LAST NIGHT

The fact that the word United is fleetingly on screen before the word Kingdom! joins it (in BBC2's new composite profile of the national character) gives us just enough time to put an invisible question mark behind the word. United? And if the answer is yes then why is that many viewers will look on the lives depicted here as if they had been beamed to us from Tierra del Fuego? As you watched last night's openers, a cruelly focused film about an enthusiastic royalist and an account of Anglo-Scottish tension in Cape Wrath, the suspicion soon arose that this was less a coherent project about what unites us than an economical way of giving lots of directors a shot of airtime and tidying up the resultant miscellany. Which is a perfectly respectable sleight of hand, if you ask me, particularly if the succeeding films are as watchable as these. The central figure in Royal Watchers was Colin Edwards, a connoisseur of crowd control barriers throughout the land. If there is a royal walkabout anywhere it is a fair bet that Colin is somewhere along the route, a fact that I imagine leads to raucous exchanges at Balmoral Christmasses. "He saw me and said something about me to the gentleman next to him" said Colin, beside himself with excitement as Prince Charles's car swept by. I daresay he did, having just had a selection of pointless gifts pressed on him by his unctuous and unstoppable subject. Colin suggested that he was no more eccentric than the average football supporter, but few soccer fans can pursue their passion with quite such bossy subservience. Attracting the attention of the Queen Mother on a birthday walkabout he launched into his gift ceremony: "You may remember the very first time we met twelve years ago on this very day. I gave you a book on roses? Do you remember that? ... Last but not least Ma'am, my eighth poem for your Majesty in honour of your birthday. May I have your gracious permission to read it please Ma'am?" The Queen Mother, who looked as if she would rather be having a fishbone removed from her throat, nodded weakly - "It's not too long?" she asked warily, clearly a veteran of unprovoked doggerel assaults.

No member of the family is safe from his attentions - the Queen was later given, with elaborate ceremony, a picture of "our beloved Queen Mother with a sheep" as well as a laminated newspaper photograph in which Colin was depicted bending her ear on a previous occasion. "I think the Queen will enjoy receiving that from me" he had confided to us before her arrival but she didn't look all that thrilled, more as if she was trying to recall whether this one had been marked down as potentially dangerous. But Colin's cup really overflowed when Princess Diana came over and said "Hello Colin", the prelude to having pressed upon her a "rather crumpled bar of chocolate" from his Slovenian holiday and yet another poem. For students of the national mood there was not much here really, apart from a short speech about changing attitudes from a man with "ALIEN" tattooed on his neck: "Charles, I fink he's lost it mate, I fink he's lost touch with everyfing. But I fink that's mainly the view of the majority of Wolverhampton." All the other extra- terrestrials had their tattoos in less conspicuous places.

500 Bus Stops (BBC2) could be viewed as a state of the nation piece too, exploring the hinterland of shopping centres and small provincial towns through which John Shuttleworth, singer-songwriter, is conducting his hapless solo tour. This spoof rockumentary, recorded on incompetent camcorder and attended by multiple off-screen presences, may be a specialised taste but it made me laugh, in particular John's attempt to look on the bright side of performing his first gig in a frozen food store: "There'll be lots of chest freezers - the surface I'm most comfortable playing on." If you hadn't just seen Colin you would have dismissed the whole thing as wild fantasy - because you had you were aware of how close to real life some of its sharper details were.