Imagine: Rufus Wainwright, Prima Donna

BBC One

Now that Father's Day has passed, it is time, perhaps, to honour bad fathers and dysfunctional families. Who else would produce the world's artists? Imagine, in mildly hagiographic mode, did its bit for the cause last night by examining the musical family Wainwright through the prism of its talented son, Rufus.

Rufus Wainwright recalled that his father, Loudon Wainwright III, had left the family home when he was 3. He had a strong memory of the dining table being hauled into the removal van as he, his mother, Kate McGarrigle, and his sister Martha relocated from New York to Montreal. All parties, he reckoned, had been equally damaged. But it gave them all something to sing about. Rufus wrote Dinner at Eight (“So put up your fists and I'll put up mine”), a declaration of war on Loudon matched only by Martha's Bloody Mother F***ing Arsehole. But, as Martha said: “The idea that it is all right to bash you family in songs or talk about them really comes from Loudon.” It was Loudon, remember, who wrote Rufus is a Tit Man. All the kid had done was suckle.

Loudon, who had looked on bemused as the infant Rufus sashayed around in his mother's apron, reckoned the best thing that had happened to the boy was sending him to boarding school where “the weirdest kid in the school” had to learn to fit in. That he was able, at 14, to frequent Montreal's gay bars, does not seem to have altered his father's opinion of the school. At around the same time, “on the prowl” in Hyde Park during a visit to his father, Rufus was raped. Rather than ask the question on all our lips - where was Loudon? - Rufus, after much unhappiness and a period addicted to crystal meth, instead paid him the compliment of covering his One Man Guy. Loudon, before thinking better of it, briefly conceded that it was better than his own version.

What became obvious was that Rufus, at 35, has already surpassed his father's career, not simply by the quality of his songs but the variety of his endeavours: a solo show in Germany based on Shakespeare's sonnets; a re-creation of Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall concert and now, in Manchester, an incredibly tuneful opera, Prima Donna, about Maria Callas. Rufus may, as his father so generously concluded, be a prima donna himself, but in all his interviews with Alan Yentob he was funny, reflective and candid. Rufus is one of those boy-men you instinctively want to hug, and Imagine duly did so.

Maximum Jail

More4

Absentee fathers were the unspoken factor in Maximum Jail, a documentary known in America as The Farm: 10 Down. A decade on from the director Jonathan Stack's original documentary, The Farm: Angola USA, he had returned to see what had happened to the handful of inmates he had followed in America's largest maximum security prison.

As you would regretfully expect, most of the population - half of them murderers - were under-educated black men. As you would not predict, many were intent on rehabilitation. The churches dotted over the old plantation played a part, inspiring emotional displays of repentance and salvation, but so did the warden, a big white guy named Burl Cain, who truly believed his job was to reform not punish and was a surrogate father to the 5,100.

Despite the success stories - two of the original six have since been released to the world and are doing God's work - it was the bad asses to whom I (and I suspect the film-makers) was drawn. Particularly compelling, in an awful way, was Vincent Simmons, who having belatedly worked out a line of defence, was still refusing to admit raping a pair of teenage twins. Having come in good faith to meet and forgive, Sharon and Karen Sanders discovered that he planned to use the opportunity to cross-examine their witness statements. Only right at the end, when he was shown a video of Karen once again proffering compassion, did a tear escape his eye. His fight for “justice” continues. The documentary made no judgments: mine was that the fight had become so much part of Simmons that the facts hardly mattered any more.

Torchwood

BBC One

Torchwood's second day bored me a little: lots of running around and shooting, very few aliens. I was fascinated, however, by Russell T. Davies's creativity with the problem he gave himself by making Jack immortal. (“They crash him, and his body may burn, they smash him, but they know he'll return, to live again... Captain Harkness”). Last night he was sealed in a silo with liquid cement only to walk free when the resulting block was pushed off a cliff. Foxy Alice (Lucy Cohu), who had devised the plan, was furious and she doesn't look the sort to be cheered by the quip of a passing paramedic: “If she's anti-terrorist, I wouldn't mind being uncle terrorist.” It made me smile, though.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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