TELEVISION / Drag net

TIMEWATCH (BBC 2) started with the thin end of the wedge. J Edgar Hoover, it seems, did not live up to the high ideals of the institution he founded. Though FBI agents were forbidden to use Bureau cars for any private business, Hoover himself had three limousines, each of them strictly reserved for his own personal use. When he decided he didn't like the colour of his lawn he had FBI men re-lay it, and when he emerged on to his patio one day to find a mysterious turd cooling in the morning air he ordered a full-scale investigation - the FBI's famous forensic lab eventually pinned the crime on a racoon with a grudge. This sort of perk-bending was clearly hypocritical, but venial when compared to Hoover's greater sin of allowing himself to ignore the boundaries between policeman and thief.

Much of the substance of last night's programme has already been reported by newspapers picking up on revelations in Anthony Summers' recent book, but this was an intriguing 50 minutes none the less. Hoover's homosexuality and his taste for relaxing in sling-backs and a flapper dress have naturally attracted most attention, but Timewatch's more sober account brought home the fact that his transvestism didn't stop there - this was an almost Gibbonian account of the way in which corruption likes to put on the clothes of civic virtue.

Hoover was hooked less by his sexual tastes than by his taste for gambling and the high life. Though he was always pictured laying legal dollars 2 bets, he gambled much larger sums with gangster bookies, using somewhat dubious go-betweens. If he won he got paid, if he didn't his friends had a habit of forgetting the debt. That is, they forgot the money and remembered the debt. Hoover paid off with interest by stonewalling attempts to crack down on organised crime, denying its existence until the evidence was irrefutable. Timewatch suggested too that Meyer Lansky had photographic evidence of Hoover's homosexuality, which served him well.

Hoover learnt his lesson, amassing files on the private lives of hundreds of politicians, including President Kennedy and his brother Robert. The result was a cat's-cradle of extortion and threat, held in tension by secret knowledge. All this put the hysterical purity of recent Presidential selections a little more into perspective. By his self-indulgence Kennedy delivered himself into the hands of men he despised and, in a sense, contributed to the Mafia's growing security. The moral corruption of both men didn't lie in the affairs so much (Hoover's loyalty to his lover, Clyde Tolson, was actually rather touching alongside Kennedy's satyromania) as in the compromises it took to keep them secret.

Among several strange pleasures, the drama serial Mr Wroe's Virgins (BBC2) offers the sight of a theatrical flame being passed on - for years Freddie Jones has been unrivalled at playing mad visionaries with trembling eyeballs and beards of hessian. Here he looks on (with a touch of paternal pride perhaps?) as Jonathan Pryce conclusively establishes the succession.