No need to rubbish Rudolf

Rudolf Nureyev is the latest victim of the tiresome documentary genre that knocks famous people. This time they chose the wrong man, says Louise Levene

SPEAKING ill of the dead used to be taboo. Now it's a cottage industry. Approach a TV commissioning editor with the outline for a documentary celebrating the life and influence of St Francis of Assisi and you will be given short shrift. Return two weeks later with a proposal establishing that St Francis was an infamous racketeer whose hobbies included badger- baiting and sheep-shagging and you are on to a winner.

Posthumous shafting of the glorious dead is a short-cut to notoriety, but it is an ugly trade. Of course, it is sometimes helpful to look at established reputations from a different perspective, but this justification weakens when you reflect that it only works one way. Suggest that Emperor Bokassa was a genial host with an impish sense of humour and see how far you get. Viz the public outcry at the recent Oswald Mosley drama series, which had the brass neck to suggest that a man who could lead an entire political movement could possibly possess an ounce of charm. We insist that the bad stay bad. But this still leaves plenty of room to put the boot into anyone, from Mother Teresa to Enid Blyton (both victims of Channel 4 revisionism). The fin de siecle mood seems to force us to look back in anger at the great and the good.

Rudolf Nureyev was undeniably great and he was also very, very good. Ross MacGibbon's ungracious little film would like to suggest otherwise. MacGibbon knows his stuff. He was a dancer with the Royal Ballet and his partner, Julie Kavanagh, has written a major biography of Frederick Ashton and has been approached to write another of Nureyev. Which makes Nureyev Unzipped even more depressing. With the collusion of a number of people who are old enough to know better, MacGibbon paints a picture of a slightly second-rate dancer who covered up his inadequacies with a charismatic stage presence, and who (shock, horror) was not the princely heterosexual he portrayed on stage.

Nureyev's talent hit the West for six when he defected in 1961. Young, exotically handsome and gorgeous in tights, he was bedsit-wall material from the word go. But his celebrity - like that of Mick Jagger and George Best - was always firmly underpinned by his gifts. The founder of the Royal Ballet Ninette de Valois (no doubt due to star in a forthcoming documentary depicting her as a lousy talent-spotter who couldn't run a whelk stall) knew instantly that she had to have him for her company and for Fonteyn. When the couple first danced at Covent Garden in the romantic melodrama Giselle, Nureyev's account of the heartless, randy young aristocrat transformed by remorse astonished the audience and drew an equally remarkable performance from Fonteyn. There were 23 curtain calls.

Nureyev's arrival was a bit of a facer for de Valois's hard-working homeboys. But his pantherish dancing and his ardent expressiveness set new standards for men in ballet. He continued to dance almost until his death in 1993. He last danced in Britain in 1991 in a mildly embarrassing programme that existed merely to provide a showcase for his own fascinating performance in Fleming Flindt's The Lesson, in which he played a dancing master who drives his pupils to death.

Decline? MacGibbon should enjoy such a decline. Besides, he didn't just dance. His directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet raised the company to the international top three and nurtured an entire generation of sensational dancers and powerful actors such as Laurent Hilaire, Charles Jude and Sylvie Guillem. His productions were fabulous. The film doesn't mention any of that.

Given Nureyev's reputation, surely no one could be found to suggest that he wasn't a great technician and an inspiration to other dancers? Many colleagues and friends are conspicuous by their absence - no Vladimir Vasiliev, no Lynn Seymour, no Patricia Ruanne no Guillem. But step forward Sir Anthony Dowell, artistic director of the Royal Ballet (a god-like stylist who went on to steer Covent Garden to millennial glory? Or a jumped-up porteur with the administrative flair of a lobotomised weasel? It depends who's in the editing suite).

Sir Anthony is one of the few real stars to appear in Nureyev Unzipped. Eva Evdokimova and Wayne Eagling (hardly household names) pop up briefly to remark that Rudolf went on dancing far too long - which is a bit pots- and kettles coming from those two, quite frankly. Sir Anthony apparently gave the film crew a long interview, in which he must surely have expressed the greatest admiration for Nureyev. They cut out that bit. Instead we get him kvetching regretfully about how he was embarrassing to watch in later years.

Reading between the edits it is very probable that Sir Anthony has been stitched up and that his mild reservations have been exaggerated by being interspliced with the voiceover's carping. "By the late Sixties, his dancing was losing its Leningrad bloom. Dancers like Anthony Dowell could do anything he could do and with far greater finesse." Him and my aunt Fanny, says John Percival, ballet critic, friend and early biographer of Nureyev. Percival is in no doubt where the greater talent lay and is incensed by MacGibbon's film. "It's all very well for these pip-squeaks who weren't very good dancers themselves to come along and denigrate people who were much better. But we know that the Royal Ballet, at that time, had some very fine dancers, but Nureyev always looked the best." Derek Deane (who danced with the Royal Ballet in the Seventies and who now heads the English National Ballet) is happy to set the record straight on the "weak technique" score: "He certainly had wonderful batterie, wonderful pirouette. He had great strength of technique that went along with his animal magnetism."

The film's biggest trick is to present wild assertions as fact and then attempt to insinuate the voice of reason. Nureyev, we are told, was "often described as the greatest male dancer in the history of classical ballet ... nobody could do it like Rudolf. He was able to leap higher and turn faster than any other dancer before or since." No he wasn't. Nobody with any sense ever said such things and he would have been the first to deny them. Juxtaposing this nonsense with rueful accounts of his dancing in middle age enables them to paint a sorry picture not of a has-been, but of a never-really-was.

Those of us who saw him in his prime are in no doubt about Nureyev, but you didn't have to be there. We may have to take the greatness of Vestris and Nijinsky on trust, but Nureyev's reputation is preserved on film. Lots of it. Which makes it strange that a documentary arguing about his place in some stupid technical league table should make so little use of the available footage. Apart from repeated shots of him mooning tragically about in an early film of Giselle and a tiny snatch from The Corsair, shot on the Soviet equivalent of Super-8, we see little evidence of his technique (or lack of it).

MacGibbon's film makes much of Nureyev's supposed technical inferiority to his exact contemporaries Vladimir Vasiliev and Yuri Soloviev. Rather than celebrating the fact that Russia was able to produce three superlative male dancers in one generation, they remind us that the great Soloviev could jump higher. So what? Dick Fosbury could jump higher. By implying that a dancer's technique can be measured by their elevation or the speed with which they pirouette Nureyev is rendered an easy target. Nureyev was a rare and special dancer because he combined good technique with amazing projection. He brought fairy tales to life. Guillem was once asked where she had learned to dance Giselle. She replied: "I just danced it with Rudolf and looked in his eyes."

I don't doubt that MacGibbon is a sincere Nureyev fan, but his decision to angle his film in this tiresome way will chip away at the dancer's greatness. People who know nothing about Nureyev will come away with the impression that he was Not As Good As Everybody Says He Was. "Long after they have forgotten the others, they will remember Rudolf Nureyev," intones the voiceover in elegiac mood. No doubt. But if mealy-mouthed documentaries like this have their way it won't be such a beautiful memory.

`Nureyev Unzipped' will be shown on Channel 4 at 8pm on 13 April