Television Review

IT'S ONLY to be expected that biographers will dish the dirt on their subjects. After all, there's no point examining a life in detail if you aren't going to dig up something new, and since we tend to make sure the good stuff about ourselves is well-publicised, the new stuff will usually be bad. The corollary to this is that the more blameless the life, the less new material there is likely to be for biographers.

So last night's Reputations (BBC2) on George VI consisted, by and large, of things that most viewers probably knew already: nice man, had a stammer, didn't want to be king, the Queen Mother (God bless her) was a tower of strength and, um, did we mention the stammer?

For all that it didn't pull any skeletons out of the closet, though it did a good job of putting flesh on the bones it had. As a boy, Bertie (his given name was Albert) was subjected to a regime of terror at the hands of his father (who is supposed to have said: "My father was scared of his father, I was scared of my father, and I'm damn well going to make sure they're scared of me."). As a result, he was cripplingly shy; he had no artistic or cultural interests (the only book he was known to have read was The Empty Tomb, an account of the Resurrection). Especially in contrast to his glamorous, fast-living elder brother, the Prince of Wales, society regarded him as dull - "quite wrongly", according to Robert Rhodes-James, one of his biographers; but it was hard to see on what he based that view. At no stage in his career did Bertie show any special originality of mind or strength of character. His main achievement seems to have been that he didn't go completely mad during the Second World War, though it was a near-run thing.

He had an impressive collection of neuroses. Naturally, he hated speaking in public. But he also suffered a terror of heights and an uncontrollable loathing of reviewing long lines of soldiers - an affliction that in almost any other job could have gone unnoticed for years. During the war, sent abroad to inspect the troops, he tried to hide in his tent, and only came out when he was told he would have to swim home.

The weakness is what makes him now seem, if not interesting, then more appealing than most monarchs. Pictures show a vulnerable, feline face, with wide, heavy-lidded eyes and high cheekbones - Jodie Foster would make good casting if it came to a film, and if she were a few inches taller.

At the time, weakness was despised. Most people didn't feel he would measure up to the job of king; but the coronation changed minds - it was even remarked that he looked taller. Denys Blakeway's film didn't challenge the notion that the coronation had transformed the man; but surely the truth was that it transformed the way people perceived him. Where the film went wrong was in failing to spot when a myth was being peddled. All in all, though, it was an intriguing film about a nice man: not an easy thing to pull off.

People have had bad things to say about Louis Armstrong - he has been written off at various times as an Uncle Tom, as a trad jazz dinosaur, as a foul-tempered hypocrite. Although none of these charges has stuck and few of them were said out loud on last night's Omnibus (BBC1), the programme did have a faintly defensive air. In fact, nobody had a bad word to say about Armstrong, unless you count the fact that he never travelled without supplies of a powerful laxative ("Swiss Kriss"). (He also enjoyed what the film quaintly described as "marijuana - `pot', as it was then known".)

The film, by John Akomfrah, had too many admirers and too little Armstrong. It was appallingly mannered, too, with interviewees shot in washed-out, sepia tones and, inexplicably, a large number of out-of-focus shots of the Houses of Parliament and County Hall by the Thames. But in between, it managed enough music and enough intelligent comment to show that Armstrong brought to jazz a new freedom, an elastic carelessness, that transformed the way we hear music. At the beginning, it was claimed that he was the single most important figure in 20th-century music. By the end, the hype didn't sound so empty.