TELEVISION / Making a drama out of a documentary

CALLING THE SHOTS (BBC 1) was an odd mixture of psychological acuity and psychological myopia. There was a nice scene in a supermarket, for instance, in which the contents of a shopping basket told you a little story about the character on screen. Maggie Donnelly (Lynn Redgrave), an abrasive investigative reporter, is leaning over a freezer cabinet toying with the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream when she is approached by a man who'd seen her on the television the night before. She stonewalls, because her film was about male violence and rape and she expects aggression. Instead he gives her praise and a thumbs up. At once the ice-cream goes back into the freezer and she walks with a little smile over to the low-fat yoghurt. This wasn't a one-off touch; by nibbling away at her tendency to comfort-eat the script added weight to the character.

She needs plumping up, frankly, as the bare bones are pretty familiar. Think of Prime Suspect, with its isolated, driven police detective and Cracker, with its shambolic, compulsive psychologist, and you have the family to which Maggie Donnelly belongs. Working for a programme strand that's going soft beneath her feet she has ambitions for more serious stories and not too many scruples about how she gets them. This puts her at odds with her programme editor. 'I want 9 million viewers, minimum,' he shouts, sending her off to make a candyfloss film about gym junkies. (He would probably be sectioned under the Mental Health Act if he shouted this in a real television office, but we'll let that pass.) In the course of filming, Donnelly stumbles on a brutal assault and rape and persuades the victim to describe it on camera. The assailant, a nasty piece of work, commits suicide after the transmission, and shortly afterwards Donnelly starts getting menacing calls. But when a bulky Jiffy bag turns up in her mail (and this is where the psychological myopia comes in) she not only opens it without hesitation but sticks her hand in without looking. When her hand encounters a furry glove puppet stuffed with raw liver you might expect her to shriek and recoil but the director has a better idea. Almost in slow-motion her face crumples and she does a grisly manual strip-tease, first slowly removing the envelope, then the toy, then the bloody meat. It looks great and is totally implausible.

I'm missing the point slightly here, I know, because Calling the Shots certainly achieved its aim of tugging you to the edge of your seat (it cleverly ended in mid-sentence in television terms - giving you a reaction shot but not the thing reacted to - a scary disruption of the conventional grammar). It does so while also brushing up against real concerns - by a nice quirk of timing, tonight's Dispatches (C 4) is about the difficulty of convicting rapists, exactly the subject Donnelly pursues to her cost. I only fuss, I guess, because it's odd to watch a drama which flips so rapidly from stylish truth to stylish lie.

BBC 2's Picasso season has been a mixed blessing. Last night's Picasso and the Model was just right - direct, unpretentious, a footnote you could be proud of. Not qualities shared by Yo Picasso, in which Brian Cox adopted a fake pate, a fake accent and what I hope for his sake was a fake belly, to deliver a collage of Picasso quotations. The programme itself was a fake documentary in which Bill Paterson played a pipe-sucking BBC twit and it was adorned with fake interviews, many more fake accents and quite a bit of fake archive film. The result was genuinely infuriating.

Even John Richardson's talks, which were underwritten by the magisterial authority of his prize-winning biography, turned out to be a bit disappointing. They were apparently cut together from an off- the-cuff interview, which gave you an irritating sense of receiving scraps from the table (Richardson's intellectual energy being directed to some unseen interviewer). Perhaps this was all hommage - a meditation on the nature of authenticity, a television demonstration of cubist aesthetics - but it didn't make it any easier to watch.