TELEVISION / Little grouse on the prairie

ON THE main street, only tumbleweed was moving. The image met your prejudices so snugly that you wondered for a moment if the BBC had had this iconic commodity shipped in for the occasion, whether a team of tumbleweed wranglers was at work with a wind-machine off screen. It was soon clear, though, that almost everything in Shoshone, Idaho, already fitted the received image of mid-West America - the good ol' boys playing poker in the trackside cafe, the stop-lights swinging in the wind above the empty street, the rusting pick-ups bedded down in fields that had reverted to sagebrush. It was only when States of Mind (BBC 2) got up close that you saw the details which gave the cliches life.

There was a time when the slogan emblazoned on Idaho State license plates was 'Famous potatoes', a motto which probably didn't do too much for tourism but which accurately caught the inhabitants' rather dogged, down- to-earth attitudes. Five years of drought haven't improved matters, particularly in Shoshone, a town which was probably never worth much of a detour anyway. A scatter of buildings clinging like cuckoo spit to the stem of the railroad tracks, it seemed to be inhabited entirely by old-age pensioners; though you were shown a gymnasium full of high-school students at one point, they were nowhere to be seen on the streets. A Bible class at which one participant inveighed against conjuring tricks suggested that the night- life might not be up to much.

In fact the inhabitants spoke rather movingly about the consolations of life in a small town - its intimacy and solidity - but you couldn't help feeling that their minds needed to search for the upside of life. 'You can double-park and nobody's gonna have a heart attack,' said the waitress at the Manhattan Cafe. Others were less loyal: 'You want to know why the population of Shoshone remains constant?' asked one weathered drinker. ' . . . Because every time a baby is born some man leaves town.' Over pictures of three Hell's Angels riding down the main street, the sheriff explained the logic of small-town hostility to outsiders - 'If they're not part of your community there must be something wrong with 'em - otherwise they'd live here.'

John Barnes's film, made as the Gulf war was coming to an end, was alert to the way such rural xenophobia could be amplified on a larger stage. President Bush's speeches, which sounded hokey and sentimental to European ears, were perfectly aligned to simplicities of the rural life: the poker players' ignorant chatter about 'Ay-rabs' and 'Jews' was a glimpse of foreign policy as they saw it down on the farm.

In my review of Secret History's report on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, earlier this week, I incorrectly identified the presenter as Timothy Tate when it was in fact Chris Plumley. Embarrassing, considering that I was critical of the programme's own attention to detail. Still, perhaps it just goes to show that you should always be suspicious of eyewitnesses.