Review

A Perfect State (BBC1) is an odd sort of thing - a conventionally flaccid kind of English sitcom, clenching itself up to act hard. So, while certain details indicate that it will cause less of a jolt than a five- pence piece on a railway line (it includes a black mayor called Winston and a resident weed called Malcolm - I mean, have a heart), there are other lines which add an unusually acerbic edge to the comedy. Then again, you may not immediately notice this if you are still trying to come to terms with the audacity of the writer's smash-and-grab raid on Passport to Pimlico. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Michael Aitkens is nothing short of idolatrous in his adulation of TEB Clarke, the scriptwriter of that post-war comedy of parochial independence.

There are mitigating factors here - the most substantial being the fact that history has genuinely recharged the batteries of the story. As the Soviet empire and its satellites break into friable chunks and as Sir James and his feverish patriots plan the resurrection of Albion, the fantasy of secession has never before had as much potential to deliver the galvanising tingle that tells you a connection has been made. You might also argue that there's no great magic in originality of plot anyway. Shakespeare scarcely invented any of his, and we don't mope on about that. Then again, Shakespeare, corny as some of his gags were, might have drawn the line at having a character tell a butcher that she was going "to save his bacon", a joke so mildewed that it scattered the little stock of goodwill you had scraped together and forced you to start all over again. If they thought it could be rescued by getting the perpetrator to titter sheepishly as she said it, they were wrong.

Gwen Taylor stars as the chief mover and shaker of Flatby, a small fishing village which discovers, through the agency of the local archivist, that it has never been formally incorporated into the United Kingdom (the tide was in when the Domesday surveyors went past and Flatby's general dampness is still a source of jokes). For reasons varying from greed (the flash local estate agent dreams of tax-haven status) to irritation with those "deranged ding-a-lings of Brussels", the villagers vote to secede. The Whitehall office concerned with this matter provides some interludes of bureaucratic comedy, as well as potential love interest, in the shape of a junior civil servant dispatched to observe these constitutionally disruptive events. Every time he encounters Gwen Taylor, they stare dreamily at each other in the manner of a coffee advert. The saving grace, as I've already noted, is the occasional sardonic bite of disenchantment - about the dubious joys of village life and the base motives of all politicians - but it will help considerably if the viewer is in an unusually genial mood.

Shopping trolleys make very serviceable camera dollies - a point demonstrated earlier this week in Modern Times's film about mangetout and confirmed by Shop Till You Drop (C4), a kind of natural history programme in which some of the subjects give interviews about their behaviour. We have been here before, with a recent series about the development of the supermarket as a calculated Pavlovian machine - triggering our purchasing instincts at every twist and turn of the aisle. But this was a little more concertedly analytical about the anthropology of consumption. To be told that the fresh fruit-and-vegetable section is a "pre-dominantly female selection zone" is one thing, but to see the stupefied and obedient males leaning on their trolleys as their wives flit to and fro foraging, was rather intriguing. The series also offers a rare moment of glory for the more arcane members of the species Academicus - such people as the Senior Lecturer in Retailing at De Montfort University, on screen to describe the trance- like state in which single shoppers roam the aisles, central processors idling until they have to make what the experts would probably call a "spontaneous purchase commitment". It's odd that demystification should require such copious amounts of bullshit, but it works nonetheless.