Television Review

IT'S NICE to see ITV keeping its hand in with costume drama. Come to think of it, it's nice to see an ITV drama that doesn't have Robson Green in it. This being commercial television, it went for the whoop-de- do end of the fiction section, and turned to Daphne du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek (ITV). It's not quite Penguin Classic material, but what the heck. It had gorgeous Cornish locations. It had Tara Fitzgerald as a fag-toking, sword-toting heroine with the grand name of Lady Dona St Columb. And it had Anthony Delon (Alain's son) as a French privateer with all the period charm of a Chippendale, circa 1988 (the stripping, rather than the upholstered kind).

The story opened as Fitzgerald's 17th-century good-time girl was deciding to retire to her ancestral home in order to "escape the world and what I have become". (These days, she'd probably downshift to Norfolk and live in a geodesic dome with Lynne Franks.) Her husband (James Fleet) was something of an absentee drunk and her children were perfectly horrid. (This being a time of religious turmoil, little Hettie and little Charles were rather taken with tying up the family dog and attempting to exorcise its evil demons.) And they needed to be beastly, because the plot demanded that her ladyship abandon her maternal responsibilities for a big-shirted Gallic sauceboat named Aubrey (Delon), who'd just moored up her creek.

I suspect it was their mutual interest in long, curly, Michael Boltonish hair that brought the two of them together. And it didn't take them long to get serious. After their first date - a spot of violent flintlock action on the local quayside - he brought her breakfast in bed, popping into her cabin and feeding her soldiers (the eggy, not the military kind).

Before you could say stab me vitals, we were plunged into an extraordinary sequence of soupy romantic images. It was as if you were walking around inside the sexual fantasies of a Swindon housewife. La Fitzgerald groaned under a big continental shoulder. Then she was on deck in a flouncy, off- the-shoulder number, having her neck eaten. Then Delon was up in the rigging, the sunset slowly fading behind him. Then, by some mysterious process known only to wicked lady aristos and their pirate lurve gods, she was emerging naked from the water and on to the beach - where he was waiting with a big blue towel.

It was the nearest television has come to embodying that tacky cod-historical aesthetic that you get on the covers of Harlequin period romances. I must admit I was rather taken with it. And I was even more delighted by Fitzgerald's full-blooded participation in the swashbuckling sequences. Especially the scene in which Lady Dona got to kebab the villain with his own cutlass.

Football doesn't usually breed understanding between people of different nations. More often, it encourages them to run through shopping centres trying to kick each other's teeth in. So it was genuinely affecting to see the sport working as a form of gentle diplomacy in The Outsiders (C4), a documentary which saw comedians Nick Hancock and Andy Smart spending time with the Iranian national team during its recent bid for World Cup victory.

What made Tony Davies' film such a fine piece of television was the contrast he drew between Iran's mad mullah-ish image and the sweet-natured relationships Hancock and Smart formed with the Tehran eleven. The two Brits went under the Iron Yashmak and discovered that the people were - guess what? - just like us. They were more likely to eat hot dogs and chips than ewe's eyeballs, and they also chanted vaguely obscene things from the terraces ("Stick the tap of a samovar up the referee's arse," if you could believe the subtitles).

From the vox pop interviews that Smart conducted on the streets of Tehran, it was also clear that the locals fancied their celebrity players. And well they might. The Iranian team were dignified, smart, unassuming, sensitive and dedicated. They made our lot look like a bunch of boors, drunks, bimbos and big girl's blouses. Can you imagine David Beckham holding a conversation in Farsi? Usually, I can't abide football, and wouldn't know one end of Billy Bremner from another. But this moving, modest little film communicated the game's emotional pull with unpretentious eloquence, and used it as a means to break down a few lazily xenophobic prejudices about the Arab world. Ooh-aah Ayatollah.