Television review

Made in part by Hallmark Entertainment, Gulliver's Travels (C4) undoubtedly carried the right artistic assay stamps - a huge cast of English character actors in costume (big wigs in every sense), a self-important orchestral score, a sense of dutifully unstinted expenditure. If it was a huge hit in the United States, as we were frequently reminded by the publicity, then it wasn't just the presence of Ted Danson that made it so, but the flattering promise of cultural benison. It was also anodyne - proving once again that the door behind which you find America's huge and lucrative TV audiences carries a large sign reading "Do Not Disturb".

It wasn't that the production team were a confederacy of dunces - quite the opposite. They brought a startling degree of invention to the task of interleaving Gulliver's experiences with the film's present tense, his attempt to persuade everyone that he is not mad. A single tracking shot, for example, took you from the Lilliputians standing on the man- mountain's chest to Gulliver's hand dangling over the edge of a physician's examination table; a single eyeline often linked two utterly different worlds.

But as you admired these beautifully crafted dovetails between Swift's satire and the Hollywood additions, it occurred that this was just the sort of ingenuity which Swift depicts in the Academy, his assembly of imbecile savants. To extract a narrative of triumphant personal growth from Swift's queasy satire is about as likely an enterprise as the distillation of sunbeams from cucumbers. Nonetheless, that's what they did, by means of a positively heroic indifference to the mood and tone of the original. Where Swift is excremental, this was disinfected - to the point of blank contradiction. As Gulliver recalled the monstrous pores and boils of the Brobdingnagians, for example, the giant faces stared down, as flawless as if they had come to audition for a soap commercial. The Immortals are babes in chiffon, rather than hideous reminders of the charity of death, and the only bodily fluids glimpsed are saliva and a gush of urine as limpid as Evian water.

What's more, where Swift offers a comically brief account of Gulliver's difficulties in re-acclimatising, the film finds an opening for a whole new melodrama - one involving a wicked doctor with designs on his wife, incarceration in Bedlam, and the little son who never loses his faith. This effectively reduces Swift's generalised disgust at human behaviour - at its sophisticated malice and animal stink - to little more than an arraignment of 18th-century mental health practice. There's even a scene in which Mary Steenburgen delivers an early account of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, insisting that her husband just needs time to heal. Gulliver, and we, are spared any more of this by the nick- of-time arrival of his son, who bursts into the room and reveals the tiny sheep which proves his father's sanity. Cut to general consternation and joyful family hugs. Imagine The Crucible with a happy ending and you have the mood of vindicated integrity.

"I have been there - yes - all the way and back," says Gulliver throatily, in case we've missed the point that it was a really valuable learning experience. This extraordinary reinvention - dutiful without being respectful - proves that Swift wasn't always right. "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybodies face but their own" he wrote once. Contemporary mass-market TV looked in the glass and saw only its own features: psychological vanity, inoffensive charm and the moral instruction of adversity.

John Sullivan's Over Here (BBC1) wasn't. It was all over the place, involving unexplained plot-lines, incoherent characterisation and a memorably awful framing device in which Timothy West murmured sententious gibberish. The consolations were moments of sharp, funny writing and two nice comic performances: Martin Clunes as a wisely twittish Group Captain, and Samuel West as a pilot with a very dry sense of imminent doom.