Michael Palin's New Europe BBC1, 9pm
Drop Dead Gorgeous BBC3, 9pm
SCARCELY a decade has passed since eastern Europe's warring sectarian factions stopped killing one another and destroying each other's homes and places of worship. So would the world's most matey man, Michael Palin, comedy deity, prove the right chap for the wholly serious job of profiling the emergent lands behind the old Iron Curtain?
No. And yes. If it's searing political analysis you want, then you'd probably be advised to body-swerve the former Monty Python surrealist trouper's latest travel series. Our Michael's a jovial jaunter, a genial globetrotter, not a sharp-eyed social historian.
That said, his perambulation through the new tourist hotspots of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Serbia didn't shy away from confronting awkward truths and difficult questions about the wholesale death and destruction of the recent past.
In Mostar, Palin joined other camera-toting holiday-makers in gasping at divers leaping into a river from the Muslim town's spectacular bridge, freshly rebuilt after having been shelled by Bosnia-Croatian gunners in 1993. He then mourned in a nearby Muslim cemetery filled with young people's graves dating from the same terrible era.
In scenic woodlands encircling the equally-scenic Sarajevo, a mine-clearance team strove to cancel out its own death-dealing handiwork, using the same diligence with which it had laid mines against old neighbouring opponents. Everywhere Palin went, he gingerly asked war-torn folk how horrid, or frustrating it must have felt during such painful times. The interviewees' broken English couldn't quite convey the horror and frustration. But then Palin's diffident, sympathetic manner ran up against one survivor for whom his politesse and understatement was too much.
"I understand you are being British, using mild words like frustrated'," the man replied, struggling to express what it had felt like, before inadequately adding that being shot at in the streets of your home town had been "much more than outrageous".
At this point, Palin's famously creased face took on a different cast. The deep lines in his 61-year-old fizzog have evidently been etched there by much laughter, but now, as he sought to comprehend the age-old conundrum of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, Michael Palin looked gaunt, haggard, wounded, broken - and in that moment he was confirmed as a most decent fellow, an Everyman traveller; sympathetic, baffled but still questing for unpalatable truths.
Sure, Michael Palin's New Europe still found its host undertaking bits of his old knockabout japery. There was a Gumby-esque moment atop an Albanian sea-front pillar box merrily repainted blue and yellow in the style of a jolly English beach hut ("You could 'ave a nice 'oliday and repel an invasion from 'ere").
Nor was he slow to point up parallels with Basil Fawlty in an encounter with a brusque, over-opinionated Slovenian restaurateur, or engage in an ill-advised and mirth-provoking dance in a nocturnal street with an acrobatic group of young buskers. But Michael Palin's New Europe has sober import to it, too.
This is in marked contrast to Drop Dead Gorgeous, returning for its second series. It exists as a smutty sub-Hollyoaks sex-romp through the lives of some impossibly knowing and assured modern-day teenagers in the north of England, one of whom is an emergent supermodel.
Unforgivably, Drop Dead Gorgeous wastes the show-stopping serio-comic charisma of Lee Boardman, aka Coronation Street's most charismatic drugs-dealing murderer, Jez Quigley.
As the emergent supermodel's massively gay agent, Murray Priestman, Lee is merely required to spout camp and mucky aphorisms while resembling an eccentrically-shaved chimp with someone else's dentures grinning manically in its mouth. Drop dead, Drop Dead Gorgeous! Bring in some Corrie writers and give Lee Boardman his own series.
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