The Secret Life of the Berlin

Saturday, BBC Two

Saturday’s beautifully assembled The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall was nothing to do with the secret life of the Wall and everything to do with the secret lives of those to the east of it. Kevin Sim’s eerie, flickering magic lantern show, lugubriously voiced in Yorkshire by Shaun Dooley, was a seance that brought to life a 45 years in which thousands led double lives.

For some, it seemed, lying, duplicity and betrayal were not vices that they had been forced into, but character traits allowed to flourish in Erich Honecker’s East Germany.

The 90-minute documentary — on while you were watching The X Factor — began with shots of a small circus, and what could be more innocent than a circus even if to set it up Rudolf Probst had to steal the lions from Berlin zoo? Soon the beasts were racing round the ring on the backs of horses. The children did laugh to see such fun. But the state had infiltrated even Circus Probst’s charmed canvas walls. In the Sixties the Stasi raided and twice closed it down, without any charges being laid. Twice Rudolf built it up again. When the Stasi’s files were finally opened, it was revealed that two of his best friends had been informers.

As Probst toiled to generate fun, an academic in another part of the city had been jailed for planning to build a theological college. In rebellion, his daughter, Angela, ran away to the circus to become one of those clowns who mistake themselves for Marcel Marceau (in one of the film’s arty touches, we saw her trying to escape an invisible cage). It turned out much later that in prison her father had turned informer himself. In a disturbing scene, he told her how, when he left the Stasi’s service, he had been warned there would be consequences. Angela’s mother’s accident that August, he explained, had been “deliberate”.

Angela’s father had been a reluctant betrayer. Not so, Sascha Anderson, a fashionable poet and comedian who had been an influential figure in the Berlin underground. A long haired, grey-bearded photographer called Harald fumbled among his contact sheets to find and then develop a picture of his friend Anderson — one, it later transpired, of 35 who had informed on him. Anderson had been, by his own admission, one of the Stasi’s top spies, yet come the day the Wall fell, he pranced on top of it, wishing to be part of that “beautiful feeling”: “Sascha,” as Harald put it, “you arsehole!”

Some of the programme’s poetic touches worked better than others: its interviewees’ occasional difficulties in locating documents and photographs to back their still-clear memories told us something about the distance already yawning between now and then. But sometimes, you wanted better interviewing. What accident befell Angela’s mother, for example? But visually and emotionally, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall will stand up as an artistic monument to a failed state.

The Thick of It

Saturday, BBC Two

Honecker’s hermetic make-believe regime was eventually brought down by people power. On The Thick of It, new Labour’s chief Stasi officer, Malcolm Tucker, came face to face with a real person and short circuited. She was a campaigning widow requisitioned for the annual Labour conference as its “people’s champion”. An ugly fight ensued over who should introduce her, the PM or Nicola Murray, his failing social affairs minister. It resulted in Glenn, Murray’s all-grey special adviser, being punched in the nose by a frantic Tucker. The widow was not impressed and soon tweeted to that effect. “I should have known not to trust you lot when you sold out the metric martyrs,” she told Tucker, who had met his match, namely democracy. Saturday’s episode of this superb satire, contained a brief West Wing reference. These two baroquely articulate programmes are mirror images of each other. In the Bush years, America needed to be told that there was a better alternative. We British like to be reassured that our masters could be even worse.

Alexander Armstrong's Very British Holiday

Sunday, BBC One

Congratulations to Alexander Armstrong on his Very British Holiday for last night delivering the most pointless sequence in a documentary this year: in the kitchen of an hotel in Scarborough we saw him prepare himself a steak baguette and declare it delicious. Earlier he had been to a holiday camp near Bridlington and equally pointlessly cleaned out some loos, having already proved himself a very dull caller of bingo numbers. In Devon he hypnotised a lobster. It was like a rag doll, he said, twice. Armstrong either has shares in the production house Ragdoll, and I am sure he doesn’t, or was subliminally missing his two young children whom he had abandoned for this dreary celebration of stay-cations. To be fair to him, its premise militated against it ever working. Naturally, Armstrong found things to amuse him in Britain. The problem with the British holiday is how to entertain your children when it rains. But he didn’t bring them. This, apparently, was going to be a series. He is lucky they didn’t cut it into bits and sell it to The One Show.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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