Into the Storm (BBC Two)

Britain’s Really Disgusting Food (BBC Three)

Murderland (ITV1)

Waiting in France in 1945 for the results of the election that would turf him from office, Winston Churchill was at his grumpiest. According to the HBO/BBC drama Into the Storm, his wife eventually suggested he paint something. Churchill replied he had forgotten how, and when his easel was finally unfolded, he shouted at his secretary, Sawyers, for leaving his best oils at home. It was a neat sequence, and as subtle and psychologically acute as Hugh Whitemore’s boisterous script got. Of course, he would by then have forgotten the gentle pleasures of the landscape artist. After five years painting the British psyche with the epic, vivid strokes of his rhetoric, the canvas would be too small, the colours at his disposal too pallid. The painting metaphor told us the war leader had forgotten how to be a husband to Clemmie, head a domestic household or lead in peacetime. During the election, he claimed a Labour government would introduce a Gestapo. His volume switch had been set permanently to roar.

His roar, in this portrayal, varied little, whether he was addressing the nation, the Commons, the King, Clemmie or the scarred airman to whom he was pinning the VC. When he was tired he was not just tired but “tired out: mind, body, soul and spirit” . The rhetoric was what the nation needed, but the film hinted that it was also schoolboyish, naive and sometimes, as when the PM described objections to carpet bombing as a matter of fashion “like women’s skirt lengths”, callous. Clemmie, a sterner critic by far than Attlee, accused her husband of being “a little boy playing an enormously elaborate game of make believe”, and we saw him lap up a private screening of Alexander Korda’s ultra-patriotic That Hamilton Woman, savouring Nelson’s line “You can’t make peace with a dictator” (as the film was made in 1941, it will, in fact, have been more influenced by Churchill than vice versa).

This critique would, however, have been more effective if Into the Storm had been less in love with Churchill’s rhetoric itself. But its telling of 1939-45 was a K-Tel best-of anthology of his famous speeches, many of which we saw him compose out loud, working on the rhythm and syntax more than the meaning. The possibility that Churchill might have been a great commander and diplomat receded behind Churchill the orator. Appropriately, after he has lost the election, he is shown moved by a play by Noel Coward, another performer who thought in aphorisms. At the end, the house stands to a man to applaud the “saviour or our nation”. By now his appeal, this final episode unwittingly suggests, was to middle-class theatre lovers.

Brendan Gleeson, his face alternately ancient and babylike, was a worthy, perhaps superior, successor to Albert Finney who played Churchill in The Gathering Storm seven years ago, and Janet McTeer was a superb, unamused Clemmie. But this glossy, jokey 90-minute romp though our finest hour could not be taken seriously either as history or biography. Churchill might have liked it but that is because the director Thaddeus O’Sullivan had turned his life into an Alexander Korda biopic.

When Michael Moore on TV Nation first stood outside a corporate HQ with banners and a megaphone, it was a novel way of booing down the drawbridge that gets drawn up against investigative journalists. Fifteen years on it is a television cliché that usually makes you feel sorry for the PRs. Alex Riley, more, I fear, Chris Evans than John Sweeney, naturally had no compunction resorting to it on the first part of Britain’s Most Disgusting Food. His beef, initially, was with beef, especially economy beef burgers that contained only 47 per cent meat, but the programme got stronger as he got his teeth into meatless hot dogs, a chicken Kiev with 10 per cent chicken and something tinned called Celebrity Meat Loaf. His confrontation with Gordon Ramsay over the reconstituted Kiev, was nothing if not ballsy — and good for him for not being bullied when Ramsay denied against clear, physical evidence that his name appeared in its manufacturer’s catalogue.

I admired the legwork Riley put into his nausea-inducing investigation, but not his clod-hopping irony. When, at the end, he took to the streets with placards satirically praising the mechanical reclamation of meat on the grounds that, by using every last animal scrap, you save on the numbers slaughtered, he was striding well out of his depth. By selling meat so cheaply, manufacturers in fact stimulate meat demand and thus its supply.

With Murderland I feel like Edward Heath when asked if there was nothing good about the Thatcher era. “It’s end,” he answered. For ponderous, pretentious, improbable and unpleasant though the last episode was, it at least concluded with dodgy retired detective Doug Hain, being mown down by a car. Assuming Hain is dead, this means next time Robbie Coltrane plays a cop he can be called Fitz.

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