Dodi and Diana: the soap opera continues...

Diana: Last Days of a Princess

FIVE

India with Sanjeev Bhaskar

BBC 2

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

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How many times will "The Diana Story" be retold? In song and rhyme, in Balinese puppetry...? Video games will soon be made in which dead-eyed paparazzi come lurching at you, slavering like zombies, till you run and hide inside Al Fayed's Sphinx of Luxury. At end-of-term school concerts in 3007 they will do "The Diana Story" instead of the nativity. Prince Philip will be replaced by an ox, because history's a bitch and that's what happens over 1,000 years. But for the moment we have to make do with only the mild, workaday distortion of a TV docudrama. Humans were humans and Althorp was not yet a stable in Diana: Last Days of a Princess, though nevertheless, something extremely strange had happened to the truth.

People usually become more glamorous when portrayed on TV. Harold Wilson has sculpted pecs, Mary Wilson's last job was a Timotei advert, that kind of thing. But here, Diana's legs were slightly dumpy (apologies to Genevieve O'Reilly, whose performance, especially the cow-eyes, was fine) and Dodi was heavier and squatter than in real life (sorry, too, to Patrick Baladi, a lovely actor who should have known better). Clips of real footage interspersed with the dramatic reconstructions made it impossible to forget that this was Madame Tussauds acting. And they were so much less charismatic than the real thing, these dummies. When they danced at dusk on Dodi's yacht, they were as graceful as Gred and Fringer.

This benighted production was channelling the spirit of the Latin American telenovella, a genre where men are men, women are women, and titles are slightly subliterate. "THIRD MEDITERRANEAN HOLIDAY" was written over a shot of Diana boarding a yacht. "OWNED BY MOHAMMED AL FAYED" was written over a shot of, well, almost anything.

The dialogue was to die for. "I'm looking forward to showing you off to my friends," whispered Dodi. "Do you know... Bruce Willis?" Next he told her, with a careless caress, "Go and make yourself look even more gorgeous," before turning on a sixpence and shouting at his bodyguards in a display of rage we were clearly meant to see as virile and princely. I checked for Dame Sylvie Krin on the writing credits, but she was probably too embarrassed to be associated.

The whole production was a misadventure born of arrogance. Why did its makers feel they could tell the story as if no one had ever heard it before? Especially when it was crying out for a revisionist angle: Diana - The Bodyguards' Story. The bodyguards were the interesting figures, simply because they were the least mythologised and the most authentic. I loved security officer Kez Wingfield's tactful understatements, straight out of Gosford Park: "That Mr Al Fayed is a colourful character." "How that made Dodi feel, that's not for me to say," etc. At the climax of the drama, that fateful night in Paris, the actor playing Kez Wing-field cried out the immortal line: "Sir, this breaks all the SOPS! The Standard Organisational Procedures!" When the two bodyguards debated which of them should travel in the car with Dodi and Diana, I was on the edge of my seat. They were flesh and blood, not waxworks. It was the only moment of drama in the whole godforsaken two hours.

Who needs a holiday when you have a remote control? The new series India with Sanjeev Bhaskar took us to Mumbai, through India's gleaming Silicone Valley and out sailing on a luxury dhow. You heard fascinating stuff, such as a graphic artist saying that Western cartoon heroes make their own destiny but in India, destiny makes them. You could eavesdrop on a Mrs Mumbai beauty pageant competition, where everyone speaks English or is conveniently subtitled. You didn't even have to sit through all of a folkloric dance in Kerala, just the best bits. You could also embrace Bhaskar's positive vision of "the Indian Steptoe" buying rubbish on the street as having more to do with green recycling awareness than with poverty. Bhaskar is great company, but with this programme it sometimes felt as if we were seeing a dream version of the new India rather than the full story. Or perhaps that's coming up over the rest of the series: all the more reason to pack your bags for the next episode.

So, Aaron Sorkin's new drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I am embarrassed to recall that last week I said its beginning was "arresting". That was like calling Ingmar Bergman "capable". Its beginning was absolutely brilliant. Watching it is like being pumped full of something with a high-street value. Aaron Sorkin is now clean, apparently, but his work still fizzes unhealthily. I particularly love the minutiae, the way the studio audience keep laughing even as the executive storms on set and ruins the show; the way the network head knows something dramatic has happened when everyone's phones start ringing at once. These are the details which elevate this turbo-charged studio-within-astudio show from a fireball of energy into something that steadily burns itself into your memory, too.