The Grandparent Diaries

BBC Four

Charm is in short supply on TV. Irony and parody run rife, cruelty is endemic, humiliation the norm. And then, like a lamb among wolves, comes The Grandparent Diaries, which was so simple, charming and just LOVELY it had you smiling and cooing into your cocoa; sweet without being tooth-rotting and gently illuminating about the differences, and ties that bind, between generations - and a rare wholly positive advertisement for the nourishment of family life.

No one argued. There were no hidden cameras. Its thesis was quietly intriguing, rather than salacious. Today's grandparents are the children of the Sixties, so what kind of role models - what with the free love and long hair - will they make for their grandchildren?

What a cool and lovely grandpa, or “pops” or “popsie”, Ian Batten was. He took his seven grandchildren away for the weekend. Would he cope, the programme asked, as if proximity to the swinging Sixties and wearing fitted pea coats (Ian was a fashion designer and so, so cool) would disqualify him from caring adequately for the children. Of course he coped. He's a free spirit with a younger girlfriend, but one who was gently firm about bedtimes.

The oldest grandchildren were Milo and Alice, with heavy dark fringes and almost mute. Milo said he could imagine his parents getting old, “but not grandad”. Lily was a four-year-old out of moppet central casting. “He has different coloured hair which is grey,” she said of Ian. There was a brilliant moment when Ian called Milo on his mobile to get him to come down for breakfast.

The children said that Ian was less strict than their parents and he indulged them - he returned from a Japanese business trip with the coolest goodie bags ever - but he was also a grafter and in his own way tried to talk Alice into thinking about her future when she said she was determined to leave school.

This wasn't just about his relationship with his own brood, but also sketched his relationship with his grandparents (both born in Victorian times and fusty and strict) and then his children remembered Ian's parents. His mother was traditional, but his father was into yoga. Ian was the first of the family to get divorced (in 1979). Home movies showed him as a proudly post-hippy father. His children, in classic Saffy from Ab Fab form, were stricter parents (one of his daughters said how much she yearned to wear conventional school uniform). Today, Ian himself recognised that the notion of childhood had changed and so parents had to be more watchful.

The exchanges between Ian and the kids were particularly warming. He let them clamber over cliffs with a “danger” warning. He read to them. He talked to them about the future. His eccentricity puzzled and enthralled them. When they ran riot slightly, he told them to talk in their room. His inner kid had never really left the building. Best of all was his delighted cackle when he got to take them home. This was a brilliant gem: inquiring and cheering television.

Getting On

BBC Four

Once upon a time, before she became a comedian, Jo Brand was a psychiatric nurse. Now she stars as a nurse in an old people's ward in Getting On, a comedy with a resolutely dark heart. It was directed by Peter Capaldi and the hand-held camera, jitteringly close to the action and people's responses, reinforced the same uneasy, quease-making intimacy the technique also gave to The Thick of It, in which Capaldi played the foul-mouthed spin chief Malcolm Tucker.

Just as The Thick of It exposed political corruption, Getting On revealed the daily reality of cutbacks and petty bureaucracy now blighting the NHS. A turd sat on a chair for almost the entire duration of the show, first because a specialist turd-removing medi-testing outsourced company needed to clear it, and only then because the turd was being used as part of a vital research exercise to secure funding for the hospital. The staff struggled and failed to understand a woman speaking in a foreign accent. There were piercing notes to the character portraits: the ward sister was neurotic and ineffectual but also heartbroken. For all her dead-eyed scorn of her seniors, Brand seemed nice about the patients, until she ate the cake belonging to one dead old woman. She also lifted her family pack of Starburst.

Taking the Flak

BBC Two

Taking the Flak had similarly satirical aims, this time around the absurdities and egos of 24-hour news, and it pointedly mocked the BBC's very own BBC News channel. It followed a big story breaking in an African country, with a vain chief reporter, a harried producer, a right-on, shrewish World Service presenter with diarrhoea (a joke that ran and ran) and a junior correspondent whose patch was being invaded.

It was sporadically funny - particularly the character of a moon-eyed, Sloaney children's charity worker and only the occasional glimpse of any actual war or unrest going on - but it told us nothing we hadn't seen before on Drop the Dead Donkey and other similar shows. The characters didn't feel original (as ever, the journalists were all shysters and unprofessional). The jokes and satire went one way and after an hour of in-jokery, you did find yourself wondering: if the BBC is so keen to mock its own news operation, using recognisable presenters and graphics, why should we trust the real thing?

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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