cane. Getting him to front a series on class was a stroke of stinging genius, because while the subject is dull, dead and as unlamented as the trade-union movement, it gives Prescott an opportunity to publicly squirm at every disrespect he suffered since he had hair.

He’s like a big oyster squeezing lemon onto himself. The Earl of Onslow, a man just as replete with petty absurdity, accused Prezza of having a chip on his shoulder. He’s wrong. It isn’t a chip, it’s stigmata. He bleeds constantly with the wounds of his deified class, suffers the constant slings and arrows of japes, jokes and one-liners, all delivered with received pronunciation. He is a massive, quivering bag of naked solipsistic self-pity, and nothing repels empathy or sympathy like self-pity. So we watch the man and feel only a cruel snigger. All his achievement, all his power and work are plainly no solace or protection against the patronising bonhomie of a public schoolboy. It is a fitting punishment for one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met. I once interviewed him and remember vividly how badly and unnecessarily humiliatingly he treated a junior reporter from the local paper out on his first big job. It would have been so easy to be avuncular, polite and thoughtful, to play the toff. But Prescott felt bullied, and so he passed it on.

The redeeming joy of this programme was Pauline Prescott, with her eyes like two crows that have crashed into a stucco wall. She blissfully showed us round her guest toilet (lavatory, if you please) and said, with a moment’s rare perception: “I hope they don’t make us look like the Hamiltons.”

Barbara Cartland is really just John Prescott in a fright wig. With Mrs Prescott’s eye-make-up. They are remarkably similar. Both worked relentlessly to scale professions they were innately unsuited to. Both became unintentional figures of fun, glove-puppet characters in the national Punch and Judy, and their snobbery was cut from the same insecurities. In Love with Barbara, the dramatisation of Barbara Cartland’s foolish infatuation with Lord Louis Mountbatten, was a sorry, meagre and spitefully silly little drama that had all the insight and class of a Nigel Dempster gossip column, managing to be simultaneously malicious and fawning.

It follows from similar offerings about the love lives of Princess Margaret and Fanny Cradock, programmes that have the production values of a Pontypridd pantomime and all the inquisitiveness of a Big Brother talent scout. Television is a very good medium for biography, for gossip, for iconoclasm; there are whole channels devoted to nothing else. But this sort of low-rent, two-dimensional soap, which doesn’t have the courage to be either voraciously scurrilous or ribaldly comic but rather sidles past being snide behind its hand, is really the worst of all possible options.

Spooks is back, one of the few exciting bits of home-made television worth setting the recorder for. We really have handed over the running, punching and talking in breathless, gritted-teeth imperatives style of drama to the Americans. But I predict we’re due for a whole escapist slew of cloak-and-dagger fiction. It always does well in times of uncertainty and hardship and bruised national esteem.

I was sent a letter with the DVD of Spooks saying that under no circumstances was I to reveal the death of a lead character, the unspoken implication being that if I did, then, just before I pushed Send, a man in black would spring through the window and very unpleasantly do that clicky thing with my head. Well, it was Adam who got blown up for being heroic. But seeing as in the same episode, two other characters we assumed to be goners turned up, if not actually hail and hearty, then monosyllabic and grim, maybe he’s dead or maybe he’s just outside waiting to twist my neck. Nobody smiles on Spooks still. You smile, you die, with a clicky head, and then you come back.

I want to add a PS to my review of Simon Schama’s The American Future — A History. I said it was good, but I think I was less than fulsome. I would like to add the fulsome bit now. Fulsome is a curious word. It has two main definitions. One: generous, replete, overwhelming. The other: lying, odious, duplicitous. Odd that a word can mean the opposite of itself. In this context I’m using it in the first, fulsome stance. The American Future is growing to be a very, very good series indeed.

Little Dorrit (BBC1, Sunday, Thursday)

Prescott — The Class System and Me (BBC2, Monday)

In Love with Barbara (BBC4, Sunday)

Spooks (BBC1, Monday)

The American Future — A History (BBC2, Friday)

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